“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.”
- Gears of War: Judgement art director Waylon Brinck
It’s amazing how far games on certain systems can come from launch to death, and the Xbox 360 is no exception. Around when the console launched, we had Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Dead Rising as our graphical pillars– both of which would be considered very poor looking if they came out now– followed by the first Gears of War, which really set a standard for what could be done on the technology. PS3 and Wii were no different either; they just had higher or lower starting points.
