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Mark Rein of Epic says PS3 is in a better place... for launch
Master of Epic and one of the bigwigs behind Gears of War, Mark Rein, recently sat down with Eurogamer to say a few words about Microsoft's rival. Since he's behind a large development studio, he commended Sony's attempts to give out the final dev-kits long before launch (around E3): "Developers did not have finished Xbox 360 hardware last year at E3. So Sony's actually maybe in a better place vis-a-vis Microsoft in relation to launch." Straight from the mouth of a big Microsoft developer! Well, not exclusively, but at least all the attention Gears of War is getting isn't making him as close-minded about other consoles as many people have.Yes, yes, all well and good, but what about the dev-kit itself? Sure, getting it out there is swell and all, but if it's a clunky interface with difficult who-what's-its and doo-dads, that kind of makes it useless. Rein responds thus: "I know we're getting some great results with it back at our house, so I would expect other developers will be as well." Great news! Perhaps other developers are having success with it and those 10,000 kits are making about 200 fantastic games. MS and Sony fans must agree, these words are reassuring to the latter and hard to bash by the former -- or do you not care about Gears of War? You wouldn't want to hurt its feelings, would you?
Overheard@Develop: Mark Rein - "I need a stiff drink"
Mark Rein is currently sitting 3 feet away from me, and is heavily immersed in an interview with a journalist. Only five minutes ago I heard him saying "I need a stiff drink" in not-too-subtle tones as he walked past the press area. The reason? Most likely his supposed "heckling" from developers over his strong opinions cited in the opening keynote of the Develop Conference this morning (UK time). One developer went as far as calling Mark "a dinosaur" regarding his views about the industry's direction.In the keynote this morning he called episodic content a "broken business" and stated that "Episodic games that offer faster turnaround will inevitably be using a lot of recycled content, walking through the same environments and shooting the same enemies with the same weapons." So that's opposed to the refreshing experience that we get from walking through Unreal game after Unreal game?At least one thing's on the up: Mark seems to have got something to drink, as the picture above illustrates.
Epic's Mark Rein: Intel is killing PC Gaming
A couple of hours ago, Epic Vice President Mark Rein opened the Develop Conference in Brighton with a keynote covering topics ranging from the economics of next-generation games, episodic content and middleware (which, incidentally, Epic makes a lot of its money from). The majority of the second half of his keynote took a critical look at Intel's place within gaming; specifically, Mark thinks "Intel is killing PC gaming".Over several slides on the topic, Mark laid out the reasons he thinks that PC gaming is being harmed by Intel. He pointed the finger at Intel's integrated graphics chips. Integrated chipsets are often incapable of playing the latest (and certainly next-generation) games at any kind of graphics settings. Despite this, they are wildly popular amongst retailers. According to Mark's figures, 80% of laptops and 55% of desktops (note: he failed to cite a source for these figures) feature integrated graphics. That's bad news for companies like Epic, which are investing heavily into extremely demanding next-generation games.If next-generation games don't run on the vast majority of computers, big-name and -money developers will lose (or have already lost) their bottom end. At the same time, the higher end is getting higher. The last year has produced widespread-SLI adoption within the hardcore PC gaming community and new technologies like Quad-SLI, Quad-CPUs, physics processors and $10,000+ PCs.Over the next couple of days we'll be exploring this keynote and other seminars from Develop in more depth, but for now we'll ask you the same questions that Mark asked the audience: Do games like The Sims, World of WarCraft and other low-budget Asian MMOs prove Mark's hypothesis, that PC gaming is going away because of Intel, wrong? Will console MMOs put the nail in the coffin of PC gaming? How come big publishers aren't placing big bets on PC gaming? (Mark says that he knows of at least two "major" developers that are considering moving exclusively to console based development, although he failed to elaborate on which ones). Will the PC market be relegated to only mass-market and casual games?
Heard@GDC: no Unreal Engine 3 on Revolution
During a Q&A session following a demonstration of their new Unreal Engine 3, Epic Games' Mark Rein said, "It won't be easy to take something HD res here to the Revolution," continuing we probably "won't be seeing Unreal Engine 3 on the Revolution." Although he was clear to say that he has not seen the final hardware for the Revolution, Rein said the existing Unreal Engine 2 would provide more than enough muscle to take full advantage of the Revolution's hardware since it won't require HD resolution. Naturally, nothing's been announced, so despite the fact this came from Epic's VP, consider it unconfirmed. Any geeks in the house care to pontificate on whether or not UE3 is in fact worth it for Revolution developers?See also:Revolution can handle Unreal Engine 3Mark Rein to consider Unreal Engine 3 for RevolutionNintendo responds to Epic's Revolution disdainEpic VP rips on Revolution concept(UPDATE: To prevent further confusion, I'll attempt to clarify what I think Mr. Rein was saying. The process of porting UE3 games running in HD from platforms like PC, Xbox 360, or PS3 to the Revolution "won't be easy" and therefore, he suspects, won't be done. He elaborated that licensing Unreal Engine 3 for a Revolution game would probably be overkill, since Unreal Engine 2 is already capable of maxing out what they perceive the system to be capable of. That being said, what about the streamlined scripting and animation tools bundled into Unreal Engine 3's Kismet? Wouldn't some developers gladly pay the increased licensing fees to work in a refined development environment that, according to Epic, could cut their development costs. Furthermore, some developers, like Midway, have purchased studio-wide licenses to develop all their next-gen titles with UE3, presumably their Revolution titles as well.I think mocax got it right, "Epic's writes software graphics/game engines. Nintendo makes a machine that allows developers to deviate from Epic's core business. Any self-respecting profit-oriented corporation will twitch at Nintendo's disruption." I suspect we will see UE3 on some Revolution titles, but the idea is antithetical to Nintendo's stated ideology and thereby threatening to a company that makes their money selling eye candy.
Epic shows off Unreal Engine 3 at GDC
Epic Games, creators of the gib-tastic pixel-pr0n Unreal Tournament series were showing off the latest version of the tech behind their games at GDC: Unreal Engine 3. So, we all know it's pretty. How pretty? Super duper pretty. It'll make you give up religion and find faith in fragfests, it's so pretty. Beyond it being pretty, what else was there to show off? Epic showed off Kismet, an advanced scripting system that allowed them to create gameplay elements in a graphical UI that strongly resembled a flowchart. It's this middleware system that they claim will prevent the budgets of next-gen projects using their engine from jumping 200-300%, instead citing a more reasonable 50%.The ability to simplify many of the core game design elements will theoretically result in increased creativity; it'll be amazing to see what the mod community turns out using these tools. They showed off the system running on both a high end Dell Renegade and a PS3 dev kit, both of which elicited many oohs and aahs, despite the fact the PS3 version wasn't running on all of the system's SPUs and contained some textures from Unreal Tournament 2004. For a more in-depth look at the demonstrations, check out Gamespot and GamesIndustry.biz.Read - Epic shows off Unreal tools [Gamespot]Read - Getting Unreal with Epic's Mark Rein [GamesIndustry.biz]
