Gears of War


 

Interview: Epic's Mark Rein Continued..

-- March 29, 2006 by: Chris Remo

Shack: In terms of next-generation development, you've responded to certain companies' claims that next-generation costs and development time will raise to unmanagable levels, saying that Epic doesn't see as great an increase in team size and budgets. Still, budgets are rising to some extent, team sizes are rising to some extent; how do you see that impacting general development for you and the industry?

Mark Rein: We're certainly doing more complex art now. We have the ability to put a lot more polygons on the screen, we have the ability to put a lot more shaders on the screen, we have the ability to make more expressive characters, which means animations have to be much richer. We have the ability to do way more immersive environments, so a lot more energy gets expended there. So what we've done is develop systems within the Unreal engine, like our Unreal Kismet, like our particle system, like our visuals-based material system, to make us much more productive on the other side of the coin: not just on programming but on gameplay, concentrating on being able to make fun game systems as well. So we've reduced a lot of complexity there, we've taken away a lot of the bottleneck that is programmers. We've moved our programmers to be focusing on the much bigger, much more complex, much more effective problems they could work on.

Instead of little things like--I like to use the example of a bat flying out of a wall. In the past, those things consumed programmers' time, and they didn't want to do it any more than we wanted them to do it. Now, they don't have to get involved in that kind of stuff. The designers can do that, and it's a much more efficient and streamlined process. The programmers now can work on making better AI, and more complex systems, and expanding our technology. Everybody takes our engine and adds something to it. We're seeing, overall, about a 50% increase in cost, because the efforts we're putting in art are much deeper. But, in my opinion, we're making much better games for that 50%. More than 100% better games. So we should be able to recover that money in terms of sales, in terms of quality and great review scores, that should show up in the games that we're making, because our tools are so good.

Shack: Unreal has always been a great platform for modding. How much of the new UE3 toolset will be available to modders, for example stuff like Kismet?

Mark Rein: All of it, that's always been the case. Yeah, we're really excited about the possibilities for mod makers. Kismet, facial animation, all that stuff is going to be there for mod makers. We think mod makers, especially because of stuff like Kismet, are going to be able to do much richer, more inventive, more unique kinds of mods than they've ever been able to do in potentially less time with potentially smaller team sizes even. Yes, if they want to do competitive next-generation art, they're going to have to raise the polygon counts and things like that, but mods haven't always been about that. I'm sure we'll see companies rise up to sell people assets and sell people materials and sell people textures that are higher in quality there, so people with cool ideas can buy those things, or borrow or beg or steal or whatever, to put them in their mods. We are absolutely on pins and needles to see what mod makers can do with this technology when we finally ship UT.

Shack: Related to that, do you have any opinions on the growing trends of digital distribution or episodic gaming?

Mark Rein: Well, distribution is distribution. I don't think I really have anything brilliant to say about it that other people haven't said.

Shack: Fair enough. Just to press that slightly further, do you ever see any of the stuff that people knew from the Epic MegaGames days perhaps making it to Xbox Live Arcade?

Mark Rein: Oh, you mean like Epic Pinball?

Shack: Yeah, and Jazz Jackrabbit, stuff like that.

Mark Rein: It wouldn't be possible to bring Jazz, the old original Jazz code which was a lot of assembly code, to Xbox Live Arcade but that doesn't mean that we couldn't bring the characters and ideas and stick them into Unreal Engine 3. We do have a few Unreal Engine 3 casual game projects under way. Not us, personally, but licensees. We're excited about that, and Sony's service that they talked about, so I think you will see a lot of cool stuff brought to Xbox Live Arcade using Unreal Engine 3. It's certainly a lot more efficient than what people were using before. Whether any of that is old content or not, I don't know. I want to see a new Jill of the Jungle game in UE3. I mean, it's our IP, so who knows.

Shack: What are your thoughts on AGEIA's PPU hardware? Any thoughts about how that's going to take off?

