Gears of War creator working on a high-end game that will "push next-generation graphics"

Gears of War creator Epic Games is working on a high-end next-generation game that founder Tim Sweeney says is going to push the envelope for graphical fidelity.

"It's going to push next generation graphics as you'd always expect Epic to do," Sweeney told Edge in a new interview. This game is in pre-production and is not expected to be formally announced for quite a while, he added.

Sweeney also teased that Epic Games is working on a mobile title, though he gave no further information about this project.

Epic Games is, of course, also the creator of the widely used and celebrated Unreal Engine. At GDC 2014, Epic Games announced a new subscription-based option for licensing the technology, and this--coupled with Epic's recent sale of the Gears of War franchise to Microsoft--led some to believe the studio was shifting away from game development.

This isn't true, Sweeney said. "At any time there are over 100 engineers working on the Unreal Engine and there are more than 100 developers worldwide at Epic contributing to our games, so they're really inseparable--the engine is based on the feedback from our game development processes."

Epic's current development slate includes three games: the PC-exclusive Fortnite, as well as the mysterious mobile and high-end games. Finally, Sweeney said you can expect to see many games at E3 in June and later in the year running on Epic's new Unreal Engine 4.

"There's a lot [of games] on the way and a large number of them haven't been announced," he said.

Sweeney went on to say that he thinks the game industry is shifting to a point where AAA games, because they are so expensive to make, are actually becoming the minority

"The industry's changing," Sweeney said. "This generation it seems like there are about a third of the number of triple-A titles in development across the industry as there was last time around--and each one seems to have about three times the budget of the previous generation. I think we're heading towards a future where triple-A is the minority."