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It's been a while since we've run a tech interview, but when Microsoft approached us with the opportunity to quiz The Coalition about the technical work behind the recently released Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, we seized the opportunity. The original Epic release was a landmark last-gen title - a game that thrust Unreal Engine 3 into the limelight, its technology and its artistic approach helping to define the aesthetic of a vast range of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 titles. What's clear is that the Ultimate Edition is a full-on remake done right - fans and purists will have their own view on how the game should have been updated for the current-gen era, but there's no doubt that the vast majority of the game's visuals are updated beautifully, honouring the spirit of the original material while at the same time presenting a radically new look, based on today's cutting-edge rendering principles. And at the same time, what's equally clear is that the Ultimate Edition remains a Gears game through and through - the biggest surprise for us being that the original gameplay, faithfully replicated here, still manages to hold up nine years after the title's original Xbox 360 release.
In this interview, The Coalition talks us through the whole process of bringing the Xbox 360 game to Xbox One. You'll learn about the way the original game was ported across and built upon, how the team updated the rendering technology, as well as the approach taken in remaking all of the environments without impacting upon the way the original game played. On top of that, the team also clue is in on how the Windows 10 DirectX 12 version is progressing, the kind of visual enhancements we should expect to see there, and how the PC version scales across hardware platforms. There's also a small hint on how Xbox One's backwards compatibility works (native x64 executables?) - thus far, technical details there have been thin on the ground.
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