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No limit on PS3 Unreal Tournament 3 mods says Mark Rein
In a recent interview with Joystiq the Vice President of Epic, Mark Rein, makes it clear that PS3 mods for Unreal Tournament 3 will have no limits. "Anything that can put into a level" can be included. ""Level" is a little deceiving now because, with the streaming system that we have, a level isn't just one map anymore. But anything you can put in there, which includes maps, models, Unreal Kismet scripts, Unreal Script, textures, shaders, matinee instructions." So total conversion mods will easily be possible, when utilizing all those tools. Rein summed it all up by saying that "Anything that we can do, you can do." Sounds good to us. Check out the full interview at Joystiq.
Mark Rein on Halo 3, 360 UTIII mods
Remember the CVG interview in which Epic VP Mark Rein stated that Microsoft's E3 showing hurt Halo 3? Now the first part of the interview has been published in its entirety, giving a further look at Rein's opinions. One of the more interesting tidbits, after his spiel about the Halo 3 showing, he goes on to admit that Halo 3 will break all of the sales records set by Gears of War. According to Rein, "We've had a nice nine, ten months of being the record holder, and now we're going to get our ass kicked. In a good way." Good form, old man, good form. Rein goes on to discuss the various versions of Unreal Tournament III and Gears of War PC and the fate of its exclusive content (hint).Also worth nothing, in the second part of the interview, which has yet to be published, Rein admits that the reason for the delay of the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament III is that Epic has yet to sort out how user created mods will work on 360. Rein notes that in the "worst case scenario" Epic will submit user created mods to Microsoft for certification and offer them as downloadable content. Rein adds that, "hopefully between now and whenever it is we ship on Xbox 360, we figure out a user-managed way to do it." Our fingers are crossed.Read -- Mark Rein interview, part 1Read -- Epic struggles with UTIII mods on 360
Mod restrictions holding back UT3 360
Sony's timed exclusive with Unreal Tournament 3 looks to have happened in part thanks to Microsoft. According to Epic Games' Mark Rein (via CVG), unresolved issues with downloadable user mods on the Xbox 360 led the developer to delay the shooter until "some time after the new year." Rein also confirmed this news to Joystiq in an interview to be published tomorrow.Because of the closed nature of the Xbox Live network, setting up a system for PC users to share mods with Xbox 360 users would be challenging, especially since there is no cross-platform connectivity via Microsoft's Games for Windows Live. "And Microsoft's got a very busy Christmas schedule... We just couldn't get enough attention from them to solve that problem," he told MCV."Worst case scenario would be Epic bringing popular mods onto the 360 and putting them through the certification process," Rein told us. "Because that's the way it works today. Or selling them in Marketplace, or convincing Microsoft to let us give some away for free," he said."That's the worst case scenario. Hopefully it will be better than that, but we know nothing yet about how that's going to work and that's why we're totally concentrating on the PS3 right now, in terms of consoles," he said.%Gallery-4830%
Rein says Halo 3's E3 showing hurt Bungie
Epic Games' very vocal and opinionated Mark Rein doesn't think Bungie should have shown Halo 3's E3 campaign trailer and believes it hurt them more than it helped. In a chat with CVG, Rein said that Halo 3 didn't win any best of E3 awards, because Microsoft didn't give the media any hands on time with the game stating that;"I'm sure if they'd actually had a big Halo 3 presence, if Microsoft had set up eight machines or 12 or 16 machines so you could sit and play it, it would have won all kinds of awards. But they don't need to because, like me, everyone's already placed their order... So I think that worked against them at E3." Hmm, interesting logic we guess. But Mark's comments further confuse us when he later tells CVG that it was a "smart move" to highlight other Xbox 360 titles and limit the amount of Halo 3 exposure. Hmm, didn't Mark just say he thought it was a bad move to not show a bunch of Halo 3? Well, now we're just confused Mr. Rein.In the end, we like to think that the Halo 3 E3 trailer was good times and helped fans get a feel for what the campaign has to offer. But at least we can both agree that we don't have to be sold on Halo 3 and are buying it no matter what.
Gears of War PC with 20% more
More Marcus, more Dom, more Brumak! Mark Rein, VP of Epic, says to EuroGamer that the PC version of mega-hit Gears of War adds "about 20 percent extra." Rein also reaffirmed that the extra PC content, like the Brumak fight, will not be making it onto the Xbox 360 due to changes in the "codebase." OK, who wants to take the first crack at: "Even Epic can't get their own engine to do what they want? Har, har." Gears of War on PC will have added level content, multiplayer maps, game modes and a game editor. Now, where to find the extra money for upgrading your PC to run the game smoothly? On the bright side, you could always just play with your Gears of War dolls, which we're sure will be a lot cheaper than upgrading a PC. Gears of War on PC is expected this fall.
