Feature: GP Q&A: Mark Rein talks Gears of War downloads, UT 3 on PS3
GamePro editor Vicious Sid recently spoke with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, on the future of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.
I was surprised to see UT3 running as smoothly as it was on the PS3.
People have this weird misconception that [UT3] can't run as well on PS3 as it can on other platforms. You just got to give us time to do it.
Would you contend that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are evenly matched, hardware-wise?
I'm not going to answer that question. We're going to make our games run well on both.
The Xbox 360 is selling well. Are you confident in what Microsoft is doing?
Yeah, the Xbox 360 is a better system [than the Xbox]. They learned a few valuable lessons making the Xbox. It's a good piece of hardware and is reasonably priced, and we know that eventually the price will drop to be quite aggressive. We certainly benefited from it in a huge way. Same with PlayStation 3; it's a great piece of hardware. It's a little pricy right now, but that's what you get for being an early adopter of high-end technology.
Unreal Championship 2 taught us how to make a console game. Without Unreal Championship 2 there would be no Gears of War"--Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games
Can Gears of War fans look forward to more downloadable content?
Absolutely, that's what the Gears team has been working on. So, there's more cool stuff, but we're not ready to spill the beans just yet.
Do you expect the downloads to be free?
There's some external pressure on us to be apart of the economy there. You've got to ask Microsoft about that. It cost money to make it, let's put it that way.
What kind of challenges are there in bringing Gears of War to the PC?
The number one challenge of bringing Gears of War to the PC is finding enough PCs that can run it. Right now, it's optimized for the 360, as we discussed earlier. Now, are there enough PCs that have that type of power out there? When is that going to be the average gamers PC? Controls [are another issue]. There's just some problems to figure out and timing.
It will happen at some point, but when the time is right is when we'll do it.
Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007?
Yeah, I hope so. That's the plan, but you know us. We're hopelessly addicted to delivering the best quality experience that we can, and if it's not ready it won't go out. So when it's done.
Is the goal to have a simultaneous multi-platform launch across the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360?
The ideal thing would be to ship it on all three platforms on the same day, but it's too early to tell if we can pull that off logistically and in terms of manpower. We just don't know. Then there's the question of which order [to release them in].
Why break away from the year-style naming convention with Unreal Tournament 3 (formerly UT 2007)?
The reason it's UT3 is because there are three series. The first series was UT and UT: Game of the Year, the second series was UT 2003 and UT 2004, and now we're on the third series. And we'll probably do two of them again, a second one at some point. This series, however, will be the best. It looks amazing, you've seen the visuals, and it plays really well. I'm very enthusiastic about it.
This year we have single player, and it's something we feel is very necessary on the consoles. But I hope we'll be able to reach out and grab a few more people for UT3 because we got a little more recognition with Gears of War. And, hopefully, the single player story line will drive it a bit. So I'm cautiously optimistic that it will do really well.
Any possibility of bringing back the original Unreal, with more sequels and the like?
We talk about it, but it's more in the terms of how any loving fan would talk about a game that's not in the making. I mean, we just don't plan that far in advance. Right now, we have Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3, and the Unreal Engine. So, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Unreal Championship 2 for Xbox was a bit of departure for Epic. Was that a successful experience?
That game taught us how to make a console game. It was a hugely successful experience. So without Unreal Championship 2 there would be no Gears of War. It's unfortunate that [the game] came at the end of the life of the original Xbox. If we had done that game three years earlier, maybe we could have owned a big piece of the Xbox. It's just that by the time that game came out, people weren't really buying Xbox games anymore. It was a good game, and we learned a lot from it.
PCs often come with 2 gigs of RAM. How can you make a console game look as good as a PC game when [the Xbox 360 and PS3] only have 512 MB of RAM total?
The big difference is you have 'one.' There's one kind of machine for PS3, there's one kind of machine for Xbox 360. So whatever power there is, you can completely exploit it, and you can customize it for that particular CPU, that particular graphics chip, and that particular bandwidth. So you can dig very deeply into the hardware. Whereas on the PC, you wrote a game that was perfectly 100% optimized only for Nvidia, and only for dual-core, you wouldn't sell very many copies of that game. Invariably, you have to have a game that can scale a across a large range of hardware.
What are the potential consequences of the increasing costs of game development? Is there a way out?
License Unreal Engine 3.0! [laughs]
Is the Unreal Engine becoming a standard like OpenGL or Direct X? If so, is it a benefit for developers to have such a common language across all platforms?
I mean, C++ is a standard...pixels and polygons are standard. We're just a good technology that, hopefully, a lot of people will use. The goal for us is to broaden the imaginations of game developers and what can be done with UE3. A guy came today and showed me a puzzle game. We've got guys working on adventure style games. And the next Mortal Kombat game is using UE3. So our job is to get to the next step, broaden people's views of what they can do with UE3, and get more games of different genres made with it.
Does developing for the Wii intrigue you at all?
I like the Wii, I have one at home, but it would be like going back and making another Unreal Championship 2. The thing for us is, we are a very small company, so we have to pick and choose our opportunities. If we spent six months porting Unreal Championship 2 to the Wii, that's six months we'd be ignoring the Gears of War audience. I mean, what is our chance of selling 3+ million units of UC2 on the Wii?
![Screen Update: Velvet Assassin [Xbox 360]](/screens/112821/206795-1-1.jpg)
![Screen Update: Heavy Rain [PS3]](/screens/116621/206765-1-1.jpg)
![Screen Update: The Wheelman [Xbox 360]](/screens/129321/206774-1-1.jpg)
![Screen Update: Fracture [Xbox 360]](/screens/133461/206788-1-1.jpg)
