Here’s Cliffy B being a nincompoop about Gears of War 2, the PC and piracy:
The PC right now is a fair amount different to what it was back in the day, with all the badly integrated video chips. Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.
But when the dust has settled, is there any possibility of Gears 2 on PC?
No.
He’s right, you know – no-one ever buys a PC with a videocard already in it. PC Gamers are all highly-monied tech-savants, each and every single one of them constantly installing new hardware and innately understanding what RAR files are, how to mount ISOs and how to open ports on their router. Also, upgrading a videocard is technical accomplishment up there with programming Big Blue, and nothing at all like removing three screws and plugging something into a slot. And making a high-budget FPS that scales down to lower-end graphics cards is an absolute impossibility. God! Angry.
Thanks to the many people who mailed about this – took us a while to get around to it cos we were all knee-deep in long-form pieces.
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Gears 2 on PC announced 2 weeks after 360 release guaranteed!
basically just now they make most of their money from releasing a 360 exclusive but after they’ve sold all the copies on the 360 and the pc port is ext to free they’d be daft not to get the 100,000 guaranteed pc sales even despite all the supposed piracy.
and i know this is obvious but what he says about piracy on the pc is actually more relevant to piracy on the 360 as you don’t need any tech sav whatsoever to pirate games on the pc whereas the kind of people who play the ‘hardcore’ games on the 360 are almost guaranteed to be smart young and ruthless enough to flash there drive and get all there games for free.
Personally, I bought GoW on the PC for 1 reason only.
To have a relaxed, story driven multiplayer experience with one of my mates.
I have never played it on my own.
It’s fantastic. I will never forget a section where my partner in crime and I were on one side of a dark (and instant bat related death) corridor with a small path round the side leading to a hell of a lot of enemies.
I sat there and kept their attention, my colleague zipped off round the side and when they all turned to the new flanking threat I popped most of them with the sniper rifle.
Forget Gears if you’re going to play it alone with Retard McSpacker Pants (otherwise known as AI) controlling your sidekick.
Play it with a friend and voice comms and make the most of it.
Gief GoW2 PC :(
=/ Sorry Alec, Won’t happen again!
Flip that flippin cliffy b in the bottom with a lead-pipe. grasshole. gears is a big pile of willy. I’m flipping sick of listening to that whiny, good for nothing vagina. he can go flip himself for all I care.
I always love those piracy ads.
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR
No, I wouldn’t. I can see their thinking on that. However, if I could COPY a car, hell I don’t think I’d have to be clandestine about it. My friends would probably let me copy theirs. I’d certainly let them copy mine.
YOU WOULDNT STEAL A HANDBAG
Ehm… that would be a bit fruity.
DOWNLOADING MOVIES IS STEALING
No, not really. Neither is copying DVDs, the legality of the whole situation is really all up in the air. Even governments can’t agree with each other on what the law should be. We ban people from the internet. We don’t. we let people back up their own DVDs. No we don’t do that. Well we want to turn a blind eye to the whole thing and just tax everyone for downloading everything, then give the tax away to the record companies. Oh canada – you so crazy!
The best thing about the piracy ad is that it comes on DVDs, and is unskippable. Thus, the ad itself, is a reason to download movies instead of renting them.
PIRACY FUNDS TERRORISM
This is insulting. as if al-queda are sitting in a cave copying movies and selling them. On the other hand…
NON-PIRACY FUNDS MARTIN LAWRENCE MOVIES
YOU WOULDNT PAY SOMEONE TO MAKE BIG MOMMAS HOUSE 2
DONT RENT DVDS
Porting Gears 2 to PC is easy, because the tech is all multi-platform.
The reason Gears 1 sucked was all the GFWL integration. They should put it on Steam instead.
Pick one of the two above. Gears on 360 is so tightly entwined with Live that we’ve had to suffer downtime before each game for upgrades to the service. Reworking all that to use something else would be a seriously large amount of work.
mashakos says:
Gears Of War PC was by no means a bad port. It was ported by the developers of Painkiller guys, they did it right.
The problem with the port was the PC gamer, who approached it as a PC title. I had trouble with the style till I realized that this the game wasn’t a regular FPS where aiming was important.
