Obviously, everyone's very excited about playing Gears Of War again and the studio behind it, The Coalition, has been putting the hours in for the Xbox One remaster. Talking to GamesRadar, studio head Rod Fergusson has told us about the work involved: "replacing the art assets, redoing the cinematics, and all the foley and sound effects? There’s so much changed that it doesn’t feel like we’re just re-releasing it. It doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like we’re shipping a new game".
Of the whole process, it's been the multiplayer that's been one of the toughest elements to update. "We brought a lot of new tech over, especially on the multiplayer side," says Rod. "We brought in dedicated servers, client-side hit detection and all this stuff. With all this new tech you get new issues." It made the online side of the game one of the "biggest things" the team had to deal with.
"Getting to a 60hz culture was challenging because I’d never been there before," Rod explains. "So, to take all 19 maps, and taking all the new tech we’re bringing in and getting it to run at 60hz … In my head, you go like, oh, this a 360 game put onto an Xbox One, I’m sure we can double our framerate". Trouble is, it's not that simple. "Then, when you realise you’re not running a 360 game on Xbox One, that you’ve actually created an Xbox One game because of the quality of the art assets and everything you’ve put into it, you realise, oh, wait a sec, no, we need that power to push all this complexity. Trying to get to a point where we could have the game run at 60 was surprisingly challenging".
Obviously the team has managed it and we'll likely see some of it in action at the Xbox Gamescom livestream later today.
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