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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.
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!
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?)
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.
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.
"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.