Procrastinato said:
The ease of 360 development mostly comes from its abstraction of threads, much like plain-ole Windows programming.
If you wanted to really squeeze the most out of it, you'd have to write to the metal, much like the PS3, except without the PS3 tools for doing so. That may explain why the 360 hasn't really sparkled in KZ2 fashion, as yet -- going there kinda means you should have written your engine to basically be PS3 centric already -- thus, you probably aren't making a 360 exclusive, and much of the rest of your engine design will settle for least-common-denominator between the two consoles. least available memory resources for textures, least disc space, no assumed HDD for streaming... the list goes on and on.
Only a MS first-party studio would ever care enough to write to the metal on the 360, and MS probably wouldn't want to foot the bill for doing so. There you have the real reason the 360 will probably never have a game that exceeds the quality of KZ2 -- its not that its not capable, most likely. More that no one will foot the bill for such a project, other than MS, and MS seems to be turning away from 1st party development.
In other words, they won't, because they don't care to be #1 in quality -- only in income. That might turn around and bite them someday, but... I dunno. Has kinda worked for them thusfar.
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