Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames has been on a spree of announcements as of late, the occasion all part of a four-part reveal campaign touted on social media as “Platinum 4.” The smashing success of The Wonderful 101 Remastered was the first and Hideki Kamiya’s new superhero title Project GG was revealed as the second – with another duo yet to be divulged. The third of these big announcements have now been unveiled in the form of the developer’s next in-house engine.

As part of the studio’s greater research and development initiative, Platinum unveiled the codenamed ‘PlatiniumEngine, a new game engine that will serve as the company’s blueprint for developing action titles in the future. The ambitious project is said to have been underway for about two years, with the goal of creating more modern and complex titles for PlatinumGames, but with significantly greater efficiency. Several devs with the studio detailed the planned purpose and approach for the PlatinumEngine in a new interview featured on the company’s website.

“Modern games demand a whole new level of quality, a greater variety and number of objects on-screen, and a richer amount of expressive visual power,” said PlatinumGames programmer Wataru Ohmori. “We came to the frightening realization that if we don’t make our work more efficient, we’re simply not going to be able to keep making the games that we want to make as technology and expectations grow. Our new engine will help us make bigger, more expressive games than ever before, and with greater ease.”

Though PlatinumGmaes has used its own proprietary engine for years, creating an entirely new engine from scratch is still quite the leap in order to achieve peak efficiency. Ohmori revealed that third-party engines were considered and even tested in the past, but Platinum ultimately found that they left little room for innovation. “It’s possible those features could be implemented at some point, but even if so, it would be on a timeframe that’s completely out of our control,” Ohmori expressed. “When you’re trying to develop highly original titles, that lack of control can be fatal.”

We decided that developing and improving our own engine is the only way to be sure that we meet our game development teams’ exact needs.”

As for what these needs might entail, Ohmori provides the example that “programmers at PlatinumGames have more freedom to directly control game animations than they do at most game studios” and that quality “gives them a particularly important role” when developing the studios’ action games. “This is one of PlatinumGames’ strengths as a developer, and with the new engine, we want to give artists and programmers even greater control to try things out with their creations,” Ohmori explains. “The idea is for the new engine to both boost efficiency and make it easier to try new challenges in how our games are presented.”

“Not many companies build their engines from square one these days. I think the challenge that presents is a valuable opportunity,” Ohmori continued. “PlatinumGames is known for our action games, but going forward, we’re going to have to try making things we haven’t made before. Those new challenges might be under the broad ‘action game’ umbrella, or they might be something completely different, with some action elements. Either way, we’ll need to step up our game in terms of scale and expression.”

With the reveal of the promising new engine, PlatinumGames has surely set itself up for success as it ventures into its previously-disclosed plans to self-publish. With these details also adding another notch to the mysterious set of Platinum 4 announcements, one can only imagine how hype-worthy the fourth and final reveal might be.

What do you think? Are you excited about the possibilities of PlatinumGames’ new game engine? What other kinds of games do you think the developer could handle? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter and Facebook to be informed of the latest gaming and entertainment news 24 hours a day! For more headlines recently featured on DFTG, check out these next few news stories:

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