Phil Spencer talks Halo 4 as XB1 launch title, Gears of War on XB1, resolution/fpsOn Halo 4
Last year, Xbox 360 owners got to play the first Halo not made by Bungie Studios, the well-received Halo 4 from Microsoft's new 343 Studios. That wasn't always the plan.
"A couple of years ago we had the discussion of: 'Should we do Halo at launch and not do Halo 4 last year?'" Spencer recalled, "But I was committed to getting Halo 4 done last year, and there was no way we were going to turn around with 343 a full Halo game in a year. So that was the plan we set on. I feel good about that.
"Unlike some franchises that manage through 1,000 people, Halo is 343 and that team obviously has tight control," Spencer said. "They are our Halo team. A discussion around having a Halo game at launch—a true Halo at launch, meaning like a Halo 4 or 5-size game—would have been something we'd have had to start two or three years ago. We had the discussion, and we thought having Halo 4 come out when it came out from 343 and having them really land their first full version of Halo that they developed internally would be great for the 360 customers, great for 343 in shipping something."
On Gears of War
I asked Spencer what was next for Gears and if he could provide any assurances that the series would remain exclusive to Xbox. He gave a little laugh. "It's Epic's franchise," he said. "You and I both know that. I can't make any assurances about anybody else's franchise."
He deferred to Epic on the question on the state of Gears. I asked Epic what was next and if Gears would still be Xbox-only. They declined to comment.
I'm a huge fan of the franchise," Spencer told me. "I want to continue to work with Gears. I think there's a lot of life left in that franchise. We had an internal discussion on it even yesterday. It's something that's active in discussion about what we can do with Gears. Obviously, I know [Epic's management] Tim Sweeney, Mark Rein, Jay Wilbur incredibly well, so nothing to announce yet and I'd say, yes, there's nothing even pending that I'm holding to announce, but I understand the importance of the franchise to the Xbox platform and to gamers—I'd say gamers first. It'd be great to do something forward with that franchise.
On Japanese titles on Xbox One
"We have signed some things in Japan that we haven't announced that we'll announce in... '14 so that people get to hear about support in Japan," Spencer said. He teased that these would be seen as "full Japanese games," bigger than download titles.
On resolution/framerate
"In the design process of a game... any game, you're thinking about fidelity of input, how responsive input is, which is really a framerate question, obviously, more than a frame size question," Spencer said. "If you think about a fighting game or you think about a racing game, 60 frames per second for your precision games is something you're going to target, which is obviously going to have some impact on the resolution and density of scene that you're going to build, just because you're flipping frames twice as quickly.
"The other thing is that, when you get real high-contrast outdoor environments with a lot of foliage and other things, you start to look at strong lighting and anti-aliasing techniques that you want to put in place, which, again, is a trade-off against framerate, and scene density and scene resolution.
"To me, it's always been about putting the controls in the hands of the creators and the developers and the artists to pull the right levers to get to what they think is the right experience for gameplay and visuals. To try to turn it into a math exercise of: 'If it's not this framerate or it's not this resolution then it's somehow not a valid game or it's less of a game I think is an issue.'"
http://kotaku.com/whats-next-for-the-xb ... Socialflow 
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