From an Xbox perspective, there's not a whole lot to talk about, but the company did do some work on the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection that made its way to Xbox as well, and the most notable project of theirs was the 2014 release of Titanfall for the Xbox 360. No, we're not talking about the Xbox One version... this was the last-gen version.
The YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer did a terrific job highlighting just how "impossible" this port was (you can watch the video up above), and he references a tech interview with Digital Foundry in which the team explained how apparent it became that squeezing the Xbox One version onto a previous-gen console was going to be extremely difficult.
Here are just a few sample quotes from that interview:
"We started to figure out how hard this was going to be the first time we got the game running on the 360; with a single player, our average frame-rate in Fracture was around 5fps, and that's without any textures. That's an, 'Oh bugger, what have we got ourselves into?' situation that you're not going to fix by giving the engine a bit of a tickle.
Long story short, we've replaced the world renderer, collision system, visibility system, animation system, asset system, asset pipeline, audio system, stuffed in a streaming system and compressed the crap out of the assets to make it fit on a DVD. We basically ended up with a crazy Frankenengine by the time we shipped."
Bluepoint Games utilised all sorts of tricks behind the scenes to get Titanfall running (and running well!) on the Xbox 360, and they had to do it at the same time Respawn was working on the Xbox One version. Former Bluepoint Games president Andy O'Neill, who has very sadly since passed away, described this as "like trying to change the transmission on car while it's still moving", but concluded that his team were ecstatic with the reaction to the final release.
"The reaction to Xbox 360 version has been amazing. It's the best we ever could've hoped for. It's always scary putting something out and you think it's good but you don't really know for sure. For all the tech stuff we do, putting something out that's fun is the real job. People seem really happy with our version of the game; they're having fun, and after all is said and done, making something that people appreciate and enjoy is the real reward."
There's loads more about the making of Titanfall for Xbox 360 in the video above and the Digital Foundry interview we've linked to, and in regards to today's news, we wish the best to everyone affected by the studio's sudden closure.
