Aug 10, 2011

You Can Thank This Man for the Look of Gears of War

Kotaku

Epic Games has a common visual style running through all its games. Gears of War looks like Unreal Tournament which looks like Bulletstorm. If you've ever wondered why that is, well, wonder no more.

It's because of artist James "Hawkprey" Hawkins.

Hawkins is a concept artist employed at Epic who is responsible for that trademark "look" the company's games all share: the big boots, the clunky armour, the rustic weaponry. He's worked on all three of the Gears of War games, as well as the Unreal series and even done a little on Bulletstorm, the rest of that game looking like his work because, well, that's just what Epic games have to look like these days.

This is a great collection of work from all those games and series listed above, with character art and equipment designs ranging from rough sketches to the finished product.

You can see a lot more at Hawkprey's personal site.

To see the larger pics in all their glory, either click the "expand" icon on the gallery screen or right click and "open link in new tab".

Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

You Can Thank This Man for the Look of Gears of War

Jul 22, 2011

Bulletstorm Didn't Make Money, But it Was Worth It

Kotaku

Mike Capps, president of Gears of War development studio, doesn't regret Bulletstorm. That game got a lot of hype—and some extraordinarily odd press coverage—when it was released earlier this year. It was an odd first-person shooter that was vulgar in tone and creative in execution, rewarding players for, well, being creative in how they executed kills in the game—more points, for example, if you shotgunned a guy into a giant space cactus.

I played it, enjoyed it, and tell people it's one of my 2011 favorites so far.

But Bulletstorm could hardly crack 300,000 units in its first month, according to a financial analyst. Someone from its publisher EA recently told me the game "under-performed." And Capps told me yesterday that it "didn't make money for us."

A game to regret, though? No way.

Capps is keynoting Game Developers Conference Europe next ~~week~~ month, where he will deliver a talk on the topic of making high-quality games. Epic may be defined by some people as the Gears of War studio and by others as the profitable mechanics behind the widely-used Unreal graphics engine. But they've also turned out to be a studio that keeps making highly-regarded games, including the critically-acclaimed Infinity Blade, which is considered one of the best iOS games out there, and Bulletstorm which did very well with critics.

Capps' talk is called "Size Doesn't Matter: How Epic Brings AAA Attitude to Every Game, from Gears of War 3 to Infinity Blade." The idea, he told me, is to dispel myths people may have that Epic's games are high-quality due to infinite budgets or unlimited development times, neither of which the studio actually enjoys. He wants to emphasize that even back during Epic's Unreal Tournament days, the company did some of its best work thanks to an internal drive to keep polishing and experimenting. Headshots, a;t fire, triple kills—some of the signature elements of the first UT that other studios then riffed on—he said, were only added in the game's final six months.

These days, Epic is trying hard to make top games on a variety of machines, games that are certainly good ads for Epic's Unreal Engine on the various platforms on which it runs, but also just very good games. Some are hits. Some are not. Would it have been nice to make money on Bulletstorm? Sure. Capps says they could have taken the easy route all along, not done Bulletstorm and gotten People Can Fly, the Epic-owned Polish development studio on that game to just churn out Gears of War content. That's not what he wants those folks doing. That's not what he wants Epic doing.

"The studio has shipped AAA content," he said. "The next thing we do with People Can Fly will be great."

I hope Capps will use some of his talk to discuss why Bulletstorm didn't thrive, a topic we didn't have time to go into during our brief chat. I wonder if it was too short, too new in a crowd of shooter games or too lacking in addictive online gaming—it was the rare first-person shooter with no competitive multiplayer—but who knows. If only all the games that studios were proud of could be hits.

Capps' keynote will help kick off GDC Europe in Cologne, which runs August 15-17.

Jul 13, 2011

Exclusive—Flying Wild Hog announces cyberpunk FPS Hard Reset

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

We like being the first to tell you about a game. It's rare, though, that we announce something that's a mere two months away. Flying Wild Hog, a new studio, is releasing its debut game this September. It's called Hard Reset, and it's a PC-exclusive "dark sci-fi" FPS. Roughly, it's Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Painkiller rolled into a single-player-only flour tortilla.

Like some kind of Polish, game-developing Voltron, Flying Wild Hog was formed from members of People Can Fly (Painkiller), CD Projekt RED (The Witcher 2), and City Interactive (Sniper: Ghost Warrior). Read on for more details, the first trailer, and first screenshots.

Pre-emptively asked questions:

What's the engine?
Proprietary, impressively enough. It's called "Road Hog." And because a built-from-scratch engine is a serious investment, we'll probably see more games on it from the developer.

What's the plot?
Hostile robot takeover. Only one human city remains--the bastion of Bezoar. It's here that Major Fletcher, your character (the guy with the laser eye patch), takes to arms against the robot hordes.

