Epic’s Mark Reign revealed today that the very beautiful Unreal Engine 4 will be seen “later this year,” but says that games won’t be able to run on the engine until 2014. Last week at DICE, Reign told G4 “people are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4 and how much more profound an effect it will have.” If that’s not exicing enough, just look at the beautiful image enclosed in this post. This definitely makes sense, considering that we will be seeing some next gen console previews later in 2012, as well.
You don’t have to be the developer of Angry Birds to rake in some serious dough in the mobile game space: Epic Games, developers of the Infinity Blade series for the iPhone and iPad, have announced that the franchise has generated $30 million in sales so far. That’s quite a feat, considering Infinity Blade only retails for $7 bucks on the iOS store. The latest version, Infinity Blade 2, topped $5 million in revenue in just one month. Of course, it helps that the title is the most stunning game currently available on iPhone and iPad — it’s something that tends to drive up sales on any platform.
Just like every other console on the market the Xbox 360 has an extensive line up of games. Many of these games are found on competing consoles but many of them are also exclusive to the Xbox 360 such as Halo and Gears of War. Both of these titles have managed to sell quite well and help push consoles which makes it no surprise that their respective developers are hard at work on sequels.
While Halo 4 won’t be out until next year, Epic Games has assured us that the highly anticipated Gears of War 3 will be out later this year. However, it seems that the company has run into some problems as it was just made known today that the game has leaked in its entirety. Of course, this is not the final build as the studio has quite some time to work on it before the game is actually supposed to be released.
We’re definitely not condoning pirating a game as not only does it hurt the studio but it ruins the story for you as well. However, it is important to note that things like this continue to happen despite efforts of just about everyone to protect against it.
Epic Games, the creators of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, have revealed that their websites and forums were hacked, and that users emails from their forums have been leaked onto the web (or rather, exposed to the hackers, which usually means they’ve been leaked). Epic says that password were leaked as well, but they were encrypted. As a precaution, Epic has reset all the passwords on the site.
This is yet another incident in the streak of game related website hackings that have taken place over the past few months, were Nintendo, Codemasters, among others, have had security breaches. Then there’s Sony, which had its PlayStation Network servers shut down for over a month when a hacker group attacked their systems.
Epic producer Rod Fergusson has stated in a recent interview that he believes Gears of War has the best cast in all of video games, which is of course a lofty statement, considering all the great casts in video games, from Half Life 2 to Grand Theft Auto 4.
Nevertheless, Fergusson talks about a moment in Gears of War 2 where character Dom’s wife dies, and how that had an effect in the voice acting room with voice actor Carlos Ferro. Fergusson said, “It can definitely get pretty intense, when you’re trying to get those kinds of emotional scenes.”.
True, we can imagine it requires real acting from voice actors to do the tense scenes in video games, but that goes not just for Gears of War but for all video games. Although, we’ll have to admit, the voice actors doing the Locust voices in Gears of War are pretty awesome.
We’ll have to see how the cast and voice acting is in Epic’s latest game, Gears of War 3, which hits the store shelves in September.
Big time developers and publishers are having a tough time competing with the emerging smaller devs that exclusively work on iPhone games. Because when your competitor offers a $0.99 cent game on iPhone that’s of decent quality, it’s a lot harder to sell a game for 60 bucks to the same audience, and gamers are now expecting cheaper and cheaper games, something AAA titles simply cannot offer.
Epic games knows this, as Epic president Mike Capps said in an interview with GamesIndustry. Capps said “How do you sell someone a $60 game that’s really worth it … They’re used to 99 cents.”. It’s not surprising that major developers see the 99 cent market as a huge threat to their business. But both Epic and the big publishers have tried to get into the iPhone market, Epic especially with Infinity Blade and they’re now even offering an Unreal Engine SDK for the platform as well.
On the Xbox 360 one of the hardest hitting exclusives is none other than Epic Games’ Gears of War. Currently, the franchise is on its second iteration as Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360 but its been known for quite some time that Gears of War 3 is quickly approaching. In fact, those who picked up Epic’s Bulletstorm will be getting early access to a beta version of the game with pre-orderers and the like getting access some time after.
Seeing how Gears of War 3 is expected to be a huge launch it’s no surprise that Epic Games is expecting a huge turn out for the beta test. In fact, the studio has just come forth today to let us know that they are expecting an astonishing 1 million beta testers to run Gears of War 3 through its paces before it actually hits the market. In turn this means a better experience for gamers actually purchasing the game come September 28th of this year.
As you’re sure to know, other popular games like Modern Warfare 2 did not feature a beta test and not long after hitting the market some malicious users found exploits that essentially brought the game’s online community to its knees. In other words, Gears of War 3 having a beta test that is expected to reach the scale of 1 million users is definitely a very, very good thing.
Will you be beta testing Gears of War 3?
The Unreal Engine 3 has pretty much become the de facto engine of the current generation PC and console games, powering everything from simple puzzle games, to MMOs, to familiar franchises like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War. Epic has since been working hard on implementing the Unreal Engine 3 and varieties of it on all kinds of devices, from smartphones (Infinity Blade on iOS), to tablets and portable devices.
Epic’s Mark Rein has recently stated that the company wishes to see the Unreal Engine 3 on all platforms — not just PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, but particularly mobile phones and tablets, which are seeing huge growth, particularly in the tablet scene.
Rein said that Epic is focusing quite a lot on Android as well, shipping the Unreal Engine 3 on several devices like the Xperia Play, the Motorola Xoom. Rein said that Android provided a bigger challenge than iPhone, because there are so many phones with different hardware out there, meaning the software has to be tested on each phone.
Rein still didn’t mention anything about the Unreal Engine 3 on the Wii.
Every home video game console currently on the market has their own share of respective exclusives that help push the hardware and please loyal games. Just to name a few, on the Nintendo side of things we have hard hitting franchises like Mario and Zelda, Sony has Killzone, LittleBigPlanet and Uncharted while Microsoft has Halo and Gears of War.
Gears of War from Epic Games, in particular, has managed to impress with just about every release and is currently on its second iteration appropriately dubbed Gears of War 2. However, it’s long been known that Epic Games is currently working on a sequel to the game, also appropriately dubbed Gears of War 3. While we’ve seen things such as game3play videos, screen shots and more, we haven’t known when we’ll be able to get down on the game’s beta.
Lucky for us, Epic Games has just come forth to finally give us some insight saying those who purchased the Bulletstorm Epic Edition will be getting early access starting April 8th while those who pre-ordered Gears of War 3 at GameStop will be getting in on April 25th. For all, the beta will conclude on May 15th with the game actually hitting store shelves on September 20th, 2011.
Want some more info on the beta? Check out the official press release after the break.
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Apple’s iOS mobile platform powers very popular devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. While there is a ton of productive software baked into the platform, everyone knows that the real joy comes out of the massive library of games found within the App Store. Of course, while hardcore gamers may find Angry Birds a bit boring, Infinity Blade from Epic Games may be more up their alley. In fact, this game is regarded as being one of the most graphically advanced games ever released for the iOS platform.
Unfortunately, not all gamers may want to spend $5.99 on a game for their iPhone but Epic has just announced today that it will be dropped down to just $2.99. In addition to the price cut, it’s also been made known that a major update will take place at some point in the near future that will include new enemies, a new dungeon area and competitive multiplayer.
Sounds great, we’ll keep you posted.
