Hideaki Nakata was in charge of Vanquish’s Playstation 3 Engine as well as overall engine tuning and has given us some insight into the system programming on Vanquish on the game’s offical site.
Nakata explains that with the game engine used in Vanquish, the focus was on all-out quantity. Shinji Mikami, the director of Vanquish, made a number of requests including the fact that he wanted “the game to look unlike anything else out there! I want our battlefields to have the overwhelming feeling of a real battle.”
So Nakata explains that the only way they were going to pull this off was with “quantity.” He says, “More and more enemies are going to have to keep appearing, more and more bullets are going to have to fill the air, bigger and bigger explosions are going to have to ring out…” and therefore they would need an engine that could pull that off while still keeping the characters and backgrounds rich in detail.
Vanquish’s engine is based on work done on Bayonetta and for that reason the team had a lot of work to do changing things for this project. An example he used was that they rewrote the renderer, implementing a technique known as “deferred rendering.” The team also tuned the title “so that if you play Vanquish on the PS3 or the Xbox 360 you should notice little to no differences,” which he reports that even the developers on the Vanquish team have a hard time telling the two versions apart at a glance, “so no matter which console you have, you have nothing to worry about!”