Six years into its lifecycle, we haven't seen the best that Xbox 360 has to offer - and developers can still squeeze more out of the system.
That's according to Epic Game design chief Cliff Bleszinski, who said at E3 2011 last week that although it would be like getting "water from a stone", he still believed studios could push the hardware that little bit further.
After acknowledging the query was a "loaded question", he replied: "Honestly [360] is a puzzle, a puzzle box. It's a matter of figuring out how to squeeze water from a stone at this stage in the generation.
"If you look at games like the new Tomb Raider, or look at Gears [3], these are games that weren't really possible when the consoles first came out. Only when the developers mastered what the console was capable of were they able to squeeze that much graphic power from it.
"I still think we can still squeeze some more out of it, right? It's a matter of optimising how you run your work flow and what you do with it."
We'd be surprised if there's much more to come - the Gears multiplayer gameplay footage we saw looked stunning, and more colourful than anything we've seen from the Epic series before. Check out some footage from the Microsoft E3 conference below.
Gears Of War 3 is due for release exclusively on Xbox 360 in September.
Comments
18 comments so far...
TOKEN on 15 Jun '11 said:
Just want somthing new cliff and jump in hardware cliff,sick of same old stuff cliff.
verynaughtyboy on 15 Jun '11 said:
That game looks STUNNING! I'm not sure that Uncharted 3 looks any better graphically than this, certainly as good as but not necessarily superior. What do you guys think?
yourmumwasfun on 15 Jun '11 said:
The whole 1GB is now available for more corridors.
STEVONYMO on 15 Jun '11 said:
Their is no reason any 360 game shouldn't look ACE it is a fine machine but hampered by the blu ray (lack of). I don't really agree with more to come rubbish, both 360 and PS3 are at the best they are going to get right now. The next wave of BF3 and Skyrim along with Uncharted will see the pinnacle of what they are capable of.
kirankara on 15 Jun '11 said:
Uc3 has mlaa style alternative AA running which smoothes out the jaggies ( has milder sub pixel issues than mlaa according to EG) , whilst gears 3 has no AA, so I'd say Uc3 still has edge, especially when u consider it's environments are little more open.
StonecoldMC on 15 Jun '11 said:
M-I-A-O-W!
NEO_SUPERMAN on 15 Jun '11 said:
Gears 3 looks amazing! The beta was epic.
I missed out on the whole uncharted thing, played the first game which was a bit naff and haven't looked back. I think I would have liked it better back when I was a kid.
There's still more power in the X360 yet!
KK-Headcharge78 on 15 Jun '11 said:
Give me Gears, I want to gorge on Gears, come on September you 30 day bastard, change the habit of a lifetime and get here sooner.
Jakey Bee on 15 Jun '11 said:
The current generation of consoles is maxed out. 28 FPS and super jaggies, mind you Blezinski, IS a maxed out figure, and it's usually a sign to a PC Gamer that it's time to upgrade. Well we've been faced with this problem for about 3 years now on the 360, and it's getting f**king old. The problem is that with all these high performance titles and the 8GB... sorry--now "new and improved" 9GB of disc space on top of the s**t processor in the 360 we're getting screwed by spacial limitations. Games are now being ported to console on "low" quality settings with a goal of maybe somehow reaching medium. It's time for a change, dammit.
Looking to the success of games like CoD and GT5, with that winning 60FPS formula--you just won't see games running at 60FPS. On top of the GPU, GT5 uses so much code and processing to render so that it can handle a constant 60FPS (that's why it takes so long to load everything)--and CoD is running on what basically was the best of it's time 4 years ago. Because that's what CoD did. It maxed out the capacity for a console with smoke and mirrors, and for many people, those fast paced graphics are what we deem playable, or of value. That's why we see so many sell outs in this gen, and that's why so many people keep buying CoD. Though some may argue that photo-realism is possible in games this gen like UC3, it's only possible on the PS3, not the 360 due to that extra kick from the CPU, so you won't see it cross-platform which also p**ses me off. The lack of size, processing and--in reality, the GPU's s**tty AA of every single game by comparison to the PS3--it's simply not fair for the 360 to be anything but maxed out.