Unreal Tournament 3 not using Games for Windows Live
Xbox 360 users who want to shoot up their PC counterparts in Unreal Tournament 3 are out of luck -- Epic vice president Mark Rein has confirmed on the developer's forums that the first-person shooter will not use Games For Windows Live and will therefore not feature cross-platform play between Microsoft's console and the PC. Rein said that they have not decided about cross-platform play between PC and the PlayStation 3. "We're not 100% sure that users want that feature but if we get time we'll play around with it and see how it works," he said. Sony's console will have the ability to share PC mods, so the the logistics of PC vs. PS3 play shouldn't be too hard. No release date has been given but Unreal Tournament 3 has been confirmed as a timed exclusive for the PS3.%Gallery-4830%
Gears of War, UT3 coming to Macs
At this rate, it's becoming difficult not to play Cliffy B's roadie-running extravaganza. During an interview with Game Head's Geoff Keighley, Epic VP Mark Rein revealed that Gears of War is in development for Mac OS X, along with Unreal Tournament 3. This news follows Epic's E3 announcement that Gears is in development for PC, with additional features not seen in the Xbox 360 version.No development details or release dates were mentioned. Given the casual nature of this announcement, however, one can assume that both Gears and UT3 will be ported from the PC to OS X using Cider, rather than being developed natively. No love for PowerPC users; though it might be time to consider that Intel-based Apple you've been eyeing ...[Update: It appears these are coming to the Mac natively, not through the magic of Cider, according to this comment from MacSoft's Ryan Gordon: "And no, neither game is using Cider." Impressive. Thanks for the link, David!][Via X3F]
Next Gears update will bring more achievements
Epic's Mark Rein hopped on the official Gears forums to tell everyone that they are working hard on the next auto update and that they've included a few unexpected goodies. Not only are they tweaking the roadie run as promised, but they are adding some glorious NEW achievements to both the Annex gametype and the Hidden Fronts DLC, taking advantage of the new Gamerscore policy. Rein also goes on to say that the update will take care of random exploits and general housekeeping, but that they do not have a firm release date for the update yet.Brand new Gears achievements simply rocks! It's something that I have been vocal about and to my surprise is going to happen. Now, for those of us who've earned the Seriously achievement, we can milk Gears for even more Gamerscore points. Dreamy isn't it? It's almost as if the Gears of War angels (Epic Games) have flown down from the heavens and blessed us once again.[Via GamingTalkHQ]
Gears of War gets golf mode
Perhaps tired of complaints that all of the Gears of War gametypes are too similar, Epic has struck back with a new one that's just about as different as different gets: Golf. The only problem? You'll probably never get to play it. Games Radar has the full story from Mark Rein in an upcoming issue of Edge magazine. Eager to prove to a Korean publisher that Unreal Engine 3 is about more than shooting people until they die from it, the team at Epic spent a day transforming Gears into golfing game that used the game's grenade mechanics to aim and swing and featured Marcus Fenix as the man behind the clubs. One of the levels from Gears even got it's landscape reworked to make it more of a course. It all sounds intriguing, too bad we'll never see it. "Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper space marine, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac... It's in the hole! It's in the hole! It's in the hole!"
New Gears gametype 'Annex' previewed, still no date
If you already suspected that "Annex," the new Gears of War gametype, was a highfalutin name for King of the Hill, this 1UP preview and video will do very little to change your mind. But, if said preview is any indication, it could become "the definitive way to play Gears online," so who really cares what it's called? When they're not heaping on the praise for Annex, 1UP also discloses some tweaks coming with this update (like increased fire for the Lancer) and in the future (four new maps with titles like "Subway" and "Bullet Marsh").The big question now is exactly when the free update will be available to us commoners. The 1UP piece says we can expect it this week, a hope echoed by Epic's Mark Rein yesterday. But plans have been changed before, if memory serves.[Update: It's coming today. Seriously!]
Microsoft forcing fees? Marketplace Phil. 101 with Epic and Microsoft
In the most recent podcast of the 1UP Yours show Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein from Epic Games (Gears of War, Unreal Tournament) sat down and talked about Xbox Live Marketplace and a host of other topics. But the quote that stuck in people's heads was when Tim Sweeney implied Epic would like to give Gears of War maps away for free on Xbox Marketplace (like they did the original maps), but Microsoft won't let them.Sweeney said, "We already released two [maps] and we have four more maps that we've built. We've been wanting to give them away for a long time but actually Microsoft has been pushing back on us for that. They're trying to build this business model around selling additional content for games and that's a valid idea, but definitely we would like to release more stuff for free, and we haven't been able to do so -- yet. Which is unfortunate, there's a lot of good business reasons for releasing free content for a game."This naturally sparked some heavy debate on the Evil Avatar forums. Joystiq spoke with Mark Rein over the weekend and he laughed at how out of context the conversation was taken. He asked people to listen to the podcast before they weighed in. He says there are simple business philosophies separating Epic and Microsoft.
