Gallery: From Final Fantasy to Star Wars, E3 Brings Next-Gen Game Graphics
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LOS ANGELES -- Sony and Microsoft may not have announced superpowered new gaming hardware at E3, but several game publishers seemed eager to get the next generation rolling. Xbox 360 was released in 2005, just four years after the release of the Xbox. It's now 2012 and Microsoft has not uttered a peep about updating its 7-year-old hardware. Neither has Sony said a word about PlayStation 4. Yes, Nintendo showed its Wii U console, to be released this year, at Electronic Entertainment Expo last week. But based on the look of the games on the show floor, Wii U is roughly on par with Sony's and Microsoft's current consoles, not a big leap over them. [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/e3-2012/) But the E3 Expo was full of tech demos that promised a glimpse at what the next generation of games might look like when graphics artists need no longer target their technology at a box built in 2005. Epic showed the Unreal Engine 4 following [an exclusive Wired report](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2012/05/ff_unreal4/), but the Gears of War maker was hardly alone: Square Enix showed a concept of a next-gen Final Fantasy, Lucas had a slick-looking Star Wars game and Ubisoft promised a "glimpse into the future" with a video of a 2013 game called Watch Dogs. Some publishers were more cagey than others about what platforms their new games were targeting. But the message of E3 2012 was clear: If Sony and Microsoft aren't going to announce new machines, game publishers will do it for them. Here are the futuristic games and demos that had E3 attendees abuzz. __Above:__ *Agni's Philosophy* ------------------- Billed as a "Final Fantasy real-time tech demo," this short film from Square Enix looks like a pre-rendered cut scene from one of its graphically splendorous role-playing games, but is in fact being rendered by a game engine called Luminous Studio. Square Enix said it represents its ambitions for the next generation of Final Fantasy games. "Agni" is the name of the magic-using main character shown in the video. "Luminous Studio is without a doubt an engine envisioned to [create role-playing games like the Final Fantasy titles](http://www.famitsu.com/news/201206/07015939.html) seen up until now," said Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada to the Japanese magazine Famitsu. "But not just that, it's also for high-action games which are unlike those RPGs." He said, however, that Square Enix is not currently creating a game using the new engine, saying that the game design teams will likely begin using it late this year or early next.
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Unreal Engine 4 --------------- Epic Games released this video of a demo created with Unreal Engine 4 on Friday following the close of E3. It was built by Epic over three months to showcase [the new features of its next-generation engine](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2012/05/ff_unreal4/), which it says is targeted at high-end PCs and next-generation game machines. The big leap is in lighting: Finally, developers can just flip a switch and have light bounce and refract off everything in the room, cranking up the graphic verisimilitude in a fraction of the time. But Unreal Engine 4 isn't just a piece of helpful tech for developers working on the next Xbox and PlayStation. Epic wants to use the UE4 demo to push Sony and Microsoft to add more power to its still-in-development new hardware. “There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director, said in Wired's recent feature on Unreal. “It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be."
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Star Wars 1313 -------------- While Epic and Square Enix stated outright at E3 that its engines were for as-yet-unreleased game hardware, other publishers played it coy. Showing a demo of a gorgeous new action game called [Star Wars 1313](http://www.lucasarts.com/games/1313/) at E3, LucasArts pointedly refused to say on what platforms the game would be released. The website CVG reported that [1313 was in fact running on Unreal Engine 3](http://www.computerandvideogames.com/352406/confirmed-next-gen-star-wars-1313-is-unreal-engine-3/), not 4. It pointed out that Epic vice president Mark Rein had said earlier this year that the early titles for next-generation game hardware may well be produced using Unreal Engine 3. But UE3 doesn't mean status quo. Epic had shown an [impressive future-tech demo at last year's Game Developers Conference called "Samaritan,"](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2011/03/epic-unreal-engine-demo-gdc/) that used Unreal Engine 3 but required three $500 Nvidia graphics cards running in tandem to pull off its impressive effects.
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Watch Dogs ---------- At its E3 press conference last Monday, Ubisoft pitched the game Watch Dogs as a glimpse of the "future." That forward-looking introduction, combined with the exceptionally pretty lighting seen in the demo of this open-city action game, led those watching the conference to infer that Ubisoft had just shown a next-generation game. But documents released to the media following the conference listed Watch Dogs as being in development for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. That doesn't necessarily mean that these are the only platforms, or the video shown at the press conference wasn't running on a high-end PC closer in power to next generation machines. Indeed, Ubisoft representatives including CEO Yves Guillemot all clammed up at E3 when asked about unannounced platforms. "The game is going to come on PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and, um... we'll see," he said with a pursed smile in an [interview with GameTrailers](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kaPas-4KNCc#!). *Daniel Feit and Chris Baker contributed reporting to this story.*
