While Rare hasn't been as efficient or its games as good as when it was owned by Nintendo, could that all be changing soon when the Xbox 720 rolls around?
In a series of job ads (via OXM), the studio outs that they're now looking for a Principal Network Services Engineer, whose role is to, "involve you working as part of the Cloud Services engineering team in order to develop and deliver Cloud Services for our current and future products."
Not only that, but in the "Key Expectations," it adds that the Principal Network Engine will need to "Work closely with design in order to define ambitious cloud services within our upcoming titles," and "Contribute to the long-term cloud services strategy at Rare to ensure we will be able to provide players with the services they expect from future titles."
So, I take it Rare and Microsoft will be using cloud-based storage/gaming in the next Xbox, no?
Aside from that particular job posting, the studio is also looking for a Gameplay Engineer who'll be "a crucial part of a passionate team of gameplay engineers, working with designers and producers to create stunning, groundbreaking game entity reactions & input interpretation." During this time, Gameplay Engineers "will occasionally be working with extremely early prototype hardware co-developed with teams located off-site."
Now, that bolded sentence could very well mean the Xbox 720 or a new iteration of Kinect that we've been hearing about for quite some now. Whatever it is, we can safely say now that Rare is indeed working on a next-gen game for an upcoming piece of hardware for Microsoft, no?
What would you want Rare to be working on for the Xbox 720 and Kinect 2.0? I know it's too much to ask for Killer Instinct 3, but can the studio reclaim some of its past glory when the next-generation of gaming finally hits?