Evolved1
make sure the pudding isn't too soggy but that just ruins everything
Here's something to put it in perspective...
Our fx files are surprisingly small. Most of our memory usage comes from the materials we apply to our particles. Our materials are loaded in memory all the time and I believe we were somewhere around 25Mb of texture memory around the time we shipped. We don't have a limit really we just try to play nice with everyone else. We use dxt1 compression on our textures so they come out pretty small and we try to keep the textures small. We rarely go above 256x256 for texture samples. We also don't do a lot of animated flipbooks. So for instance the fire is composed of about 3 texture samples and our materials distort uv's to make it look like fire. There are other things we do to try and deal with things like overdraw but those are mostly related to framerate and buffer memory.
http://dougvfx.blogspot.ca/2013/06/visual-effects-in-last-of-us-hometown.html?m=1 (comments section)
Pretty crazy what they have done with such a pittance of memory.
edit: also...
Our workflow changes so much all the time. Working on The Last of Us we were given a lot of ways to interact with our particle systems on the runtime side. I wouldn't say we expect our workflow to change radically on the next console. Our methods will remain largely the same and continue to evolve. We don't want to reinvent the wheel or anything. Game fx is always a collection of hacks. I think our team is looking forward to more memory. We constantly ran out of memory making this game and had to scale back some stuff.