CliffyB: No Gears 2 For Windows

[Sir_Brizz]

This is probably as much a financial move by Microsoft (in the vein of "we won't pay for that this time") as it is Epic not wanting to do it. I'm not saying Epic does, but it sure makes it easier to not do things when your publisher won't pay for them

 

[Grobut]

This is probably as much a financial move by Microsoft (in the vein of "we won't pay for that this time") as it is Epic not wanting to do it. I'm not saying Epic does, but it sure makes it easier to not do things when your publisher won't pay for them

That may very well be the case, but if you take a gander at the reception this news has gotten, you have to wonder if it was a smart thing to do..

But to be honest, Epic hasen't been in the buisness of making smart decitions since Capps got in the drivers seat, i dont think that guy has a clue.

 

[Anuban]

That may very well be the case, but if you take a gander at the reception this news has gotten, you have to wonder if it was a smart thing to do..

But to be honest, Epic hasen't been in the buisness of making smart decitions since Capps got in the drivers seat, i dont think that guy has a clue.

Right right ... he doesn't have a clue ... that's why Epic is so successful and everyone and their mother is using or plans to use their engine. Sure Capps has had nothing to do with the success Epic has enjoyed over the last four years ... sure Capps decision to bring Gears to the 360 first and sale millions of copies making Epic millions of dollars to invest in making even better games was not smart at all. Do you realize how ridiculous what you said sounds? It flies in the face of logic and makes you look like someone who is in denial and who was really hurt by Epic (in short you sound like a jaded lover).

Look I am not huge fan of the man but you have to be honest and give credit where credit is due. You are not only being disingenuous but really man you are just not making any sense from a logical perspective. Epic is more successful now than they have been ... more gamers know who Epic is than ever before and that is due largely to Mike Capps and the culture he has cultivated at Epic. Maybe you don't like the new culture because it seems to be console centric but that doesn't change facts.

Edit: I cannot believe people continue to totally forget about PCF and the new IP that will be on the PC. Before folks say that Epic has abandoned the PC base and all this other nonsense that is being spewed why don't you be patient and see what develops with PCF and also with the last UT for Midway. Its amazing how you folks who are supposed fans of Epic are completely unwilling to cut Epic any slack and just keep dismissing the PCF part of Epic without even seeing what great stuff may be awaiting us PC gamers. Come one folks be smart ... be logical. And give Epic some credit for knowing what they are doing ... they didn't get to where they are today (rulers of the Middleware kingdom and creators of what many still consider to be the best looking game on the 360) by making stupid decisions.

 

[Grobut]

The shortsighted pursuit of quick cash payoffs is seldomly a recipe for lasting success, with good marketing you can sell one shoddy product to millions of people, maybe two, but after that people will wise up to what's going on and take their buisness elsewhere.

Currently, Epic is burning all their bridges with the PC gamers, their last offerings have been sub-par rush jobs or shoddy ports, they have gone out of their way to put their foot in their mouth and alienate PC gamers in interviews, and now they wont even bother porting their flagship title to the platform (lets face it, UT3 has face planted so hard GoW is their new flagship now), do you really think PC gamers will be coming back for more if that's how it's going to be from now on?


I'm sure Epic could live on and make good money as a purely Console game developer, others do even without engine sales, but they are just one bad PC release away from beeing dead to me as a PC game developer.
Is freezing yourself out of one profitable market instead of standing strong in both really smart? does that really deserve credit? i don't think so.. i don't give out kudo's for taking a company that was once viewed as one of the last bastions of PC gaming, and practically destroying that reputation in 2 game releases.

 

[UndeadRoadkill]

Edit: I cannot believe people continue to totally forget about PCF and the new IP that will be on the PC. Before folks say that Epic has abandoned the PC base and all this other nonsense that is being spewed why don't you be patient and see what develops with PCF and also with the last UT for Midway. Its amazing how you folks who are supposed fans of Epic are completely unwilling to cut Epic any slack and just keep dismissing the PCF part of Epic without even seeing what great stuff may be awaiting us PC gamers. Come one folks be smart ... be logical.

