The hype may be building for the next generation of consoles but Epic Games, the studio behind the Gears of War trilogy and co-developer of the upcoming prequel Gears of War: Judgment, still thinks there's more that can be done with the current hardware.
In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, lead level designer Jim Brown said: "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."
"We're pushing way more enemies, way more particles, the environments are a lot more dense than on previous games," added Waylon Brinck, art director of People Can Fly, the lead studio on Judgment. "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. 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."
Gears of War: Judgment is out on March 22nd exclusively for Xbox 360.