Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hey, you there. Yes, you! Do you have eyes? Do you enjoy looking at things? Well then, your precious peepers might’ve crossed paths with Epic’s Unreal Engine – for instance, in every game ever. Eyes, though, are perhaps the most treacherous of all face real estate tenants. They sight a new object of affection, cause your heart to palpitate and your mouth to transform into a sloppy stew of saliva, and then – five minutes later – it’s all old hat. Fortunately, then, there are always new graphics, as Epic explained…

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Fortnite’s reveal trailer suggested that the game could be borrowing ideas from Minecraft, Fort Zombie and Team Fortress 2, along with many other things. Now that details are beginning to emerge, Epic have admitted that Mojang’s block ‘em up was indeed an inspiration. Lead designer Lee ‘Unscratch’ Perry took time to broadcast the following messages through his personal Tweet-o-Tron: “Minecraft lets you build ANYTHING, we are focusing on constructing ‘buildings’ specifically”. A later tweet contained this: “Minecraft was an inspiration for sure”. With that out in the open, the obvious thing to do was to ensure Notch backed our demand that the game come to PC. A few more details about the game await below.

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So here’s a genuinely interesting twist. Epic’s next game steps away from space marine bombast to be a thing where “you explore, you scavenge, you build and ultimately you survive.” It’s called Fortnite and it sounds like my kind of game, frankly. There’s no word of this formats it is coming out on, so might not be PC, but I think we can assume that it will be, given the clear Minecraftian inspiration. Like Minecraft, enemies come out at night, so players will be spend the daytime scavenging to bolster their defences for the night.

Teaser-y trailer below. Thoughts, Internet?
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Last night saw just the latest sign that civilisation is on a nosedive to hell, as the entire internet lost its mind over the prospect of seeing pictures of a new telephone. Subsumed by that news was far more interesting news for people who prefer their technology in a hot metal box: Epic have gotten their Unreal Engine 3 running in Flash. In theory, this means running the likes of Unreal Tournament 3 in a browser – as is demonstrated below.

WITCHCRAFT.
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We mentioned a while back that Epic were developing a number of new games aside from the Gears franchise, and we couldn’t help hoping against hope that perhaps one of them might be Unreal 3. Not so, says Mike Capps. Talking to businesslication Forbes the Epic bossman said: “Unreal and Unreal Tournament continue to have a huge influence on the studio here, even though we’re not currently working on an Unreal IP project.” It’s not the first time that Capps has mentioned the U-word recently, but it’s the first indication that they’re not actually doing anything with it.

Writing in a blogpost on PC gaming journal Rock, Paper, Shotgun Jim Rossignol said “Aww, that’s a shame. But perhaps they are working on something exciting and new! That would be exciting. And new.”

Eurogamer have a brief and mysterious news story sourced from Mike Capps of Epic Games who was speaking at Gamescom/GDCE today. Epic are apparently working on five new games, none of them Gears Of War related. Could one of them be Samaritan? Probably not, as it sounds like these are small-scale projects. Anyway, here’s the important bit:

“It’s nice to target the PC as a primary platform again,” teased Capps, “not just for ports.”

This kind of thing just scares the hell out of me. While Bulletstorm isn’t exactly the kind of game I’m going to put on a pedestal and hail as the one true future of electronic entertainment, it was a new franchise, a rare shooter that didn’t take itself deathly seriously, a good-looker and a game that at least attempted a few bonus ideas. It did a lot of things right, and it was clearly having a great time in the process. Yet it didn’t turn a profit for devs People Can Fly and Epic.
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Over the weekend, Eurogamer posted a story about how PCs are better than everything else, including new babies and planets with rings. Well, those weren’t quite their words, and nor were they of Mark Rein, VP of Epic, but he said something close. He in fact said that, “We’re at the stage in the life of the consoles where the PC has shot by them in terms of capabilities.”

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Hack hack hack. The crackers of the world are going after the gaming internet like an axe murderer at a Spring Break bikini party. The most recent victims, after Codemasters last week, are Nintendo, and more pertinently for our crowd, Epic.

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Did you like Bulletstorm? Did you enjoy the multiplayer modes? So did I! I can’t imagine anybody’s still playing them, but that’s for Epic and not me to decide. They’ve just released the Gun Sonata DLC pack, offering three new maps for Anarchy, the game’s arena co-op point-scoring mode, and two new maps for Echo, the game’s corridor-shooter point-scoring mode. For this they are charging ten American dollars, which is a number that is a little more than nine dollars, but significantly less than twelve dollars.

I think I need another mug of tea. Press release after the jump.
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I am as outraged as a man who hasn’t yet felt the effects of his morning tea can be. Which is to say I look the same but I’m typing marginally harder.

I spotted over at PC Gamer that Epic have released the Bulletstorm soundtrack for free. Kind of them, no? You can download it here. Except I’ve just discovered the hard way (clicking through every track in sequence) that it features everything except the Disco Inferno cover that plays when you get to the club, which is to say they left out the one track everyone remembers. Epic have dropped the ball right onto our collective face. If you haven’t played Bulletstorm, you can watch the part I’m talking about below.
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