Lair is not upscaling or cheating to get to 1080p, we are natively running at the full 1920x1080 progressive resolution. Earlier this year we were quite skeptical if that would be possible, but the final kits really were a revelation in terms of power. Sony delivered what they promised and after a bit of tweaking we had the game up-and running. One thing that did help us was that our engine always was heavily reliant on data streaming, so the larger frame buffer memory never was an issue. By now half of our staff has 1080p monitors, and believe me, the 720 guys are jealous.
IGN: Quick Fanboy wars question -- Could Lair be done under its current spec on the Xbox 360? If so, why go with the PlayStation 3 "only" instead of going cross-platform?
Eggebrecht: Lair in its current form couldn't be done on 360. We are using large amounts of Cell's SPUs for all of our geometry, landscape, simulations, animations, even troop AI. When we create a game, we absolutely focus on the platform it is designed around. Would we do one for 360, it would be a different game and a different engine -- most crucially perhaps though: Lair is an entirely different game without the motion control and gesture recognition since it was designed around it.
IGN: What advantage does Blu-ray afford you now? Everyone talks about how great the extra storage space is but are you actually using it for Lair?
Eggebrecht: The single level at TGS alone takes up 4 Gigabytes of data. We are using every ounce of that due to streaming of our textures. Sure you could chop them all down to tiny sizes and we would fit, but then again, it would not be the same game. In addition to all the textures and geometry, we also do have video on the disc, and all of that is in native 1080p resolution. Thanks to Blu-Ray we don't need to worry about that and can still fit the whole game on a single disk.