Ex-Respawn Founder On The Potential Of Next-Gen Consoles

Former founder Drew McCoy and fellow Respawn alumni programmer Jon Shiring have announced a new AAA studio called Gravity Well, which will look at using the hardware potential of next-gen consoles to innovate the AAA game space.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, via Wccftech, McCoy has talked about the new studio's top-level game goals, and how it aims to use the new generation of hardware. With Gravity Well's founding, the focus is on finding new ways to do things--starting with its flexible work structure and going all the way through to how their games will be designed.

"We feel that the AAA space is losing the hunt a bit in terms of finding new things," McCoy explained in the interview. "When you look back, big explosive growth in a genre or in the industry itself doesn't usually come from an iteration on a thing that already existed; it comes from a new thing that hasn't been seen before... It probably means we will fail finding big massive hits sometimes, and that's okay because you're not always going to land perfectly."

When looking to innovate in the AAA space, McCoy is specifically very interested in the possibilities of the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X. "The transition to next-gen, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 is really exciting," he said. "It dovetails with our desire to find new spaces that people haven't explored. I think that things like the amount of CPU power and I/O speed actually opens up opportunities that we haven't had before. Even when the Xbox One and PS4 were in development, what we were screaming at platforms to do was give us faster I/O, please. I am excited to see where we can get to with it."

Microsoft has just released more information about the Xbox Series X in the first of its monthly scheduled Xbox 20/20 streams--including all new footage from a bunch of the games that will be released on the next-generation console.