Every game is not your hypothetical HZD. Every developer is going to approach crossgen in the same manner. But we have an example of how MS has approached crossgen, and it's not nearly as simplistic as you suggest.
Yes there will be certain design approaches that are impossible on old gen games (I'm not sure flying mounts would be one of them considering we've had open world games with flight for years)
But who's to say the developer was going to choose to use the surplus processing power in that manner anyway?
You're coming in with this preconceived notion that if MS first party were tasked with making an nextgen exclusive launch title, that their first order of business would be implementing gameplay elements that were previously impossible rather than more computationally intensive iteratiosn of what came before. The latter has been the approach launch games have gone with for at least the last few generations
This seems like pretty weird reasoning to me.
Clearly the last few generations haven't seen the HUGE jumps in CPU, I/o and mass storage device transfer speed as we're seeing here being touted (by the companies themselves) as the game changers.
Given how much devs and publishers have already been gushing over how much the new CPUs and SSDs, that have long been bottlenecks in game design, why is it so difficult to believe that said developers don't already have ideas about how they are gonna leverage those new technologies?
The creative development process is iterative. Meaning many ideas for mechanics and gameplay systems get left on the cutting room floor because of hardware limitations. Ask any dev and they'll tell you a long laundry list of things they may have wanted to do in games they worked on in the past but couldn't because of hardware limitations.
Those same ideas, with the advent of these new consoles, suddenly become viable. And so you can bet your ass that a huge swathe of first and third party devs, upon knowing the specs for next-gen consoles started going back through their back catalogue of abandoned ideas to find the most exciting ones that will now become viable.
I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised by the types of new gameplay experiences we get come next-gen console launch. Even at launch we'll start to see the beginning of new ideas manifesting in the early launch games with things that clearly aren't possible on current gen. And as we get deeper into next-gen and devs get more confident in both their next-gen development workflow we'll start to games more ambitious than we could have ever dreamed to be playing on consoles.
Next-gen is gonna be lit.
