You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
The Xbox 360 will be over five years old by the time Epic’s Gears of War 3 hits stores in April 2011, but that doesn’t mean the game won’t be doing things that seemed impossible back when the first Gears of War shipped.
“We actually went back – it was a funny thing, a side anecdote – I haven’t told anybody all this yet this week and I’m not lying. Our chief engine architect right now Dan Vogel basically took a Gears test level, put it in the Gears 3 code base, and it ran at 500 frames per second,” Bleszinski told VideoGamer.com. “The point was we’d optimised everything from the way the VSP was running to the static meshes to the lighting to the skeletal meshes that you’re basically squeezing water from a stone and solving this puzzle box on a console.”
He continued: “It’s just like the Super Nintendo or the Genesis. When the first games came out like wow, these look great. And then the code’s sloppy here, or maybe something’s not that intelligent here, and you figure out how to tighten every last little bit and tune it just like a car, so you get great performance.”
All this means Epic is able to have much more happening on screen than before.
“So now we have good global illumination. We have free vertex deformation so you have blowing banners and trees that are waving and god beams that if the programmer puts in it made them super cheap so you can put them in all these scenes – and those are in Bulletstorm,” said Bleszinski. “Bulletstorm has two suns, by the way, which means twice the f***ing god beams, which is day one purchase right there. So yeah, you figure out how to work smarter, not harder, right?”
Read our full interview with Cliff Bleszinski here.
Gears of War 3 is scheduled for release on April 8, only on Xbox 360.
About the Author
