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Gears of War Heading To PC Someday
Mark Rein, of Epic Studios, told the folks over at Team Xbox that sooner or later Gears of War will be heading for the PC. With Microsoft's 'ownership' of both the 360 and PC platforms, it's a no-brainer that Epic's epic will make its way there eventually; the question is one of keeping quality high and satisfying fans of the franchise. They also discuss the hopeful-looking future for the game, as a part of the Marketplace download ecology and in future games. Rein states: "The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console, to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That's a challenge." For another look back and forward on the game, 1up has a chat with CliffyB up on their site.
With the money they are making on it anyway why not?!
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Ah well, I'm still excited that I'll be able to get my hands on it eventually.
One can only hope they do as bang up of a job as they did with those Halo games...or Thief deadly shadows or even Oblivion. Oh sure, those last couple were actually billed as PC games but they both had the stink of console on them. I mean...you guys did get a load of the gigantic icons and text in Oblivion right? And the limited shortcut keys? What would it have taken? 3 Days to shrink the icons and fonts while expanding some of the hotkeys for the PC? And they couldn't even be bothered to do that. Hell, in most ways Morrowind had a better interface then Oblivion.
Probably be just another Direct X 10, Windows Vista only project like Halo 2.
Someone forgot to take his whiny bitch pills this morning.
GoW drove sales of the Xbox 360 through the holidays. Damn shame that it probably won't do the same for Vista ..
Why don't they just mandate that you get that spiffy 360 Controller for PC? It's not *that* expensive and IMO is a decent investment anyway considering how good of a controller it is. And naturally it would mean that they don't have to mess with the game's pacing which would be a good thing because I think the pacing was well-done in Gears.
I like basketball!!1!
Well .. you're looking at $50 for the game, $50 for a Wireless 360 controller, and another $20 for the PC Wireless adapter. That's a pretty steep cost of entry.
It will be a "Windows Vista" exclusive, right?
It's $40 for the 360's Wired (USB) controller.
uh this is a FPS isn't it? Who the hell wants to play a FPS with a controller when you have a mouse sitting right there in front of you?
I think, for a lot of people, the whole point of playing FPS/TPS games on the PC is NOT having to use the controller and being able to use keyboard/mouse.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Forgive me for being sceptical here, but in the last 5 years (or ever come to think of it), can you name an FPS game which moved sucessfully from a console to a PC? Crys of "omfg Halo is the pwnzors" will not suffice since it was hardly as sucessful as say the Quake/Doom or Half-Life series or most original PC made FPS games.
IMO they simply dont translate well because fundamentally the controls are simplified on a console. Moving from an inaccurate control system to a more accurate keyboard and mouse means the gameplay is changed and I am yet to see it translated well enough to satisfy the so called PC "twitch gamers". This is of course assuming that you dont want to use a gamepad (in which case why dont you have a console in the first place?)
...a mind numbingly boring 8-10 hour single player campaign. I beat the game at a friend's place in about 4 hours.And yes, I did get a cookie, too...
No its very much a third person game.
You mad
Why both make it for the PC at all then? I've seriously been wondering if Microsoft has been trying to figure out whether they could get away with requiring 'Games for Windows' games to use a xbox360 controller. I mean, the whole thing kind of sounds like they're trying to turn a gaming PC into an overpriced xbox360.
The question is...why bother spending the extra money on a PC Gaming machine at all if all there is to play is console ports that aren't even updated to take advantage of the different platform. I wonder about the business model MS uses...I mean the original xbox was sort of the same thing.
The "Games for Windows" I've seen so far were the AoE3 expansion and Company of Heroes, both RTS and neither suited for a console controller. I'm not using my 360 controller much either because most gamepad-capable games on my PC are 2d and the 360 pad sucks for those games. I'm using a cheap-ass PS2 imitation controller and it works much better for 2d games because it has a reasonable deadzone on the left analog stick (the digital pad sucks on both controllers). I even play fighting games on the thing and it's actually more comfortable than the original PS2 controller because I can use that analog stick with its good deadzone, no need for the thumb killing d-pad.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
If you have just a little patience, then almost all the games out on the XBox 360 will be put into PC platform. Like Halo did for the regular Xbox and a few other games that dont need to be mentioned becasue they suck. Not to mention elumators work great on the PC to play a huge portion of Xbox games. Now dont get me wrong here. I am an avid Microsoft fan, beta tester and what not for them. but I would never put money down on a fancy gaming system when i could drop the same money into my home system and have it more powerful then what gameing system is out.
"When we feel like whoring out our franchise for a bunch of cash, we'll give you a PC version."
