[NEW] Gears of War - Video Interview

Wow, so split-screen CoOp made it. I always knew Gears was going to have online coOp...
Is MP 4-player split-screen though?
 
manxor said:
Wow, so split-screen CoOp made it. I always knew Gears was going to have online coOp...
Is MP 4-player split-screen though?

I kinda doubt it... just because how would you see in a 4 split screen third person shooter?
 
Oh yeah, forgot GRAW goes into 1st person mode for that.
I guess 2-player split-screen MP-online would work though...
 
TTP said:
Is it confirmed it uses the Unreal Engine 3 too?
Seems like it, it's on the official website

http://www.gearsofwar.com/about/

'Powered by Unreal Engine 3
The only obvious choice to power the Emergence Day era, its visuals, and its gameplay is the brand-new Unreal® Engine 3, which provides an unparalleled amount of detail without taxing the processor
 
Tieno said:
Seems like it, it's on the official website

http://www.gearsofwar.com/about/

'Powered by Unreal Engine 3
The only obvious choice to power the Emergence Day era, its visuals, and its gameplay is the brand-new Unreal® Engine 3, which provides an unparalleled amount of detail without taxing the processor

I'm not positive but... I think he was being sarcastic to the max.
 
They need to lock the framerate at a minimum of 30fps if this game is going to have the effect that Microsoft is hoping it will have.
 
Fredrik said:
They need to lock the framerate at a minimum of 30fps if this game is going to have the effect that Microsoft is hoping it will have.
What I saw running a few days ago at TGS was very very smooth. Much better than anything we saw of that game until now :)
 
Blimblim said:
What I saw running a few days ago at TGS was very very smooth. Much better than anything we saw of that game until now :)

As in rock solid 30fps plus motion blur ? :D (i remember Cliffy stated somewhere they were going to put some motion blur in the game)
 
Blimblim said:
What I saw running a few days ago at TGS was very very smooth. Much better than anything we saw of that game until now :)
That's great news, far too many games on the 360 has problems with the framerate and this is kind of the game that is supposed to show off what the Xbox 360 is capable of, anything below 30fps will turn into a trollingfest.
 
Karma Kramer said:
Yes plus you can play Co-op through System Link and Split Screen!

Awesome. I hate it when games avoid support for System Link. Glad to see that it's going to be an option.
 
Blimblim said:
What I saw running a few days ago at TGS was very very smooth. Much better than anything we saw of that game until now :)
A solid 30 fps? Tearing?

If that's the case, my hat is off to the team as I was having doubts that they could pull it off. The game is incredible looking and considering that nearly every game I own for the 360 has framerate problems of some sort, I had little faith. Of course, they are trying to sell two different products with the release of Gears of War. If the creators of the engine were unable to release a game with a smooth framerate, that would reflect negatively on UE3.

It was somewhat sad that, up until now, the only UE3 game demonstrated to the press/public with a smooth framerate has been Fatal Intertia. :\

Hopefully other developers using UE3 will be able to hit a target of AT LEAST 30 fps with vertical sync enabled.
 
I saw tearing for about 5 seconds during the 15 minutes demo. I had one instance of slowdown during a realtime cutscene. That's it. VERY impressive.
 
Fredrik said:
That's great news, far too many games on the 360 has problems with the framerate and this is kind of the game that is supposed to show off what the Xbox 360 is capable of, anything below 30fps will turn into a trollingfest.


It doesn't matter if it runs a steady 30 to 60 fps ther will be one or more times when there's alot of action on screen that the framerate will dip and it will be trolled just like many 360 games already have been. I've played almost every 360 game to date and the framerate has never been a problem for me. the same shit is going to happen to most PS3 games and the xbots will jump all over that also.Most developers are going to try to max out the visuals in a game and the framerate will suffer, unless you want PS2 visuals with 60fps on next gen hardware you will have to wait till the PS4 and the xbox 720 to get PS3 and 360 maxed out visuals @ 60 fps and so on. It's a never ending vicious cycle.
 
Blimblim said:
I saw tearing for about 5 seconds during the 15 minutes demo. I had one instance of slowdown during a realtime cutscene. That's it. VERY impressive.
That's fantastic.

How was the game itself looking? Have they further enhanced the animation? Any other improvements/additions since E3?

I've played almost every 360 game to date and the framerate has never been a problem for me. the same shit is going to happen to most PS3 games and the xbots will jump all over that also
The problems exist, however.

