Devil May Cry 4 is slated to release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on February 5 in North America. A downloadable demo of the console editions is expected early next year.

Much like many of Capcom's other current-gen titles, such as Lost Planet and Dead Rising, Devil May Cry 4 uses Capcom's internally shared MT Framework engine. In the past, Japanese developers have been known to be extremely stubborn regarding the sharing of assets and technology, even between teams, though that trend is shifting, in part due to the complexity of developing for current hardware.

As the PlayStation 3's specifications weren't complete when work on the title began, the team started out developing it for the PC, though the game was still pegged as a PlayStation 3 exclusive until March 2007.

"We initially planned only to release it on the PS3 in the first arc of development, but during the development of the game, Capcom announced that we decided that we were going to have a multiplatform strategy for the next generation machines, and we started to develop it for the 360 at that time," said Kobayashi.

"By developing it on the PC [with the MT Framework], it's very easy for us to work with the graphics and the gameplay, and see how the game is going to play," he continued. Actually, we're still continuing to develop it on the PC, as well as being able to check how it runs on the 360 and the PS3."

Though Kobayashi and team had not expected to release the game on two other platforms, the addition of PC and Xbox 360 versions to released alongside the PS3 edition didn't even double the amount of work required for the project.

"Because we developed it on the same engine--on the MT Framework--it wasn't double the work that we had to do, but it probably required about 1.5 times the work and 1.5 times the ability in order to be able to get everything done," he stated. "There were some changes we had to make, and some extra work that we had to put into it."

"Having said that, developing it simultaneously for different machines is easier than developing it separately--developing it for something, and then porting it over onto something else," Kobayashi concluded, perhaps making a reference to Capcom's decision to port Lost Planet: Extreme Condition to PC and later PS3 following its original Xbox 360 release.