"Whoring out our franchise" implies they were doing something for some noble higher purchase and are now succumbing to the call of cash, and giving up their moral stance. It implies that there's something seedy about writing games for the PC. I don't think it applies here.
"Gears of War" was written to make money. Expanding to the PC market allows them to make MORE money. No change in position, goals, or morals.
That'll be two systems I can ignore this pile of crap on. Colour palette of brown and grey; weapons that take an entire magazine to kill anything; gameplay that consists of running from cover to cover, sticking your gun muzzle out of cover and spraying bullets in the hope of hitting something at random. Did nobody else notice these tiny defects or was it just me?
While I have all the GTA games on my PS2 and enjoy them, I would be tempted to buy GTA:SA for Windows, that is if my system wasn't 4+ years old. Why? Mods. There's the multi theft auto mod, and other mods(different cars, etc) I'd love to get my hands on. I can't do that with the PS2, but easily on the PC.
And with a mouse, I'd do better on those shooting gallery missions, but otherwise play with my Thrustmaster, which is a PS2 controller + 2 extra buttons & no pressure sensitivity on the quad-buttons.
You have to be fraking kidding me. A game controller for a FPS on a PC is like training wheels on a mountain bike. Why would I want to limit myself that way?
Morality, filters both ways.
It's not a FPS it's a 3rd person shooter.
Good karma sticks to me like velcro on a piece of plexiglass.
Move along, citizen.
The big thing for me, if there is a port, is that they bring over co-operative play via LAN or the net. Halo's port was a huge disappointment to me because they dropped co-op play. For me, especially with games such as these that have weak stories, co-op is a deal breaker.
The company I work at licences the Unreal 3 engine for their upcoming games. Our game merely needs recompiling to switch targets between pc, xbox360 and ps3 (though we don't have any ps3s at our studio. Ironically we have a wii despite not developing for it). I'd bet that Gears of War is the same, that they merely need to change the project config and press build to get a pc version.
Did you notice I stated "FPS/TPS"? TPS = Third Person Shooter
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
I ask not because I'm a Linux zealot (though I am), but because UT2004 supported all of those, working straight from a Linux installer on the CDs.
I mean, it's obvious Linux hasn't been the native dev environment for any recent Epic or Id games -- all the editing tools are given away for Windows only -- but I can still hope to at least be able to play the game by upgrading my Ubuntu for free, instead of paying to upgrade to Vista.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Something to keep in mind is that differences between Console games and PC games are primarily design decision - not technical/programming specs.
Consider how much of the console development is actually done on the PC ? Consoles do not have some magic Console++ programming language - most of the development is done on the PC itself. Sure, the extensions/libraries might be different but we're not talking about a total code re-write just to make a port from console to PC.
What I think is the major difference between a PC game and Console game is how the game looks and plays.
Console games must have support for more limited controller compared to PC keyboard. Console games have simpler interfaces, the saving/loading mechanisms are generally simpler.
In the end, Console games are having difficulty overcoming the "platformer" stereotype. Back in the days of sega genensis and etc, most games were simple 2d scrollers, punch the monkey, kind of simple affairs.
Things have changed since these days but it seems like the spirit of the idea that console games are pac-man and Centrepide lives on.
Look at DeusEx1 vs DeusEx2.
Dx1 was clearly a PC game: it had inventory management, most guns had 2-3 different types of ammo you could switch/change/manage/use vs different opponents. You picked up a lot of information and it was saved in a log which you could edit/change/annotate. As you learned information in game, you had to feed it back into the game: you read someone's email that contains a username/password to another computer, you go over to that computer and you actually have to type it in. The interface was very robust and extensive. You could suffer area specific wounds, and heal them accordingly. It was a fantastic game. It ran perfectly fine the first time around. Many years after its release as newer and newer cards come onto the market, the game on max graphic settings looks better every time I buy a new card.
DX2 on the other hand was a console game that was poorly ported to PC: Universal ammo meant you only had a pool of 1 ammo and different guns burned the ammo at different rates. Usernames/passwords/pin numbers were non-existent - you either had access or you didn't (oh wow that concept was only invented in gaming in like the 80's). There was one type of 'tool' instead of dx1's collection of multitools/lockpicks/etc that you could use on a very limited number of places in the environment. The interface was clunky at best. Inventory management was limited to "you have 10 spots, each item takes 1 spot, you can carry 10 items) The interface was slow and unresponsive even with patches, the game handled sluggishly even years after the game was released and the graphic cards improved many fold.
Same comparison could be made between Morrowind and Oblivion. Granted Morrowind ran like an slug on release and just as bad after months of patching, even on high end systems. However, these days, running Morrowind on a high end system means the game handles incredibly well and all them fanboys who are spazzing about "but look how great oblivion looks you can see sooo far!!!!" should see Morrowind on max settings with a graphic tweak that increases the view distance to match today's hardware.
