Gears of War designer wants "face-melting graphics" from next-gen consoles

Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski recently said at PAX East that he wants future consoles to have astounding graphics. He joins the chorus of voices calling for significantly more powerful next-gen consoles, including CD Projekt artist Marek Ziemak who wants true-to-life animation.

"Face-melting graphics," said Bleszinski. "I really want our next-generation consoles to pass what I call the 'Mom Test.' So that if you were to show this console and games to your mom, she would be like, 'Wow, that clearly looks better than your last console,' and it's an essential step that needs to be taken by both Sony and Microsoft."

The idea of consoles that are constantly connected to the Internet is a somewhat controversial idea, but Bleszinski is in favor of it. "Always-connected consoles that basically require an Internet connection. So that I can just wake up in the morning and say, 'Oh a new demo has been downloaded on my hard drive, so I can check it out'," he said, adding. "As well as considering streaming gaming from the cloud, which would be very nice."

Despite the recent cancellation of the Gears of War Kinect project, Bleszinski is still intrigued by motion controls. "The other things I want to see are gesture-based controls," he said. "I think Kinect is quite cool, and I'm a big fan of using Kinect to control movies with Netflix. Maybe it will be built-in [to a future generation Xbox], maybe it won't. We'll have to see what actually comes out of that."