Epic Games and People Can Fly are aiming high with the upcoming Gears of War: Judgment, releasing exclusively Xbox 360 on March 19th. Speaking to OXM UK, People Can Fly art director Waylon Brinck spoke about making this “the most intense game ever.”
He talks about how the game’s plot demanded a new approach to the visuals. “The other Gears games were post apocalyptic. It was all about the destroyed beauty. In this game, it is the apocalypse.
“The beauty is being destroyed. There’s a lot more fire, smoke, collapsing buildings, just a much more active environment. Once you go down that path, you’ve got to find some tricks.”
“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.”
But it paid off. “It’s the most colourful Gears game ever, which feels weird to say. But I think it also has the richest darkest mood out of any Gears game since the first one. So yeah, it was all hands on deck optimising this thing, we squeezed a lot more out of it.”
But when it comes to next-generation hardware, Brinck feels that, “Yeah, there’ll always be something more we can figure out, do better.” So while the current generation isn’t quite dead, the next generation will provide its fair share tweaks for new games.