Rare’s Next Xbox One AAA Game Will have “Quadrupeds;” Unreal Engine 4 Confirmed and More

Rare’s Next Xbox One AAA Game Will have “Quadrupeds;” Unreal Engine 4 Confirmed and More

Giuseppe Nelva December 24, 2014 4:56 PM EST

We know that Rare is working on at least a new game, that they recently pitched to Phil Spencer, and the historical developer recently published a batch of career opportunity ads, going on a veritable hiring spree.

The first ad, seeking an Animator, mentions that the game will be an AAA experience and will make use of motion capture. There’s also a quite juicy detail:

High quality animation skills that include experience in bipedal animation, quadruped and facial animation.

I don’t know about you, but the mention of quadrupeds definitely evokes a certain game by Rare. Of course it’s not a given, but…

Two ads, for a Technical Animator and a World Artist, confirm the use of Unreal Engine 4. Previous ads weren’t as specific, mentioning experience with Unreal “or equivalent,” but these nail it down, explaining explicitly that the two candidates will use Epic’s popular engine.

Push the limits of what is capable in Unreal and constantly strive to find better solutions. Work with the discipline lead to deliver content in UE4

The World Artist ad also mentions the use of outsourced art assets.

A Concept Artist ad explicitly specifies that the game is going to be for Xbox One.

An ad seeking an Engineer mentions “secure and scalable web services” and “reliable high-traffic web application to support console and multi-screen end points.” It also confirms the use of Microsoft’s cloud in some form:

Experience developing, deploying and supporting applications on the Microsoft Azure platform.

An ad for an Engine Programmer confirms the fact that Rare is interested in games provided as a service, constantly updated:

The future of games development is building games that can be continually updated and delivered as a service. Rare is seeking an experienced and forward-thinking programmer who will help it to engineer scalable, high-performance games that take advantage of the flexibility this future holds.

It also mentions “development of an online multiplayer game at scale,” among the required expertise points. Unreal Engine and Xbox One/Xbox Live experience is also mentioned.

An Audio Software Engineer ad mentions the use of an in-house engine for sound and the audio middleware Wwise by Audiokinetic.

It worth mentioning that not all the ads are necessarily related to the same game, so it’s very possible that the studio (which counts about 200 developers) is working on multiple experiences. For example, they may very well be working on a single player experience and an online game at the same time, even if we have no way to know for sure.

Phil Spencer mentioned that the game he saw was “a uniquely Rare game.” It’ll be interesting to see what he means, but I’m definitely keeping my fingers crossed.