CliffyB will executive produce Gears of War film
Gears of War creator CliffyB will serve as an executive producer to the film adaptation, according to Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games. Speaking to Game Invasion at Midway's Gamer Day, Rein also explained that it was Jay Wilbur, the other Epic Game VP, who worked with Creative Artists Agency to negotiate the deal.Having the creator of the franchise in such a prominent position is sure to satiate purists to the game, but so far we have seen only minimal plot that could not be stretched to a feature length. And CliffyB's production role may not give him too much influence, for better or worse -- after serving as executive producer for the latest film adaptation of his work, Frank Miller has decided to serve as director on his roles from now on.No director has been announced, but the treatment was done by Stuart Beattie, scribe of Collateral, which bodes well. New Line won the rights to create the film, but we're still hesitant to call it will still come to fruition or fall through the cracks like Halo did.[Thanks, Frank]
Epic retracts Gears sequel statement
In our report on Cliffy B's take on Jazz Jackrabbit and its potential for Xbox Live Arcade, he made a tongue-in-cheek remark about "potential sequels" for the Gears of War franchise. Some people took this and ran with it as confirmation that there "ToTAlLY iz a GEars sequaL!1!!". Mark Rein made an appearance on the official Gears of War forum and stated that Cliffy in no way confirmed the development of a sequel. Mark has also said that if popularity and room for innovation was still there, he saw no reasons to stop at three games. So, not that we're suggesting anything, but if there was enough story and progression in the gameplay mechanics, how far can you see the Gears franchise going?[Via Eurogamer]
Mark Rein apologizes for Epic's lawyers attacking artist
While Mark Rein was away, the lawyers did play. During last week's GDC a cease and desist order was sent to Emilio Lopez over a very well done one-time piece of Gears of War art. Lopez had created the Munny doll for his cousin. The lawyers requested all Gears of War trademarks be removed -- even though the assets used to create the doll were taken from a fansite pack Epic released. Epic's VP Mark Rein apparently got back to the office after hearing about this and typed out a statement of apology and clarification.Rein says on the Epic website, "Ugh. Our lawyers are trying to do their job and protect our trademarks but I guess they didn't realize this wasn't a commercial project and they fired off a standard form letter ... What we need to do is come up with some sort of permission letter for things like these so that we're properly protecting our future commercial rights but not stopping people from doing cool fan art like this. On behalf of Epic I apologize to Emilio and anyone who was offended by this."[Thanks Frost]
Epic apologies for the doll misunderstanding
The other day we reported that Epic's lawyers were demanding that Emilio Lopez remove all Gears of War related material from his custom Munny doll. You, our fellow fanboys, had varying opinions about the whole thing to whether or not Epic was overacting or if they were within' their rights to send Emilio the letter. Well, we've received some clarity on the situation as Epic's own Mark Rein posted an apology on the official Gears of War forums. Rein acknowledged that their lawyers misunderstood Emilio's work, because they thought it was an actual product for sale using the GoW trademark. Rein went on to say that their lawyers did act over zealously and they now see absolutely no harm in Emilio's Christmas gift, but reinforced that they pursue hundreds of individuals who try captilizing on their trademarks illegally. In the end, no hard feelings and everyone can go their merry way.We're glad that Epic came clean on this little situation and exposed it for what it was ... a misunderstanding. See, we knew Epic wasn't a corporate machine capable of doing such evil things ... we never doubted them for a second.
GDC 07: Mark Rein talks Unreal Engine 3 on the Wii (again)
He said as much last year (wow, seems like yesterday we were calling this thing the Revolution), but the hopes of seeing the Unreal Engine 3 on the Wii is still strong in the community. And this year at GDC, again the question came up and again Mark Rein took the time to take those hopes into a headlock and proceed to give them the Yoga noogie of a lifetime. Mark said "this is kinda a high definition engine. Designed for a certain level of graphics card and certain amount of CPU. You know, I'm sure one of our licensees will squeeze it down into the Wii. The way Ubisoft squeezed Unreal Engine 2 into the PSP," he explained in a little bit more detail exactly why the Wii and Unreal Engine 3 won't become best buddies, "Unreal Engine 3 is designed for a high level shader architecture and the Wii doesn't have that. I mean, you know, it's just not what we've been aiming for, so it's not something we're looking to do or support." Mark didn't go on to talk about specific companies that were already looking to license the engine, if there even are any, but apparently its fairly cheap to license as Mark said he "only saw a splinter of the money from Splinter Cell."
