Xbox 360 isn’t maxed out yet, Gears of War dev argues

Xbox 360 may be currently in what we suspect to be the last year of its life, but developers People Can Fly and Epic reckon there’s more juice waiting to be squeezed out of its seven-year-old innards.

"Yeah, there’ll always be something more we can figure out, do better," Gears of War: Judgment’s art director Waylon Brinck told OXM.

Epic’s lead level designer Jim Brown added: "I’m trying to remember if it was the transition between Gears 1 and Gears 2 or the transition between Gears 2 and Gears 3, there was like a million different changes to Unreal Engine 3 to get to that point.

"When we first released Gears of War, the first one, people were like ‘woah, they’re pushing the Xbox to its limits, they’re doing crazy things’ – and every single time we’ve been able to step it up and find some corner of the 360 that no one was aware of and more areas for us to push."

The pair unsurprisingly think that their latest title – due out on March 22nd – provides a new benchmark for what’s possible on Xbox 360.

"Right off the bat there were two pillars of the game that we had to support by optimising like crazy," Brinck added. "We wanted this to be the most intense game ever. More enemies on screen, more action, more dense action, less of that sort of downtime in between. We had to get those enemies in there, we had to stream them fast.

"We’re pushing way more enemies, way more particles, the environments are a lot more dense than on previous games. Our rendering engine, we’ve even added a few new features that allow us to do richer lighting, more dynamic lighting, darker darks, brighter brights.

"So yeah, it was all hands on deck optimising this thing, we squeezed a lot more out of it."