I have some faith that PS3 will offer us higher framerates on the whole. While some games were still rough at TGS, we saw a suprisingly high number of 1080p titles (including some at 60 fps) along with some very impressive 720p titles at 60 fps. Capcom commented that it was impossible to achieve 60 fps with their new engine, yet they are doing just that on PS3 with DMC4. That gives me faith.

The PS3 may not be significantly more powerful than the XBOX, but perhaps the boost will end up being just enough that we see higher framerates more often. Also, based on last generation, there were more developers working on Sony hardware with a higher framerate standard. The vast majority of "important" XBOX titles struggled with framerate, so 360 really isn't all that different at this point. We'll see...
 
dark10x said:
A solid 30 fps? Tearing?

If that's the case, my hat is off to the team as I was having doubts that they could pull it off. The game is incredible looking and considering that nearly every game I own for the 360 has framerate problems of some sort, I had little faith. Of course, they are trying to sell two different products with the release of Gears of War. If the creators of the engine were unable to release a game with a smooth framerate, that would reflect negatively on UE3.

It was somewhat sad that, up until now, the only UE3 game demonstrated to the press/public with a smooth framerate has been Fatal Intertia. :\

Hopefully other developers using UE3 will be able to hit a target of AT LEAST 30 fps with vertical sync enabled.
Here's a comment from a Gears developer on that stuff

There are hybrid solutions to VSYNC. Gears of War uses VSYNC whenever a frame takes less than 33ms to render and immediately displays the frame if it took more.

This means we VSYNC > 30 FPS (and hence clamping to 30 FPS) and don't drop down to ~20 FPS (32ms + 16ms) just because the framerate might be 29 FPS in rare cases.

In practice, this is the best of both worlds as you get VSYNC 99% of the time and don't get hitches the 1% of the time where strange things happen that cause the framerate to drop slightly. This has been working out great for us, allowing consistent high framerates with minor glitches here and there not ruining the butter smooth feel ;-)

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.
http://gearsforums.epicgames.com/showpost.php?p=24608843&postcount=24
 
dark10x said:
That's fantastic.

How was the game itself looking? Have they further enhanced the animation? Any other improvements/additions since E3?


The problems exist, however.

I have some faith that PS3 will offer us higher framerates on the whole. While some games were still rough at TGS, we saw a suprisingly high number of 1080p titles (including some at 60 fps) along with some very impressive 720p titles at 60 fps. Capcom commented that it was impossible to achieve 60 fps with their new engine, yet they are doing just that on PS3 with DMC4. That gives me faith.

The PS3 may not be significantly more powerful than the XBOX, but perhaps the boost will end up being just enough that we see higher framerates more often. Also, based on last generation, there were more developers working on Sony hardware with a higher framerate standard. The vast majority of "important" XBOX titles struggled with framerate, so 360 really isn't all that different at this point. We'll see...




What games and what problems are you talking about eg: framerate was so bad I could not see who I was aiming at, I crashed into the wall because I didn't see the turn due to the framerate slowdown, I lost the race because I tripped over the shitty framerate. I want to know what I am missing here? or maybe I don't because I can enjoy the awesome explosions of SaintsRow and you can't:lol
 
dark10x said:
That's fantastic.

How was the game itself looking? Have they further enhanced the animation? Any other improvements/additions since E3?
The game looked totally awesome. The only bad thing I can say about it is that the skins of the characters was still a bit too shiny during the cutscenes. Everything else was simply perfect. Killer app confirmed for me.
I saw the game running on a big ass plasma TV (like 50 inches) and the lack of AA was not a problem at all. Honestly now that I think about it, I didn't even notice that there was no AA at all.
 
Mojovonio said:
Epic truly is Epic.
What baffles me is that Epic has about 70 people, 3 teams large (UT, Engine and GOW) and the GOW team is around 20-35 people (around 45 when lots of art was needed). That's what Cliffy said in an interview a while ago....
 
Blimblim said:
The game looked totally awesome. The only bad thing I can say about it is that the skins of the characters was still a bit too shiny during the cutscenes. Everything else was simply perfect. Killer app confirmed for me.
I saw the game running on a big ass plasma TV (like 50 inches) and the lack of AA was not a problem at all. Honestly now that I think about it, I didn't even notice that there was no AA at all.

So the game uses no AA and yet looks as smoothe as it does? That's a pretty incredible feat.
 
Tieno said:
What baffles me is that Epic is about 70 people, 3 teams large (UT, Engine and GOW) and the GOW team is around 20-35 people (around 45 when lots of art was needed). That's what Cliffy said in an interview a while ago....

