The Coalition can’t fork a UE engine. It is not supposed to be fork-able as it is not open source like the Lumberyard engine of Amazon. But what they can do is — have additional augmented processing and development pipelines alongside to help with their vision and development. This is what Colin Penty mentioned in his presentation earlier in the year.
We did not see the impact so much this year, but the UE5 release has been almost 1.5 years after the release of the consoles. That lag time will be looked at closely by first party studios. Not so much by the rest of the industry, but only by first party studios.
Consider, how fast idTech has been able to utilize some of the modern graphics architectures or features in their code already, whereas UE has their own concepts which will still need some bridging effort with the Series consoles. Epic’s engineers are quite capable of doing the bridging-code, but that is still something to consider.
For instance, how does Nanite translate to using the latest Mesh Rendering architectures underneath, or do they have their own custom implementation that side-steps the hardware features.
I don’t know if it’s off-topic, as it is still discussing engine use for the Gears series. I feel ‘off topic’ is too anally interpreted on this forum at times; conversations do and should flow organically and will tend to return to the core point if left alone.
But I will say this and then move on from HI side-tangent:
It is hard to know as there aren’t many examples of what they are doing here – first person open world at 60fps with a high resolution target and real time lighting, long unbroken vistas etc. That’s a lot of difficult things to pull off at once, and comparing the end resulting graphical fidelity with that of more linear games with baked lighting – especially games targeting 30fps – is definitely not fair.
But still, I look at the XSX hardware and what has been pulled off with Horizon 5, Flight Sim, Doom Eternal’s next gen patch, the next gen upgrade to Gears 5, even Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to an extent – even with the various differences – and I can’t help thinking that the engine is holding them back.
It does make me think: what about if, rather than taking years out to develop Slipspace, they had simply pivoted to Unreal 4? Or what if they had taken that time to get trained up on Forzatech and used that instead? We can never really know, but I suspect the end results would be better.
To draw it back to Gears, it’s a related issue. You have a team with a great deal of expertise and experience in Unreal. Could creating a new engine, or perhaps pivoting to another MS engine like idtech or Forzatech bring rewards? Possibly. Could it also set the series back? It also could. I do think SlipSpace has done this for Halo.
I love Gears, its been my favourite MP shooter since 06 and they usually come packed with content but…
there’s no denying the fatigue is setting in, the single player has barely changed since 06, outside of movement refinements and the pointless open world, the games play almost identical and they’ve been pumping games out every couple of years for 15 years, its not surprising people want something fresh
Give Gears 6 a 4 year dev cycle and let them truly innovate the franchise and take risks
I agree with this
Going linear/horror makes far more sense for Gears than the whole open world thing
The Blam engine was holding them back. 2001 code duct-taped and rehashed every few years.
Yes
Based on what? Cragi? Heh. That is a damning judgement based off Craig. And I don’t think so. It is always easy for the popular press to criticize the engine because they don’t know whether it is lack of artist effort or engine deficiency that is causing an issue. I suspect that they shipped it early before the artists implemented the correct and complete versions of Craig. There were reports that 343i devs themselves were not ready to show it.
I’m disappointed that Gears 4 did nearly the same thing that the Star Wars reboots did - i.e. briefly introduce a new status quo, then pull the rug out and return to the same basic setup as the original series. Oh the locust are back but marginally different this time, ok that’s nice I guess. They did it for similar reasons too, i.e. a new creative team wanting to prove they could do a safe entry that pulls from the greatest hits album. As a franchise I feel like Gears cuts itself off at the knees by doing this. But whatever, that ship has sailed.
By all means do Gears 6 and finish off whatever, but I don’t think the series needs to continue constant development afterwards, it can take a break for a while. There doesn’t appear to have been commercial success of a scale that would justify continuing to scale up even bigger than Gears 5. Continuing to play into modern design trends (everything is open world, everything is RPGs) might allow them to build on what Gears 5 started doing and turn that into a more successful game, but I don’t really know if that’s Gears anymore.
I already said in the post above. Based on other games on the same hardware and what they seem able to achieve in comparison.
The Blam engine was holding them back, but that doesn’t mean that Slipspace has solved all their problems. Slipspace is really just an evolution of the same engine. It’s on record that a lot of the same code is still there.
I don’t think I’m damning in my take on Halo Infinite. I think it looks fine, perfectly acceptable, and a hell of a lot better than it did in 2020. I just don’t think it is particularly impressive.
EDIT: but ironically after my last post saying it wasn’t off-topic to make analogies using other games, this is definitely veered off topic now.
