Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5 who is currently developing the impressive-looking Lair, thinks that the power of the Cell processor is 'limitless.' In an interview with Dean Takahashi of San Jose Mercury News (thanks to gamesindustry.biz for this one) he stated that developing for the PS3 was “a harder ramp. Everybody acknowledges that compared to the 360 and the Wii. It's not all that bad. It's not like the PS2 ramp was at the very beginning.” Speaking of optimising the PS3, Eggebrecht said that “You can get so much more power. RSX is a known quantity. But Cell is pretty limitless at this point.”

He also illuminated some of the difficulties of porting from the Xbox 360 to the PS3 due to the architecture of the device, although he stated that porting from the PS3 to the Xbox 360 would be easier. Perhaps that explains some of the mediocre Xbox 360 ports we’ve been seeing recently. Eggebrecht went on to talk about the Lair engine, highlighting its superiorities to the Unreal Engine that Gears of War was built with.

“In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro.”

However, I can’t say that environmental transitions were something I really missed in Gears of War. It was a fairly linear shooter and worked as one, so I don’t think that having the ability to go through the maps quickly was really needed. Still, it’ll be interesting too see how the freedom offered by Lair works out.

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