There's more to come from the 360 - Molyneux

Microsoft Game Studios creative director, Peter Molyneux, has told GamesIndustry.biz that he believes there is still plenty of headroom in the Xbox 360 in terms of technical power.

Speaking in an interview at last week's Develop conference in Brighton he explained that although the console has now been on the market for over five years, teams - including Molyneux's own Lionhead studio, working on Fable III - are continuing to push the hardware in new directions.

In answer to a question about whether production efficiencies improved as studios became more familiar with a platform's architecture, he responded: "You'd think that would be true, but the problem is that with great knowledge comes great opportunity - and there's your problem.

"If you know the GPU so intimately well, you're not going to say: 'Oh, that's not any problem any more.' You're going to push it harder, and that's what we do.

"The demo I've shown of Fable III - those levels are four times bigger, and we've got true dynamic lighting. We didn't do any of that before, but if we hadn't done that our problems would be so much simpler... but we push ourselves, over and over again.

"There's always this curious thing that happens with consoles - you tend to find that the most spectacular looking games and tech comes after the end of the generation. We're still yet to discover where the 360 can go in graphical resolution. We're still inventing stuff."

The full interview with Molyneux is available now.