I think a lot of people have been cutting Epic some slack for a while, but it's gotten to be too much for them. After the bad GoW port, and the half-finished* UT3, a lot of people are going to take a "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude with this PCF thing. Wait for great stuff? Man, I'm still waiting for the lots of great stuff coming for UT3 that Mark Rein promised. That three-map pack that didn't even have preview pics wasn't it, was it?

*EDIT: and it's not just that it was half-finished, it kinda felt like they took their UT franchise, and tried to make it as much like GoW as they could in an effort to grab some cash from drones. Sacrificed their PC title on the altar of profits. Hopefully they've learned the lesson for the next UT they're contracted for, that simply injecting it with useless cinematic fluff isn't going to cut it.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I dunno, are alot of people upset with the design/gameplay of UT3 in general? I think most people just can't run it well (or as well as they want to) and when they do run it, get so frustrated by the menu system that they just give up.

Add to that including everyone's favorite love to hate spyware, GameSpy, and the plethora of other little annoyances, and it's sure easy to decide to go play something else.

 

[shoptroll]

I think most people just can't run it well (or as well as they want to)

I still think this is the biggest problem PC developers are having right now. If they wanted UT3 to get a large audience, they should've had the system specs closer to WoW or UT2004. WoW can be run on almost a toaster. Same with other "casual friendly" titles like The Sims 2. Although I'm looking at the XFire homepage, and I'm not entirely sure if hardware is the reason given CoD4 is right behind WoW on the front page charts. All I know is that my computer right now could probably handle Starcraft 2 when it arrives next year. It might not be pretty, but Blizzard game requirements typically lag a bit behind id/Epic, and I have no reason to suspect I couldn't have a good time with it. Supreme Commander seems to play decently as well right now but I haven't really played a ton. I do know that the BioShock and UT3 demos are barely tolerable.

At the same time, people are lazy. Would you rather go out and spend $600 on a computer you're going to have to upgrade in 3 years, or would you rather spend $600 on a PS3 which is going to be playing games for at least 5?

Half the reason FPS games dropped off my radar is the piddly arms race between engine makers and the 3D card companies.

 

[UndeadRoadkill]

I dunno, are alot of people upset with the design/gameplay of UT3 in general? I think most people just can't run it well (or as well as they want to) and when they do run it, get so frustrated by the menu system that they just give up.

I know people are upset about the lack of stuff in UT3 (a good menu being one of them). They spent resources working on the fluff campaign that they could have spent adding more features or bettering ones they had.

It's like they saw people getting so hyped about the story of GoW (to the point where they thought making novels and a movie would fly), so they decided to spin the next UT title that way. They even took the tournament out of the game to do it, and that word is in the title! If you don't like the campaign mode, you can always just ignore it, but keep in mind that it cost the project in terms of time.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I know people are upset about the lack of stuff in UT3 (a good menu being one of them). They spent resources working on the fluff campaign that they could have spent adding more features or bettering ones they had.

I kind of wrapped that up in little annoyances. The lack of certain features was no big deal by themselves, but add them all together and it's a problem.

Also, UT3 will probably run on this older hardware, it just won't run the way those people want it to (which is indeed a problem spot).

 

[keaukrine]

I still think this is the biggest problem PC developers are having right now. If they wanted UT3 to get a large audience, they should've had the system specs closer to WoW or UT2004. WoW can be run on almost a toaster. Same with other "casual friendly" titles like The Sims 2. Although I'm looking at the XFire homepage, and I'm not entirely sure if hardware is the reason given CoD4 is right behind WoW on the front page charts. All I know is that my computer right now could probably handle Starcraft 2 when it arrives next year. It might not be pretty, but Blizzard game requirements typically lag a bit behind id/Epic, and I have no reason to suspect I couldn't have a good time with it. Supreme Commander seems to play decently as well right now but I haven't really played a ton. I do know that the BioShock and UT3 demos are barely tolerable.

At the same time, people are lazy. Would you rather go out and spend $600 on a computer you're going to have to upgrade in 3 years, or would you rather spend $600 on a PS3 which is going to be playing games for at least 5?