But they're all really ****ing talented.

I think as good as UT was, it ws supressing their real talents, now its quite apparent.
 
Mojovonio said:
So the game uses no AA and yet looks as smoothe as it does? That's a pretty incredible feat.
Maybe I was too focused on what was going on on the screen to take the time to check the jagged edges, or maybe the motion blur helps hiding them, or maybe Epic is magic. I don't know. All I can say is that there will be a lot of OMGWTF in here when you guys start getting some HD footage of this game :)
 
Mojovonio said:
So the game uses no AA and yet looks as smoothe as it does? That's a pretty incredible feat.

they did say that even without AA they would think of something to reduce aliasing. Not sure what it means, but apparently it works : )
 
eso76 said:
they did say that even without AA they would think of something to reduce aliasing. Not sure what it means, but apparently it works : )


they need to send a tip on whatever they're doing to the guys making Stranglehold. That game would look seriously hot without all the aliasing.
 
Brashnir said:
they need to send a tip on whatever they're doing to the guys making Stranglehold. That game would look seriously hot without all the aliasing.

And most important, do we know if they also handed the multithread render engine to other devs working with UE3 ?
 
So the game uses no AA and yet looks as smoothe as it does? That's a pretty incredible feat.

Unreal Championship was the same way on Xbox. When you turned the AA off (patch later) it looked almost as clean as with the AA, with a crisper image to boot. Im not surprised by this at all.
 
I'm pretty excited about the game and sure hope the online play will be fun for a long time. I don't expect to spend as much time online with GoW as I did Halo 2 or Rivals, but it should keep me busy until the end of the year (at least).
 
Captain N said:
I'm pretty excited about the game and sure hope the online play will be fun for a long time. I don't expect to spend as much time online with GoW as I did Halo 2 or Rivals, but it should keep me busy until the end of the year (at least).

I hope its better than Halo 2's spray n pray fest actually. The only way I can enjoy Halo 2's mp is in a lan with some friends.
 
eso76 said:
they did say that even without AA they would think of something to reduce aliasing. Not sure what it means, but apparently it works : )
you can reduce the effect of jaggies by not having highly contrasted object to backgrounds.
 
shpankey said:
you can reduce the effect of jaggies by not having highly contrasted object to backgrounds.

Well, yes but that's not something you can always control in a game like GoW.
I would think they used some slight of blur of some kind; they could even have the engine trace 1 point - 50% transparent objects outlines, and that would somewhat work without loosing too much crispness i guess...there's several things you can do actually, with some creativity. It's good to know they went out of their way and didn't give up trying to achieve a good IQ just because they couldn't just switch the AA button on.
 
36WiiS3 said:
What games and what problems are you talking about eg: framerate was so bad I could not see who I was aiming at, I crashed into the wall because I didn't see the turn due to the framerate slowdown, I lost the race because I tripped over the shitty framerate. I want to know what I am missing here? or maybe I don't because I can enjoy the awesome explosions of SaintsRow and you can't:lol
I never said that framerates were hitting unplayable levels, but rather, that most games I own for the 360 (around 14-15 games at this point) suffer from lots of dropped frames and tearing. It's a rare thing indeed to find a truly stable 360 game. They are still quite playable, but the visual impact is pretty strong for me and impacts my enjoyment. It's not a problem for you, and that's great, but that's just how I feel. It's been very disappointing.

The game looked totally awesome. The only bad thing I can say about it is that the skins of the characters was still a bit too shiny during the cutscenes. Everything else was simply perfect. Killer app confirmed for me.
I saw the game running on a big ass plasma TV (like 50 inches) and the lack of AA was not a problem at all. Honestly now that I think about it, I didn't even notice that there was no AA at all.
Oh yeah, that sounds fantastic. I'm glad to hear that it is shaping up so well.

Did you happen to catch any audio during this presentation? We've heard the voice acting and sound effects, but I'm curious as to which direction they've decided to go with the soundtrack. Any music present?
 
dark10x said:
Oh yeah, that sounds fantastic. I'm glad to hear that it is shaping up so well.

Did you happen to catch any audio during this presentation? We've heard the voice acting and sound effects, but I'm curious as to which direction they've decided to go with the soundtrack. Any music present?

Just in case you hadn't heard, Cliffy's said a few times it's gonna be a movie like, classical-themed score. Can't say how it's turning out, but you asked what direction it's going. Cliffy called out bad rock and techno music in games and said that surely won't happen in Gears.
 
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