Mark Rein: On new GoW content and the PC version

After winning eight awards at the 10th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Epic Games has more things to offer Gears of War. Mark Rein reveals in a Team Xbox interview that the next update for the game is due in a couple of months from now. He also added that the devs want “to have as regular a stream of new stuff coming for the title”.

The Epic Games honcho also enticed their gamers that the next update would have a fun little surprise, but when asked what is it, he of course opted to not spill the beans. As to the next Gears update being free of charge, he explained by saying that Epic:

Love to have everything be free…There’s a lot of pressure on us, having the leading game on the platform, to be part of the downloadable economy… there’s external pressure on us to participate in that.

Now, for those of you eagerly waiting for a PC version of the game, Mr. Rein said that this is something inevitable but it is something that would wait for awhile since challenges for it are abundant. He divulges that:

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 optimisation 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?

After winning eight awards at the 10th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Epic Games has more things to offer Gears of War. Mark Rein reveals in a Team Xbox interview that the next update for the game is due in a couple of months from now. He also added that the devs want “to have as regular a stream of new stuff coming for the title”.

The Epic Games honcho also enticed their gamers that the next update would have a fun little surprise, but when asked what is it, he of course opted to not spill the beans. As to the next Gears update being free of charge, he explained by saying that Epic:

Love to have everything be free…There’s a lot of pressure on us, having the leading game on the platform, to be part of the downloadable economy… there’s external pressure on us to participate in that.

Now, for those of you eagerly waiting for a PC version of the game, Mr. Rein said that this is something inevitable but it is something that would wait for awhile since challenges for it are abundant. He divulges that:

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 optimisation 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?