Mark Rein: One thing AGEIA's done that's really smart is that--well, if you've seen our PS3 demo, and this is really version .1, really not a finished performance at all, but we've got some really great cool physics things going on PS3. They've done a really good job of optimizing their library to work well with the SPUs in the Cell processor, which means we're going to be able to get a lot of physics performance out of PlayStation 3. Also on Xbox 360 to some extent, but definitely on PS3 we're going to be able to get a lot of physics capabilities out of that. Which means that, to bring [games using those methods] to a PC, you're probably going to need the hardware. Or you could maybe scale it up even further on the PC, I believe, with their hardware. I think that bodes really well for them if developers go nuts and do really cool physics on PlayStation 3, then if people want to play it to that level on PC, they'll buy the card. So it's a matter of them coming out with great applications, great games that use it. I know Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter will be using the hardware, and Unreal Tournament 2007 will be using the hardware. Not today, but eventually. So I think that's pretty exciting for them, and I think it's going to be pretty cool.

Shack: If I could touch on an area you might not be too thrilled to return to, and I might be answering my own question just by asking this, but are you still hearing about your Nintendo Revolution comments a while back?

Mark Rein: [laughs] No, no, that died down. I always say stupid stuff.

Shack: A little while ago, there were job postings from a major publisher looking for developers to join a project using the Unreal 3 engine, and it listed all three next-generation consoles. It wasn't really clear if they just checked all the boxes on accident, or if there was anything to that. Do you have any comment on that?

Mark Rein: I have no idea. I just don't know. I don't see the Nintendo platform as a likely target for Unreal Engine 3. Nintendo has said they're not going after high definition, and we're definitely--the kind of hardware it takes to run Unreal Engine 3 is definitely the kind of hardware it takes to run HD, so I don't really see that as a likely target for us at this point.

Shack: In your press briefing, you mentioned that one of your motivations--well, maybe not motivations, but at least benefits--of your partnership with Dell is that Epic will have some more leverage in the PC hardware scene.

Mark Rein: I wouldn't call it leverage. [laughs] Dell is one of the biggest companies in the world, and Epic is a small little 70-man shop. Influence, though. To be able to talk to the guy who run Unreal Engine 3 games, to make sure they run on Dell machines, to isolate systems it doesn't run well on and fix bugs, things like that. I think hopefully we'll also have a little influence, be able to say, "Come on guys, think about the gamer, don't put out this system with Intel integrated graphics, or at least offer people the upgrade and explain to them that that's not a great machine for playing games." And I'd love to be able to go to Dell customers and say, "Hey, regardless of your budget, if it's $700, let's find a gaming system that's a great value for $700. If it's $1200, here's a system that would be great for our games. If your budget is XPS600, boy this is great."

That's the thing, I really want to be able to educate Dell customers on what are great systems for playing games, push them a little bit to consider the gamer in the design from the outset. Make sure they are upgradable, they have PCI slots or graphics options, make sure that they're remembering that users are going to laptops and if you stick them with Intel integrated and nothing else they're going to get screwed. That's what I want to do. They bought Alienware, and one thing Alienware does is they make a laptop with a button on it, and you can switch it from Intel integrated to Nvidia graphics. It reboots the machine and comes up with the Nvidia graphics chip. I don't know if that's necessary or not, I've always thought those Nvidia chips were pretty good at power management, but clearly they wouldn't do it if they didn't think it was. Maybe we could convince Dell now to use that technology, to get people more excited about PC games.

Shack: Just throwing in your two cents.

Mark Rein: Exactly. And they're the leader in the business, so where they go, others will follow.

Shack: Speaking of Dell's Alienware purchase, do you have any thoughts about that from the strategic perspective?

Mark Rein: I don't really know that much about it. Obviously, they announced it here [at Epic's press briefing], so I don't really--I just think it's good. [laughs] Alienware is also a great company. We, to be honest, made a choice between Dell and Alienware when it came down to who we're going to work with on UT2007, and the reason for Dell was the market reach they have and the amount of customers that they have, and the systems that they make. Alienware makes great machines, and if it weren't for market size and marketing strength as a consideration, we could easily have chosen them just as well. So to me it's exciting that the two companies are at least aligned. Right now Dell doesn't serve AMD customers, and Alienware makes great systems for gaming, so I think it's great that a company like Alienware has the strength of being owned by a corporate entity like Dell. We know they're going to grow, so AMD will continue to have a great hold in gamer PCs without being at the expense of Dell. Now Dell has a strategic reason for Alienware to succeed! So that's great, that's great.

Shack: Well, thanks for your time, it's been good talking with you.

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