Epic

In my post How Epic broke Gears of War 2 multiplayer, I was quite vocal about the disappointing state of the multiplayer game compared to the polished and undeniably awesome campaign - and many of you agreed.

Thankfully, help is on the way with Title Update 3 (that’s Patch 3 for those of you who don’t speak Microsoft) which is in final testing and should be certified and released within four weeks.

Some interesting fixes and additions are as follows:

- Country preference added

- Players who quit will be replaced by bots

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Given how close to perfect the final patch for Gears of War made the multiplayer game, many of us were expecting an even better experience for Gears of War 2. How wrong we were. A few weeks from release and we’re already one patch in to Gears of War 2, and while it made matchmaking a lot faster in most cases, Epic still has a long way to go to make this game the unforgettable beast it could be.

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Epic Games president Mike Capps cares not for the massive audience of Wii owners salivating for a decent game not based on Nintendo IP, he cares only about technology. “We go forward, not back. It makes more sense for us to invest in the next-generation tech,” he said in a recent IGN interview.

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Midway and Epic today announced that the king of twitch shooters, Unreal Tournament 3 will be shipping this Summer. The Xbox 360 version features two new characters, five new maps and split-screen multiplayer.

Midway has finally announced a European release date for the PS3 port of Unreal Tournament 3 - February 22, 2008. The game has already sold over 1.2 million copies, and we suspect it’ll move a few more once it hits the PAL territories. No word on an Australian release date.

The PC version of the highly-anticipated Unreal Tournament 3 has been given a release date for North America. The game is set to hit shelves on November 19th, and while it has not been officially announced, is expected in Europe on the 23rd.

Sadly no dates have been eluded to for either the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360. Things are sounding good for the console versions though, with Epic’s Mark Rein saying this about the PS3 build:

“I was playing the PS3 build for a few hours tonight and it is really, really fantastic, […] It’s amazingly smooth and solid. I think you PS3 users are in for a huge treat with UT3.”

via MCV

As we near the PC release of Gears of War, it’s a shock to hear that the multiplayer mode was very nearly scrapped from the initial Xbox 360 version. President of Epic Games, Mike Capps revealed the fact at this year’s Leipzig Games Convention:

“I was going to cut multiplayer from Gears because I thought it wasn’t coming together fast enough, right, […] The day before E3 I’m like ‘no guys, it’s not pulling together.’ And they made it, they pulled it together, and then we won every award.”

It boggles the mind to think that the ridiculously popular Xbox Live modes nearly missed the cut, and proves an important point - your boss isn’t always right.

The PC version of Gears of War will hit stores on November 6.

via Gaming Today

After reports Epic Games were so under-staffed they were unable to offer support to licensees of the Unreal Engine, one would think Mark Rein would’ve been a bit more careful about his excuse for the lack of a PlayStation 3 demo for Unreal Tournament III.

What we told Microsoft last year - they wanted a demo for Gears of War and we said ‘you’ve got a choice - you can have the demo this year or the game this year’… We’re not a big huge company with the resources to do that, and all the time we’re testing that demo we’re not testing our full game, which we need to be doing constantly… We’ll have a PC demo for UT, [but] I don’t think we’ll have a PS3 demo before the game ships.

via Kotaku