|
|
Gears of War on its way to PC, carnage ensues
Author: Wil HarrisPublished: 15th February 2007
Coming to the PC? Epic's gorgeous Gears of War
Eventually.
Gears has always been touted as an Xbox 360 exclusive, and its brand cachet and graphical awesomeness has seen it sell over two million copies in the short time its been on sale. Epic's position has always been that it would say 360 only. Until now.
Talking to TeamXbox, Rein had the following to say:
"People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.
That’s worked successfully for Halo. Halo was a big seller on PC long after it kind of peaked on the original Xbox, and they’re doing the same thing now with Halo 2. We work at the pleasure of a publisher who thinks both of those are their platforms, so I think it’s ultimately inevitable, and obviously we’re a PC company.
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. UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it’s helping us get optimization on the PC. So it’s just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it’s worth selling…or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?"
So it seems like the team isn't convinced that it will be worth releasing on the PC right now, since 90% of people won't have a rig swish enough to play it. That's a good point - the kind of money you'd need to spend on a graphics card to play Gears of War at a decent resolution would actually buy you an Xbox 360, which is kind of insane.
It's worth noting that Unreal Tournament 3, the other title under development at Epic with the Unreal Engine 3, has now been pushed back to the 'second half' of 2007, meaning we'll likely see it for Christmas. Anybody else thing that Epic is so under the kosh finishing up UT3 that the guys there are far too busy to bother with Gears on the PC until that's out the door?
Have you played through Gears of War? Would you like to see it on the PC? Let us know over in the forums.
Recent articles on bit-tech.net
Comments (15)
Stats: 0.161 seconds
Note:Anybody else thing that Epic
think?
Halo2 on PC is going to completely miss the Halo2 bug aswell.
GoW will do the same and I'll be on UT3 by then.
Halo came out on Pc far too late and looked rubbish and dated. There was much better games on PC then. Halo 2 on PC??? Halo 3 is out soon. Again to late.
People will be playing Crisis and other cool games when Gears comes out on Pc and will then look very dated.
They just see the drop in x3 GOW sales. And i think if they want to make more money out of GOW, they better release it soon on the PC. They can at least sell a mil. copies more on the PC.
That being said, they definitely won't release GoW until UT3 has reached it's peak. As they are both pretty shooters, Epic probably wouldn't want to compete with itself.
Microsoft, with it's whole Games for Windows Initiative, really should be pushing this as hard as they can. But as much talk as they do, I think we all know that Games for Windows is the little brother to Xbox360 who gets the majority of the attention.
But I think we can all agree that this is no surprise. The day of the exclusive has really passed. Next gen games costs buckets of money, and it's just financially unwise to try and make that back on only one plattform. A game like Gears actually still probably can, but if it sells 3+ million on 360, how much more would it sell on PC. And who would want to turn down that easy money?
Aggies
Aggies
Halo PC wasn't all that great either, it's a console shooter, designed for consoles, when on a PC, it just lacks something and is absolute crap in comparison to other PC shooters.
In a similar way, PC shooters don't port well onto consoles.
If it came on pc then insane will be too easy when you have a mouse and keyboard in your hands. Difficulty needs to be cranked up so you dont finish it in only a few hours on PC
While it looks awespunk atm on xbox360, it'll look aged by the time PC hardware chews through it, going by it's estimated release date (i.e. next year sometime).
For all you guy's who have played it, here's a cool thing that happened.
It was me, and three freinds, we've never played it, versus a team of experienced players.
We picked up the game pretty quick, and figured out downs. It was the level with the train.
We figured out a great strat on the COG. As they came up from the bottom, we dropped them all with shotguns, then rushed, and kicked they're heads in, all at the same time!
It was truely an epic moment.