Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The purpose of Unreal 4′s increasingly elaborate vignette story trailers eludes me, since they are basically devoid of any game context, and might as well be rendered or something. However, I can’t deny that the latest – a leak spotted by the Big K – is an extraordinary sight. Go take a look, below.
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Jim, John and Nathan are all out at GDC for RPS right now, but the lack of any news from them so far leads me to presume they are all either dead, kidnapped, hungover, hiding or trapped inside a branch of The Cheesecake Factory. So, while I’ve not been out there to see and thus usefully report on any of the following myself, I can at least once again do what is approximately 19% of my daily job, and resize video embed code to fit on our website.

This time it’s looks at what we can expect from Crytek’s Cryengine 3 and Epic’s Unreal don’t-call-it-4 Engine 4. I think you’ll all agree that Golfzon (above) is what we most want from the game engines of tomorrow. And if you don’t, some of the other stuff in there might well be more to your tastes.
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D’awww! My cockles are forever warmed by communities keeping olden games alive, and so it is that an email declaring the latest release of a fan-made, Epic-permitted patch of the original Unreal brought about my first smile of this dingy day. OldUnreal’s Patch 227 has been kicking around in various forms since 2008, but yesterday brought the first update to it in over a year.
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This year’s Make Something Unreal Live is a competition “open to teams of six to 10 members consisting of current full-time university students.” The grand prize of full Unreal engine licences tasks entrants with making something from scratch using the Unreal engine, with the theme of “Our Mendelian inheritance: genetics and genomics.” The full brief is here. The reason for this theme is that the competition is now backed by The Wellcome Trust, the charitable foundation which promotes scientific ambition in the UK and around the world. Wellcome’s Dr. Daniel Glaser said of the alliance with Epic: “The Wellcome Trust is committed to using games and gaming culture as a means of engaging people with science, working to network the talent and knowledge of scientists and developers and offering a range of funding schemes.”

Science and games, together again: that’s an inter-disciplinary fist-bump, right there.

This headline feels like it’s dropped in from from 2007. Back then Epic put a pile of money under a giant washing basket. Then Mark Rein waited with a length of string tied to a stick and hoped for a developer to wander underneath. Painkiller devs People Can Fly did, enticed by the money and banquet that Rein had seeded his trap with. But when the trap came tumbling down, PCF left a leg sticking out, so all Epic got was a bit of the company. As of today, Epic Games have trapped that missing leg and now fully own the Bulletstorm developers. They’ve bought the final chunk of the company from founder, Adrian Chmielarz.
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Update: Epic’s issued a statement clarifying its meaning, noting that – while nothing’s off the table – it hasn’t entered serious talks about how it’ll implement online play at this point. Here’s the official word, in full: “We’re not talking about our plans at this time, mainly because that plan doesn’t exist yet. Fortnite is an iterative, living project and many things are still being decided prior to its release in 2013.”  

Original article: Let’s start with some good news, shall we? First off, Fortnite’s looking quite nice and – based on an interview I just wrapped with producer Tanya Jessen (which you’ll see all of tomorrow) – the Unreal-Engine-4-powered survivor is, by and large, taking full advantage of every tool at PC gaming’s disposal. In other words, expect a constant flow of new content, some form of mod support, and impressively open-ended, procedurally generated worlds. It’s not all uncharacteristically colorful cartoon roses, however. At this stage, Jessen told me, a constant Internet connection requirement ala Diablo is still a possibility. She assured, however, that it’d be used first and foremost to improve the game – not as a last line of defense against piracy’s nighttime pillages.

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After a long, harrowing journey in which he was forced to duct tape an assault rifle and chainsaw together to escape the vacuous innards of a consolebox, Cliff “Don’t Call Me CliffyB” Bleszinski (and, I suppose, Epic’s legion of insanely talented guys and gals) is back on PC. So then, what does the formidable devourer of puppies have in store for us this time? Well, in short, Fortnite‘s an Unreal-Engine-4-powered exclusive that, er, sounds a whole lot like Minecraft.

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With the Western gaming industry, or at least the traditional boxed product aspect of it, currently in the doldrums (just ask Max Payne) many eyes have turned Eastwards. Huge audiences, huge development manpower, increasingly huge piles of cash, both real and potential. China especially is slowly moving into (and being moved into for) games, despite having a mainland ban of sorts on consoles, and the next major herald of its intentions comes in the news that Chinese giant Tencent has bought a “minority interest” in Jazz Jackrabbit developer, Epic.
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You know what to expect, I should imagine: a camera pans across a world of raw graphics. Look, there they are, all over the place. It’s the showcase that Wired got a demo of the other week, with a big old demon being all fiery and stuff. And now you get to see it, too.
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The collapse of 38 Studios and Big Huge Games, after the commercial failure of Kingdoms Of Amalur, left a lot of game developers completely out of work. Which is not a good situation to be in. But all is not lost, thanks to the need for Epic to expand. In a letter written by Mike Capps, the company explains that they need lots of talent, and consequently they’re jumping right in with both feet and hiring a bunch of Big Huge Games folk: “The way we see it, there’s been a big storm in Baltimore, and we’re taking in a few of the refugees — as are the awesome folks at Zynga East, Zenimax Online, and other southeastern studios. Epic’s in a situation where we can do this, and it very clearly fits with our company values, so we’re going to give it a whirl.”

So that’s a new Epic studio in Baltimore, working on something owned by Epic, starting, well, right now.