Mark Rein: Gears of War 'eventually' on PC
It seems that Epic's Mark Rein is finally being affected by the unrelenting repetition of being asked about a PC version of Gears of War every time he agrees to be interviewed. Having given up on traditional non-denials, an interview with Team Xbox has Mr. Rein taking one step forward and admitting that the testosterone epic will "eventually" be ported to 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." Mark explains that the "when" will be largely dependent on how long it takes for the market to have enough PCs capable of playing the reconfigured game and thus be economically viable. However, with Unreal Tournament 3 scheduled for release this year, aren't we at that point already?Perhaps we should stick to our current strategy -- ask Mark about Gears of War on PC until he screams in agony and orders a team to just port the game already.[Thanks, Jonah]
Oblivion: Downgraded for PS3, not happening on Wii [update 1]
When we learned that the PS3 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion would not feature the majority of downloadable content found on the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, it was a blow to fans of horse armor everywhere. An episode of The 1UP Show (02/02) provides the follow-up hook as 1UP relays a juicy bit of info from Bethesda. As it turns out, it may be due to a memory limitation with the Playstation 3 itself.1UP says that Bethesda simply could not find a way to load every piece of downloadable content without affecting the performance of the game. Considering that the Xbox 360 can pull off this feat without a hitch, that seems quite odd. Bethesda will still be looking into getting that content available for PS3 users, as addressed by their VP of Marketing, Peter Hines, who also comments on the "rumors" regarding the memory issue in an IGN interview.As for the PS3 version of Oblivion trumping the 360 in the visuals department, it just so happens that the new shader techniques applied to the PS3 will also be worked into the 360 version of the game. And thus, they are equals once more. Unless you want some horse armor. In which case, you're boned.Finally, Shacknews sat down with Pete Hines and questioned their plans beyond the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. When it comes to waggling your remote in Oblivion, "It's not really going to run on a Wii for example, but if it could we would put it there. Our philosophy is to make a game and make it available to as many people as possible."Read - The 1UP Show, Oblivion Expansion Preview (9:40)Read - IGN Interview with Pete HinesRead - Shacknews, Interview with Pete Hines[Update - We swapped out the Mark Rein quote with the more recent IGN interview to pull the feedback away from gritty, armchair analysis of tech specs and back into the content involved. Cleaned up some wording to not sound so definitive on a complex and unresolved issue. Thanks!][Thanks, Stephen!]
Gears of War update: more talk, less tagging
Epic's Mark Rein has divulged a list of issues that will be addressed by tomorrow's Gears of War update. The update, a prelude to Wednesday's new multiplayer maps, promises to fix the problem that left latecomers to a match without an audible voice. The noted aspect ratio bug that occurred with the Xbox 360's VGA cable has also been crushed beneath the weight of improved code. The full list of fixes reads as follows: Fixed aspect ratio distortion when using VGA cable with 4:3 displays at resolutions higher than 640x480 Fixed voice issue with new players joining Player Match games in progress Players can now get the Achievement for "Dish Best Served Cold" when using Troika turret to kill RAAM Fixed rare situation where host could loop countdown and never start match Fixed rare situation where players could get stuck after chainsawing in multiplayer Reduced Grenade Tag melee distance Enabled "Strict" NAT check on host to prevent possible connection issues Optimized server browser queries to return results more quickly and prevent scroll bars from hiding quality of service icons Reduced number of possible revives in Execution to match Warzone Removed host name from Ranked match server browser Disabled security cameras in Ranked matches Ranked matches now require balanced teams (3v3 or 4v4) Increased penalty for quitting a Ranked match to -50 points Added additional cheat detection code Additional housekeeping updates Those that find themselves exploding at an alarming rate should be pleased to learn that grenade tagging will now require more intimacy to be effective. Indeed, the ones closest to you always end up hurting you the most.
Gears of War enhancements incoming, trilogy unconfirmed
"Why stop at three?" Epic's Mark Rein writes in response to Microsoft's Jeff Bell implying that Gears of War will become a trilogy. While no doubt a success, we're not ready to put Gears in the same league as Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Mario, or Metal Gear Solid. Nevertheless, Rein points to these franchises' abilities to continue to deliver popular entertainment (beyond the trilogy mark) and suggests, similarly, the Gears universe still has plenty of content to offer fans. Sounds like plot might factor into the sequel -- and here we thought sawdomy* was the only thing this series had going for it.Rein did add that Epic's focus is still on the original Gears of War, promising to deliver "some great enhancements you'll hopefully see before too long." Perhaps ranked matches will be tweaked to support team-play after all.*Use of the chainsaw attachment to defeat your enemy; coined by Penny Arcade.
