ALPHA | NEWS
The Gears of War franchise has become synonymous with Unreal Engine 3 and showing what’s possible for triple-A games harnessing the technology
Two or three years ago nobody expected mobiles to be where they are today, they are surpassing many people’s expectations. That considered, in terms of Unreal Engine, do you have a roadmap for how long you’ll be supporting Unreal Engine 3? We don’t really have a roadmap. The general plan will see probably about the same level of crossover as before. After Unreal Engine 3 shipped with Gears of War we were still updating UE2 for a year or two after that I believe, and we were still licensing it. Even two or three years ago we were still selling UE2 licenses, so I assume there’ll be that kind of crossover. This time around we need to make some decisions about what platforms we’ll support with the new tech. I mean, if you want to make, for example a Flash game with Unreal tech, that will probably be UE3 for a long time yet. And I can see that we might still be supporting ‘iPad 7’ or whatever they call it with Unreal Engine 4. So, to cut a long story short, no, we don’t
have a plan. I’m joking, but we’ll see. We’ll continue to support UE3 for as long as it makes sense for us to keep doing it.
So we’re talking a few years? Definitely. Right now Unreal Engine 4 is only a high-end platform. We’ll be adding support for those mid-range platforms later. The first target is to get this thing going on next- generation consoles. We’ll do that first, so it will be a long time before UE4 is a top-to- bottom engine.
Is this the most stressful time in your career right now? You’ve got to support UE3, and now sort out Unreal Engine 4, and the iPad stuff, along with everything else that’s going on at Epic. You must feel very stretched. Well, we are stretched, but it’s not like we’re just embarking on UE4. We’ve been working on it for years. What’s been the hard thing is while working on a game like Gears of War 3, which was the biggest game we’ve ever made, some of our best engine tech guys were working on UE4. In fact, about all of them were, which meant moving people back and forth between the two. We had that classic dilemma: Do we invest in the future engine technology or do we keep working on making UE3 cooler and cooler and cooler, knowing that it has a limited life span. That was hard. I did not like that last night I went to the
GDC Game Developers Choice Awards, and for Best Technology Gears wasn’t in it. We used to always win those. Why the change? Partially because
everything Frostbite is is in Battlefield 3, and it’s amazing. But everything we have isn’t in Gears 3, because it’s in Unreal Engine 4 because we’ve been building for next- generation systems.
And to confirm, the Samaritan demo is built using Unreal Engine 3? It is, yes, but it wasn’t a game. And it did really well. We’re getting tech awards at the moment, but not game awards. That stings me. I want all of the awards.
Do you plan to see UE4 being ‘everywhere’ eventually, in the same way UE3 is on almost every platform today? Yes.
To what extent? This is back to that thing we don’t exactly have a plan for yet, but we’d be crazy to say ’let’s wait on that iPhone business’. We first showed UE3 in something like 2004 or 2005. When did we first show the mobile version of the engine? 2010 or 2011? We’re not going to wait that long this time. We’re going to move a lot faster now, because we have a lot more experience.
And are you internally working on any projects using Unreal Engine 3? Absolutely. There’s unannounced projects as well asDungeons, and there’s Fortnite, which we’ve announced but not said much about.
Speaking of Fortnite, it’s not common to see new IP at the end of a console cycle. What motivated creating it now? It’s partly giving our artists and designers a chance to stretch a bit and have a bit of fun. The game style; well, it started as something simpler with zombies with a different art style. Everybody embraced it, so that meant it was a new IP. If we had something already similar to it, that might have meant we would have slapped whatever it was on it, but as it is, it’s Fortnite. We’ve had guys working on Gears for something like a decade, and now they get a chance to do something a little different. It’s the same with Infinity Blade: Dungeons; our guys are having a lot of fun.
08| APRIL 2012
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