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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.
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.
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!
It will be a "Windows Vista" exclusive, right?
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?)
No its very much a third person game.
You mad
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.
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.
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.