Talking from a personal point of view, I’ve always been a Gears ever since Epic and Microsoft first unveiled the game. I loved the look of Marcus Fenix, the monsters (especially the Berserker) and of course the amazing graphics. Gears 1 lived up to the huge hype I had for it, at the time there weren’t a lot of games with that type of third person gameplay so it felt fresh and new to me.
I did a run through of the Gears games when they all became BC and a lot of them still held up. But I did notice that by Gears 3 I was starting to feel a bit jaded by the core gameplay and I think that’s one of the problems I have with the current Gears games as it’s a feeling that’s carried on with Gears 4 and 5. I kinda understand their reasoning but I can’t help but feel maybe they should have really pushed things forward with Gears 4. A new cast of characters, new setting somewhat and new enemies - their chance to say “This is what Gears of War is now!”. But instead it just played it a bit too safe. Not a bad game by any means but not one to really get people excited about the series again.
As far as the future goes, in terms of building Gears up again they probably need to really shake up the core gameplay/combat scenarios a bit. I said in the XGS that for a lapsed Gears fan that looks at Gears 5, they’re gonna come away with the impression that “oh…looks okay I guess but it just looks like Gears 1 or 2”. The Coalition somehow need to do something to the gameplay to make people think “hey did you see the new Gears they showed at E3? That shit looked amazing!”.
Personally I don’t like any of the current cast of characters. The original trilogy characters were probably a product of their time and didn’t have much depth but fans seemed to resonate a lot more with them. Obviously they’re not going to drop this lot now but I’d actually love a game featuring old man Fenix as the protagonist. It gets mentioned a lot but I’d actually been interested in seeing a maybe more grounded/ horror themed Gears. Maybe give the players encounters where they actually feel a bit more vulnerable when being faced with the Locust/Swarm.
Whatever the Coalition come up with I’m sure it’ll be a good looking game. It would be awesome if Gears could come back with the same level of hype that FH5 or even Halo Infinite has got. Get the widespread acclaim and praise that the series used to. It’s a shame but if it wasn’t for this forum it would have completely slipped my mind that it was Gears 15 year anniversary, it kinda felt like even Microsoft didn’t make that much of a noise about it.
And it is not just you saying this - a lot of articles out there, have made a judgement very similar to yours. And I believe that is not the case. Being impressive is still up to the art dept., not necessarily the engine only.
Has Slipspace solved all the issues is a question we will see eventually, but the point is that they can correct it with the path of least resistance, as they know their code inside out – as opposed to using either UE or Blam, for instance.
Consider a simple scenario - physics code for instance, nrXic was mentioning that he found it slighltly different to Halo 2 and 3, and the way 343i go about changing it is by easily recoding/retooling the physics engine becasuse it is THEIR code.
That is the point. The turnaround and the maximum usage of the feature set can be done only by owning the code.
Well not without further configuration which studios have managed themselves (Arkham Knight, Days Gone, FF7R?) And UE5 is finally addressing that and will be more open-world ready. And listen, I secretly wish it doesn’t become good at open world so that devs don’t have to shove open world into every game but that’s me lol
Gamepass isnt an all blocking shield. This doesnt address anything other than putting the game into millions of people that will promptly ignore it if its “just another entry”.
But Gears doesnt have 1/4 of the popularity Halo does and Idk what 6 years of dev time is gonna do unless they radically change directios. The only reason Infinite took this long was an engine overhaul, Covid and bad management.
Also Halo Infinite is a literal reboot in the middle of a trilogy something Gears 6 wont be doing.
But Gears 5 was a great game and I dont see it reaching the Milestones of X, Y and Z million of players reached that xbox loves to tout so what gives? Just putting a game on game pass isnt enough to like void some first party endeavor of criticism. Just look at Bleeding Edge being outright bad or Gears Tactics (another seemingly good game) where only 7% of GP have beaten it.
Gears 5 did actually sell pretty well. And % completing the game is a not a good metric when it’s on Game Pass. % of people who pay for a game and don’t complete it might tell you something insightful. % of people who download a game at no additional cost, play for five minutes then move onto something else is not.
For my money, Gears 5 was a good game. A technical masterpiece, enjoyable and fun, but didn’t do enough to hit ‘great’. It was promising that they started to experiment with some new ideas that, if followed through on, could lead six to be great.
I still think Gears should really take Horde Mode and its PVE aspect and push it more than they do the traditional Gears PVP. I think the potential for growth and more appeal in the series lies there.
something Gears 6 wont be doing.