Half the reason FPS games dropped off my radar is the piddly arms race between engine makers and the 3D card companies.

But take a look at COD4, it requires quite a good PC to play it too (anyways, a little cheaper than UT3 though), and it's on top of multiplayer FPS lists.
Games should look pretty nowadays, and that requires more powerful PCs. Minimum PC specs ain't a problem for UT3 IMO, a problem is deeper, and it's what Sir_Brizz says -- GaySpy integration, need for patch to barely run it offline, and as minor flaws console-like menu and lack of features that were present in UT2004 (voice chat, voicepacks, etc...). Overall, yes, UT3 can be named a half-baked product, while GoW looks a solid and good game for 360.
I'm in doubt that Epic is seriously planning to make Unreal3 because they are all on this "Gears hype".

A little OT, but: After I played GoWPC, every time I hear in UT3 bot saying "losing blood" I want to find that b**ch and kill it, and find that guy who was too lazy to make a different voice messages for 2 different games and throw that in his face. That makes me think that Epic put not enough effort in making UT3.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

CoD4 looks good and runs well on a lot lower specs than UT3. But it does scale up nicely.

 

[keaukrine]

CoD4 looks good and runs well on a lot lower specs than UT3. But it does scale up nicely.

I played COD4 on my old PC, which was: AMD single-core Sempron CPU @ 1920MHz, 1GB RAM and GeForce 6600 128MB. It worked very, very poorly and was barely playable (circa 20-30 fps avg., some parts had really terrible slowdowns) in 640x480 and lowest graphics on that rig. I also tried out UT3 demo on that PC, it worked the same on lowest possible video settings, well, may be a little bit worse.
So judging on my practices, I can't say that COD4 is more friendly to low-end PCs.

Anyways I'm in doubt that good performance on old PCs would have make UT3 more popular than it is.

Speaking more on topic, does anyone recall official UT3 trailers? They says "from the studios that brought you Gears of War" and blahblahblah... The same is w/ movies. Usually people don't remember who've made a movie, they remember the movie itself, that's why in trailers of movies we see such words. The fact that UT3 was being advertised in a such way (and later ported to PS3, and then 360) made it more popular for other kind of fans -- console ones. These fans weren't expecting sequel to UT99 neither to UT2004, they were happy to play with a new toy, and they were pleased to see some GoW influences in design of UT3 characters, I guess.

 

[shoptroll]

But take a look at COD4, it requires quite a good PC to play it too (anyways, a little cheaper than UT3 though), and it's on top of multiplayer FPS lists.

I noticed that too but I wasn't entirely sure what the CoD4 required specs were. That does suggest that the problem isn't completely hardware related.

I think that the lukewarm reception of UT2 coupled with the "it's not really done" release of UT3 pretty much killed off any chance it had for living up to anyone's expectations. Then again, the same thing happened with Quake 4's multiplayer as well. In both cases you could argue that the problem is the fact that Quake 4 was competing with Quake 3 (same style just prettier) and UT3 is competing against UT99 much like UT2 was. I know this is an issue that Blizzard has talked about in regards to Starcraft 2, so we can't pretend like this doesn't already happen. There are some exceptions to the rule, I think CS: Source is more popular than plain old CS, and obviously CoD4 is doing better than the older ones.

Last time I checked, there's still copies of the UT3 Collector's Edition on sale for $30 on Amazon. That says something.

I would love to play UT3. I'm just afraid that by the time I get into it, there won't be anyone left. Even the FragBU player list seems tiny compared to a couple years ago with 2004 I got into UT back in 2001, which was two years after it was released. The game was still thriving then. We're like 10 months past UT3's release and it's already rigor mortis? That's troubling

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I played COD4 on my old PC, which was: AMD single-core Sempron CPU @ 1920MHz, 1GB RAM and GeForce 6600 128MB. It worked very, very poorly and was barely playable (circa 20-30 fps avg., some parts had really terrible slowdowns) in 640x480 and lowest graphics on that rig. I also tried out UT3 demo on that PC, it worked the same on lowest possible video settings, well, may be a little bit worse.
So judging on my practices, I can't say that COD4 is more friendly to low-end PCs.