The more we wait the worse devs like DICE with BF3 will be treated with console hardware. That game is too amazing to run on consoles, and while we dream it someday will give us more than Crysis 2's playability, we all fear for the worse. And it's because the hardware processing simply isn't good enough in these consoles to run high profile games in more than mediocre settings.
flowerday11 on 15 Jun '11 said:
wow jakey, what a snore dude ... zzzzzzz...
xbox 360 has to be maxed out, L.A Noire needed 3 discs
Imaduck on 15 Jun '11 said:
Jake deserves the "Resident "Rig" Owner" badge.
This is not about what you can do with 2k. It's about what they can get out of a £200 console, and even as a PC gamer, I have to say they can do some brilliant things for that price. They have what they have, this is about making the best of that not looking at the worst.
Dalaeck on 15 Jun '11 said:
The monster did nothing but get shot at and lurch around. It spit out a few ineffectual thingys. All bark, no bite.
Barca Azul on 15 Jun '11 said:
Good the longer this gen the better for all I think. I think its the disc that hampers the 360 more than anything. Publishers dont like additional cost for more than one disk.
gmcb007 on 15 Jun '11 said:
Congratulations Jake! You are now the proud owner of the bulls**t award!
kimoak on 15 Jun '11 said:
That was one uuugly motherf**ker!
*The monster, not the game btw.
Very_Silver_Ownz on 15 Jun '11 said:
lmao good one.
Jakey Bee on 15 Jun '11 said:
Not talking about what you can do with $2000. I don't own a maxed out PC, I've always been interested in PC gaming and I've been an active member of the mobile PC gaming community as well as it's following, but the best thing I have is what you could call a "budget" PC. This "monster" cost me $350 for 8GB DDR3 RAM, 3.1GHz Intel Quad, 1TB HDD and a GT430 that was on sale for $50. Those are some pretty sorry specs. And sadly, that $50 piece of crap bought me better graphics than my PS3 has. I can run Oblivion at 80FPS. Black Ops doesn't even shudder. Crysis 2? Piece of cake.
My PS3 was a $600 investment two years later to crash, needing an additional $150 to exchange for the Slim, and then I would have to give that PS3 to my younger brother and buy a new one for college. $400 (yes, before the price drop). That's more than I spent on my 'rig. My 360? 10 RRODs, and I gave up on the damn thing around six months ago on Christmas.
Money has changed, and to say the least this generation of consoles is six years old--and when budget hardware now can easily outmatch and out-price consoles, it's ridiculous to consider the fact that a mass-producing company can't manufacture a device on par with the top technology of today and sell it for a slightly reasonable price. The more powerful processing, GPU and read speed tend to be, the better off we all are.
TL;DR: My budget PC cost me $350 with an entry level graphics card. And that card runs games better than both my PS3 and 360. Companies like MS and Sony are smart enough to produce technology that is top of the line $2k right now for under $500 and put it into something the size of a shoebox and make a profit thanks to a little thing called mass-production.
Jakey Bee on 15 Jun '11 said:
I type a little... faster than the average typer (*cough* 129 WPM *cough/brag*). Like to use a lot of words. If you don't like to read my comments, then you probably don't want to read anything longer than a sentence or two in a response to an article/comment--which begs the undeniable that you probably like comments that are simply for "teh s**tz and gigglzez" . Then again, I do too, but also I read at a pretty fast pace.
8GB of disc space really needs to change, as it's a big reason why FFXIII was made more linear (and to fit on 6 discs at that!). If you've ever worked with rastering programs like Photoshop, you'd know a good single image project will do you in about 500MB-1GB in space. A cinematic project in Final Cut or Premiere will usually run you 10GB for HD footage. If 8-10 editable picture files can use up the same space as an entire game, you know somethings up. The ridiculous amount of compression in modern games is atrocious.