Infinity Blade III is "truly a next-gen gaming experience," says dev

Infinity Blade III may be a mobile game, but its developer, Chair Entertainment, says it is a true console-quality title. Speaking with GameSpot today, co-founder and creative director Donald Mustard said he is unfazed by the next generation of consoles because he believes mobile is the future.

"We think that Infinity Blade III is a console-quality experience," Mustard said. "And to me, it's truly a next-gen gaming experience. It's like, forget the next consoles, this is the future of gaming. This kind of combination of really, really refined deep gameplay with beautiful graphics on a device that's with me all the time."

Mustard said that after watching his own children's media consumption, he believes that the power of all-in-one devices like the iPhone may prove troublesome for traditional consoles from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

"It's already this powerful console in my pocket all the time. And as I look at my own children growing up, they spend more and more of their screen time on these kinds of devices where they're looking at something on YouTube to look up some Minecraft secret, then popping right back into Minecraft on their iPod Touch," Mustard said. "And then taking a picture of it and posting it on Instagram and then all their friends are commenting about it. All on the same little device."

"And I think that is a powerful window into the future of how teenagers are starting to consume things," he added. "And it's only going to be a few years before those teenagers are in their twenties and their thirties and the idea of being limited to something I have to sit down on my couch and interact with I think is a fairly foreign concept to them."

Mustard isn't predicting the demise of the traditional console market, saying that it will be around for a long time and remain "strong" and "viable" for the foreseeable future. However, he questioned whether or not it was expanding.

Another point that makes Infinity Blade III a console-quality game in Mustard's eyes is through the graphical fidelity of its characters. He said characters in the game are "extremely detailed" and feature about four times the resolution of a console character. In addition, Infinity Blade III will feature "almost instant" load times, he said.

"I don't think I can stress how huge this is," Mustard said, pointing out that in all cases loading screens are less than one second. This is an advantage mobile has over consoles, he noted, specifically calling out the 45-second load times in Bethesda's open-world game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Overall, Mustard said he believes Infinity Blade III represents the "ultimate Infinity Blade" experience. "This really is to us the sole expression of what we think a touch-screen experience can be," he said.

Infinity Blade III is eight times larger than the 2011 original game, and additional downloadable content is in the works, Mustard added.

The Infinity Blade trilogy comes to a close with Infinity Blade III, but that's not to say the series isn't ripe for more stories.

"We always looked at the Infinity Blade trilogy as our Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings," Mustard said. "And we see this as the setup for what we can potentially do in the future."

Infinity Blade III launches on September 18 ahead of the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S releases on September 20.