There was a time when PC gaming was in "disarray," or at least that's what I had been told back at DICE. And those comments is what has gotten many people riled up here and at Penny Arcade. But Cliff Bleszinski, the man who told me that just earlier this month, sat down with fellow Epic Games power player Mark Rein to tell me at GDC what the situation with PC gaming really is.
Specifically, they told me what the point of this whole PC Gaming Alliance is.
Rein: "Right now, if you have a laptop with integrated graphics and try to play our game, it doesn't play. Or if you're trying to play some games aren't capable of integrated graphics, they play terribly. So you just lose your interest in that. We don't want that. We want all these people buying laptops and reasonably priced PCs, to at least be able to be exposed to gaming. They can go out later and upgrade to something better, but let's at least give them a baseline experience."
Multiplayer: "Cliff, you buy it? PC gaming is back?"
Bleszinski: "Abso-frigging-lutely. The thing is, I think everybody coming together in that kind of way will essentially kind of help re-glue things back together and kind of help fix the market. I have a big PC gaming heritage and I love playing games with a keyboard and a mouse, as well as a console, and I'd just love to see it."
Cliff Bleszinski and
Mark Rein of
Epic Games wouldn't talk details about "
Gears Of War 2" at GDC last week. But they would talk about the potency of the Unreal Engine and what some of the new features make possible in future games.
To get you all up to speed, at Microsoft exec John Schappert's keynote during GDC, several improvements were shown in the Unreal graphics engine. They were demonstrated through tweaked areas of "Gears of War." In one scene "Gears" hero Marcus Fenix machine-gunned a gooey cube of meat that broke to bits the way you'd expect machine-gunned meat to. In another, hundreds of Locust enemies ran down a street, demonstrating the increased number of characters the engine can draw.
Hence, my questions about what gamers should think of this improved tech. So... how did we get there to talking about paper lanterns and running afoul of the fire marshal? Just watch the clip.
Video not available in Canada, The U.K., And Japan. Sorry! IPs are blocked.
Achievements just don't make themselves up. They had to come from somewhere.
First we had Robert Bowling, Community Manager at Infinity Ward, explain to us how the development studio came up with the Achievements for "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare."
Now continuing our on-going Achievement series, Cliff Bleszinski (a.k.a. "CliffyB"), Lead Designer at Epic Games, gives us a brief rundown via e-mail on the Achievements for the best-selling title "Gears of War" (which recently came out for the PC).
While Bowling was a fan of skill-based Achievements in "Call of Duty 2" and "Call of Duty 4," Bleszinski wanted to spread the Gamerscore love to not-so-skillful "Gears" players:
"A good achievement is one that rewards experimentation or unique behavior. Even giving players an award for even attempting to play a game in a cooperative fashion at its most rudimentary level is a great motivator for inexperienced gamers to share a title with others."
He also talks more about the hardest "Gears" Achievement and how there should be real-life rewards for high Gamerscores...
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