Ironcially, the only difference between your system and the system I played CoD4 on originally is I had a 7600GT and a 2.2ghz processor. I ran it just fine at 800x600 with medium details.

Maybe it just accentuates the point that what I find fine and what you find fine are going to be different.

Anyways I'm in doubt that good performance on old PCs would have make UT3 more popular than it is.

I don't know if it would have or not, but what it WOULD have done is opened the game up to a wider audience, which cannot hurt a game.

 

[Grobut]

I don't know if it would have or not, but what it WOULD have done is opened the game up to a wider audience, which cannot hurt a game.

That's true, certainly, and it is a problem that's really plaguing the game industri at the moment, because quite frankly, the latest and greatest tech in use right now just doesen't scale well, they rely on tricks that make things look deeper and more detailed than it really is, and thats great if you have the vid-card power to use it, but if you don't, many modern games actually look worse than older games if you disable shaders and other advanced features like that.

Quite frankly, i feel the industri would be much better off if they put less emphasis on the graphics and used that time better, making more polished and deeper games, atleast for the PC market, and i'm not alone in thinking that, some of the best selling games on the PC have pretty lax requirements, so obviously it's not bad for buisness.


But that said, i don't think UT3 would have had much more success had it had more lax requirements, a bit more probably, but the fact that it's out for Console means it was bound to take a big hit on the PC, alot of gamers don't have a top of the line gaming PC because they decided to buy a Console instead of upgrading (a decition i can't really fault them for, since most games thease days are cross platform), so lots of people have just picked it up for their PS3 or 360 instead, where they are garuenteed to run it at max graphics, and whilst that does line Epic's pockets, it does nothing to help the online numbers on the PC.

Thats just one more reason i don't like cross platform development, it splits communities

But probably the biggest problem for UT3 and performance is not if or not you can run the thing, its that it doesen't play well at all unless you have a stable high FPS, if you're FPS are all over the place (even if they do stay above 30), the game handles very poorly, the mouse just wont be reliable, and you need good aim in UT as much as you need a full health bar and a good gun.

 

[Armagon917]

i've had performance issues with an e8500 core 2 duo and 8800gt SLI. i've spoken with a lot of other people on the high end of things and there are problems as well. if you look at the options UT2004 had to scale character detail, world detail, texture resolution, character shadows, decal stay, and physics at all different ranges you could tweak UT2004 to your liking.

i did not see that with UT3 and with GOW running and looking as good as it does i think EPIC just didn't take the time to optimize correctly. i know its a different animal but COD4 points to that fact in terms of performance and the qualityit puts out for that. also other unreal engine 3 titles run great on my system maxed out in comparison to UT3.

as far as popularity i think UT99 is a great comparison here. when UT99 came out it was very demanding for the time. i remember 30fps whew! lol, but all of us with low end hardware when the game came out still loved it. a great game will have players waiting for hardware to play it better. im sure many people upgraded to play COD4 better. i remember getting a geforce 2 MX something for UT99 to play that better. its all about the game ultimately.


Grobut i agree with graphics taking a less prominent role in games. i think thats why the Orange Box has done so well. its just fun. episodic content from Valve is running on Source which came out in 2004 with a few updates over time. in comparison games in the orange box look dated to GOW or UT3 but Valves art direction is incredible, as is their general design, story and its all polished to a gleaming shine that when you start you know will be awesome. so IMO Valve and Infinity Ward have struck the perfect balance and the sales show that.

bottom line, its better to have games that are cool because they surprise you then a tour de force graphical mediocre game that does waht has been done before with shader model 3.0 or whatever.

 

[shoptroll]

Regarding hardware and sales: at least Epic didn't try to blame UT3's sales performance on piracy. Unlike some companies that will remain nameless and built a game that targets the upper 0.1% of the hardware spectrum. I thought companies learned from Trespasser's inability to run on anything but the best hardware. Although I guess that prevent almost everyone from finding out what a bad game it was.