———————————————————————-
Which is exactly the point. See Valve and how they fine-tune their games.
You think something like that would happen to them? I think not.
And that’s the kind of quality problem Epic seems to have.
“The problem with the port was the PC gamer, who approached it as a PC title”
Is this some kind of high-level sarcasm that goes right over out PC heads? Or just a euphenism for “set your expectations low and you’ll be happy”?
Personally, I approached it as a game.
P.
The fact is that it’s not an FPS, and not one geared around accurate aiming. Almost every PC gamer I can see here seemed to expect something grand like Crysis or HL2, simply because it was renowned on 360. Like trying to fit a square in a round hole.
I hated Gears. Really, really hated it. With so many people raving about the thing I gruellingly slogged my way through the whole first two levels (and dear LORD do they go on once you’re past the intial one) over the course of a couple of hours.
But I don’t think it’s a question of LOWERING expectations, but looking for a different type of game than the one you got. Your standard PC FPS asks primarily for accuracy skills. Gears, between being aimed at dual-sticks and going for an over-the-shoulder third-person view, decided it was going to concentrate on the more tactical aspects of being in the right place and using cover, and as long as you’re pointing roughly in the right direction that’s fine.
Except that by doing so, they walked right into the firing line of Rainbow 6 and GRAW, where Ubisoft very effectively used a seperate development path to ensure the PC release was a ‘proper’ PC game that demanded both skills.
True, and generally your post got it spot on. It’s halfway between mindless shooter and tactical action, where GRAW and RSV tuned the shooter part down a bit. Whilst also making sure their game appealed to PC gamers, where Epic just left it the same as what the consolefolk wanted/expected.
@Whoever it was.
Helmet-Guy isn’t coming back. That’s the uniform for generic footsoldiers.
Also, I shall forever have a soft spot in my heart for the hilariously macho (even for Gears) Cole.
“AW, YEAH BABY! THIS IS MY KINDA !”
Good riddance, Cliffski-B!
There’s yet another side to it. I was introduced to the downloading of cracks thing because:
1) i wanted to play BF 2 without having to insert a CD all the time, so i was told to mount an image. (2 clicks as opposed to opening my cupboard, opening a cd case, opening my cd drive, and then waiting 90(!!!!) seconds for the cd check to finish and vice versa when im done playing)
2) I wanted to play Clear Sky AT ALL but it insisted i did not have the proper cd in the drive.
I bought both of them. I do not condone piracy and i don’t really need to financially, but had my life not been made this hard, i would never have discovered how easy it actually is to pirate stuff.
For all this “Well, Gears was less sophisticated than a normal PC game” line of thought, aren’t the 10 most popular PC titles The Sims and World of Warcraft?
The thread reeks somewhat of “she didn’t dump me, I dumped her. And I never liked her anyway!”
As iainl said, it’s not “Gears was less sophisticated” it’s “Gears was a totally different kind of game”. I.e. Not your typical PC FPS.
Cliffy, as someone stated before, just blames shit sales on piracy. I got Gears on 360 second hand from Gamestop. It’s a piece of shit. Seriously. I’ve been playing games for way more than 20 years, and there’s nothing new or special about Gears of War. Take a super linear game without any inovation and polish it forever and you get Gears. Reason PC gamers don’t buy it is either because they already have it on 360, or because they are above the age of 18. It’s a game made for people who were too young to play FPS’es from the beginning.
Seen all this crap before. Nothing new in this series.
Go back to making Pinball games, epic. Those were actually pretty good for their time. In the FPS market, you are oooold neeeews.
Didn’t Gears on the PC come out at about the same time as Call of Duty 4, Half Life EP2 and Crysis?
Who knows, maybe it didn’t do that well on the PC because PC gamers had other, much better, games to play with. Anbd yes I thought Gears was rubbish.
and while we’re on a bout of epic bashing, did anyone else think the last unreal tournament game was nothing but a more polished version of the same old (admittedly fun) game?
How about sinking some of that dosh into something a little more intelligent? Replace those CHAINsaws with BRAINsaws man…
GOW had two colours: Shit brown and gunmetal grey. The two most boring colours in existence. Compare that to Serious Sam 2.