I could go on about the artistic aesthetics and the countless imaginative/interesting/fun books that morrowind had compared to the plastic crap of oblivion with its dozen of cut-and-paste-from-lore/elderscrolls-background books.
In closing, yes, there is a huge difference between PC games and Console games - it is not the programming, the extensions, the 3-12-months-behind-pc-technology, the controller or the madden-loving-fanboys.
It is the look and feel of these games, the spirit - one is the spirit of early dungeon and dragon text games and geeks learning how to use the acoustic coupler to dial up to their local BSB wondering "how cool would it be if we could play the Red Dragon text game with more than 3 people online!!" and the other one is supermarket plastic toy that gets chucked out every year or two for the newer, shinier one.
"The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console, to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That's a challenge."
This is a bunch of crap. This is easy. You just stall.
The cutting edge of PC graphical and computing power is constantly moving forward, at a pace far faster than consoles (new video cards come out every 6 MONTHS instead of 6 YEARS). This has traditionally meant that console ports, given the 18 to 24 months usually taken to port, are always widely playable on "gamer" PCs at the time of release.
Take Halo for example. XBOX version released in Nov 2001, PC version released Sep 2003, about 2 years later. What were the minimum system requirements?
System: 733MHz or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
These requirements exceed the system capabilities of the XBOX (and they're directly comparable as the XBOX is basically a PC), but were met even by entry-level PCs at the time. Of course it ran better (higher resolutions, etc.) on faster hardware, but "gamer" PCs were considerably faster than 733mhz at the time and they're usually the target market for console ports. Certainly this is the target market for Gears of War.
If Microsoft gains control of the console market through the XBox 360, it will have control over development, the platform, and online services. Gamers everywhere should be wary to support Microsoft's XBox 360. Sony may be evil, but they're also pretty stupid - Microsoft, on the other hand, is evil and sneaky - they've established a system where gamers will be hesitant to leave the XBox platform (XBox Live) because all their friends are on it. They're trying to establish control of gaming development by tying in PC with console development, so that developers have no choice but to develop for Microsoft.
Microsoft isn't good at innovation, but they're immensely successful at tying in their products together to keep customers and developers locked in. Sony is the opposite, they're great at innovation, but their attempts at keeping customers locked into their formats haven't been very successful.
None of us are fooled by your bullshit marketing shots. We all know about cranking up the normal map resolution on objects, huge amounts of AA not possible in games, and all the other crap you did with those pathetic Gears 'in game screenshots' the Net is filled with.
The game still looks beautiful on an HDTV. So what if the official screenshots have too much AA. News flash, most commercials embelish on the truth. Do you complain when you get a burger at Burger King and it doesn't look as nice as the one on TV?
None of us give a shit about a game that can only handle 4 vs 4 online matches. It's 2007 - wake up!
Not all games scale well to all player levels, not just horsepower-wise, but gameplay-wise. Anything more than 4v4 on Gears of War would be complete unorganized chaos. If I want to play 32-64 player nutso fragfests, I'd play Battlefield 2142. But Battlefield 2142 can't really handle 8 player games well...you'd probably want to play Quake 3 TDM for that number of players, or add two more and make it a CS scrim. Likewise, those two games probably aren't very fun if you try to cram 32 or 64 players into them (though the leigions of morons who play 24/7 dust with 32 player servers might disagree, but I don't think they have the cognitive capacity to say much more than random letters and numbers with "nub" somewhere in there). Half of why Gears only supports 4v4 is probably technical, but the other half is probably how the multiplayer gamepalay was built around 4 player teams. Honestly, I dont see how Gears could work with more than 8 players.
None of us give a shit about a game that can't get it's networking code to work - we all know about the pathetic lag and disconnect problems that plague Gears.
You do realize that Gears of War servers are essentially listen servers, right? Unless I'm mistaken, there is no "dedicated server" for Gears. You try running a listen server in Counterstrike and get 8 players to hop on your server and then get back to me. Given the range in quality of broadband in the US, it's amazing that it works as well as it does.
Whatever you spent of pulled to get those bogus reviews for the game aren't going to do shit in the pc world.
Hype can only go so far. Halo and Halo 2 continue to thrive to this day because they were actually good games. There are plenty of really hyped games that turn out to be rubbish. So far, it looks like Gears met the hype it recived, but honestly, I think it's too early to tell...we'll see how many people are playing in 6 months.
In other words, don't waste your time with a port. Unlike the Xbox, we pc gamers actually have other games worth buying.
Yeah, like World of Warcraft! And...World of Warcraft!
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion