the frame game

Q: With PS4 Pro coming soon and Scorpio on the distant horizon, the resolution versus frame rate debate is starting up again. Gears 4 runs at 60 frames a second in competitive multiplayer – was the idea of 60 ever considered for the campaign?

Lead campaign designer Matt Searcy: It's all about time and money and what you're willing to trade. Campaigns are a sum of their parts; they're about the world and the story and the gameplay and the characters all unified in a direction that makes the player feel great about being part of the story and not just a passenger but being somebody who is participating in it. And a huge part of that is art, especially next-gen. People want to experience the best-looking environments they can. If you make a game 60 frames a second, you have to make trades – you have to trade some part of the art for that performance. I'm a big online shooter player, and I'm in the camp that 60 fps is the right thing to do in that environment. But I think when you're playing a story-driven experience, you don't miss those extra frames if the story is awesome and the world looks amazing.

Creative director Chuck Osieja: It depends on the experience. With a driving game, the 60 frames a second with the responsiveness feels different. With a game like Gears, the pacing and everything doesn't necessarily demand 60 frames a second unless you're in a competitive environment. The original Gears was the first HD product on console, so it set a very high bar for gaming on the Xbox 360. We take that very seriously, so if we're building something for the Xbox One, it's gotta be a visual powerhouse.

Q: Are you future-proofing for Scorpio?

Studio head Rod Fergusson: One of the things that's really interesting as a technology that's come along is dynamic resolution. Halo 5 is a great example of it, and that's something we've implemented in Gears 4 as well. That is what allows you to future proof. We run at 30 (frames a second) in the campaign and 60 in the multiplayer, and if you get into this really intense situation where you have a lot of overdraw – like a chainsawing moment or if six Boomshots all land at the same time – there are certain spikes that can happen that can potentially affect the frame rate. So in order to try and preserve the frame rate as much as possible, we allow the resolution to slightly change. What that means though is because of that, as you move through Xbox One to Xbox One S to Scorpio, we're able to leverage any additional power we find there by basically blowing up that dynamic resolution and locking it at a higher resolution – to go to 4K with Scorpio, or to stay at 1080 longer on Xbox One S.

Q: Ultimate Edition on PC was missing a lot of features at launch, and got off to a shaky start. What steps are you taking to makes sure that doesn't happen again?

Director of community Adam Fletcher: As the community guy who had to deal with the wrath, the community is actually really awesome and their feedback was really important. UWP was still very much a new platform at the time when we launched Ultimate Edition. There were a lot of features that hadn't been implemented in UWP that we were wanting to incorporate at launch. What's nice is we went to the community and said 'we know that there's things missing, things that you want, things like v-sync'. All the players worked with us to prioritise things, and we ended up doing five or six large updates making sure we brought it back up to what people were expecting. Since then, the learnings have been huge. So now we have things like ultra-wide support. We know it's important, but we wouldn't have prioritised it to the extent that we are with this game. Same with multi-GPU support. Hearing that feedback has been monumental for us.

◆ Matt travelled to Vancouver to check out Gears 4 courtesy of Microsoft.