An Epic Rein

Epic Games' VP talks Unreal Engine, Unreal Tournament III, Gears of War and more.
4/23/2008 8:27 PM | 0 Comments | Page 4 of 5

You know there's $25,000 in the contest for that? Not in phase one, it's too early, but in phase three and four we add the Machinima categories back in. It's not chump change. Again, we've got way better tools for Machinima now than we ever had with Unreal Engine 2. With Kismet you don't have to be a programmer, you can create all kinds of cool events. Matinee is way more powerful. It was really hard to do the kind of things now that are fairly easy to sequence in Matinee. We've got much better camera movement now, and all of these great depth of field effects, and the amazing shader editor. It's pretty freaking cool, I'm psyched about it.

Crispy Gamer: Why did you pick GDC as the timeframe to debut Gears of War 2?

Rein: Well, Microsoft picked it, actually. [laughs] I think it just was a timing thing. They certainly didn't want to overshadow Halo 3's Christmas by announcing it before Christmas, which is also a long, long lead time. Also, what was the earliest thing during the year that we could do a Gears of War reveal and where was the press going to be? I think it was a tactical thing more than anything else. It didn't make sense to go set up your own amazing gamers' day like this just to show a tease. It just was the right place, right time. The only thing people got to see was maybe there's this chainsaw duel thing. Well, I guess that's been revealed now. [laughs]

Crispy Gamer: You've been to GDC for years and years. GDC seems to be shying away from what GDC is supposed to be about.

Rein: I don't think so. People are going to use any gathering to get some message out that they need to get out at that particular time. That was Microsoft's motivation there, they want to pump their system to developers. They really did a lot of talking to developers. Their XNA stuff and the UE3 demo that we did. They also wanted to pump a game that they had to be pumping at this time. I don't think they really hijacked GDC. They still did tons of seminars. We had a huge booth there. There's tons of other middleware guys showing of their stuff. GDC is just bigger and more important now. Yeah, there's a little piggybacking going on, but I don't think it hurts GDC in any way.

Crispy Gamer: When do you think is the earliest we'll see something on Unreal Engine 4?

Rein: I don't know, when do you think we'll see the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox 720? Who knows?

Crispy Gamer: Well, if Microsoft sticks with the five-year lifespan...

Rein: I don't think anybody is sticking with the five-year lifespan. I think they built these machines and there's a lot of headroom in them, they'll both go longer than five years. Right now it's really just Tim [Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney]. Right now it's just a research project, and I don't know why we ever talked about it in the first place. I guess just to show, "Hey, we're looking ahead." We don't really have the hardware to run it today. It's really, honestly and truly, not for this generation. There was some confusion about that. He said it's designed exclusively for next-generation consoles. Everybody says, "Oh, it won't be on PC!" No, what he meant was it won't be on these consoles. Of course it's on PC! You develop the technology on PC. As he bangs his head with his hand showing how ridiculous it is.