When, and how much?
September 2011. Pricing isn't announced, though we'd suspect it'll fall somewhere between AAA releases like Battlefield 3 and lighter-weight "downloadable" FPSes.

Do they have a website, Facebook, and Twitter thing I can click on?
Yup, yes, and indeed.

I think this announcement was just pick-me-up we needed to brighten up the moody weather that's circling San Francisco. We'll have a hands-on preview of Hard Reset in our next issue, and an exclusive Q&A with Flying Wild Hog later this week. Full press release, including plot details, follow:

Flying Wild Hog Announces Hard Reset, a Dark Sci-Fi Shooter for PC
Polish Studio Comprised of Painkiller, Bulletstorm and Witcher 2 Vets Announces its Atmospheric and Action-Packed Cyberpunk Debut

Warsaw, Poland – July 13. Flying Wild Hog announced its debut game, the dark sci-fi first-person shooter, Hard Reset. The PC-exclusive title transports players to a haunting, dystopian future, with humanity on the verge of extinction, confined to its last standing city and under constant threat from the robotic hordes that aim to annihilate mankind. Hard Reset is scheduled for release in September 2011.

In the only remaining human city of Bezoar, Major Fletcher, an Army Combat Veteran and soldier of the CLN, is dragged into a conflict between two of mankind's greatest enemies. He is to discover that nothing is what it seems to be.

Hard Reset may be Flying Wild Hog’s debut title, but the 35-person studio is comprised of veterans of Warsaw’s bustling development scene, with past experience at such renowned developers as People Can Fly, CD Projekt RED and City Interactive, where they worked on acclaimed games like Bulletstorm, Painkiller, The Witcher 2, Sniper and more. Hard Reset is built upon the studio’s own Road Hog technology, which delivers stunning visuals that bring the game’s incredible atmosphere to life.

Given the game’s rapidly approaching release date, expect much more information and footage of Hard Reset in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, visit http://hardresetgame.com and follow the game’s progress on Twitter and Facebook.

May 20, 2011

Bang: Bulletstorm Gun Sonata DLC Released

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Quintin Smith)

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.
(more…)

May 2, 2011

Bulletstorm Updated

Product Update - Valve

• Allows matchmaking for users purchasing downloadable Anarchy maps (Gun Sonata DLC Pack)
• Fix for experience gains bar sometimes overlapping its UI space after matches during XP Multiplier Events
• Fix for the Team version of the Double Penetration skillshot not appearing when used against Challenge enemies in some cases
• Fix for the MOTD sometimes scrolling too fast after game launch
• Anarchy Environmental Skillshot points are now accurate in the Multiplayer Skillshot Database
• A player's Quick Match lobby will now properly recover to display "Searching" if the other players in the lobby leave during the map vote tally
• Fix for extra points appearing in HUD during the Collapsed Building Echo (was causing it to appear as if the player "lost" points when falling through the doors in that Echo)
• Fixed an instance of a crash while the game is reloading checkpoint after player death
• Players can now exit the game from the title screen by using the ESCAPE key
• Fix for certain resolutions lowering performance (FPS)
• Fixes to enforce 2-way muting rules that were not being respected under different circumstances

Apr 15, 2011

Everything You Need To See In The Gears of War 3 Beta

Kotaku

Kill your enemy. Chainsaw a dude in half. Unlock stuff. Level up.

The new Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta on Xbox 360, a sneak preview of the Gears game coming out on the Xbox 360 on September 20, combines the cover-based shooting of old Gears games with that fever for unlocking new medals, weapons and ranks that's been catching in competitive shooter after competitive shooter since Call of Duty IV. It's an attractive mix, if you can enjoy the Gears gore. This game's for the inner brute within each of us. (It's better if your inner brute has an eye for beauty — the beta is lovely to look at!)

Some of us here at Kotaku are in the beta already, so we've captured footage and are taking you on a video tour of the beta's three game modes, a few of its maps and all of its unlocks. Take a look.

More folks can join the beta on April 18 if they own the Epic Edition of Bulletstorm or on April 25 if they pre-ordered Gears 3. The beta will end on May15.

Unless I'm missing something, one key difference between what's been added to Gears' multiplayer and what's been in the Call of Duty games is that the unlocks in Gears 3 appear to all be cosmetic. (More Halo than CoD, I suppose.) They won't give veterans improved abilities.

Most of the unlocks earned in the beta won't carry over to the final game, but these will, according to the game's official forum:

Exclusive Beta Unlockables
Flaming Hammerburst — Complete one match by Sunday, April 24 to permanently unlock.
Flaming Lancer — Complete one match during the week of April 25 to permanently unlock.
Flaming Sawed-Off Shotgun — Complete one match during the week of May 2 to permanently unlock.
Flaming Gnasher Shotgun — Complete one match during the week of May 9 to permanently unlock.
Beta Tester Medal — Wear it proudly, Gear. Complete one match in the Beta to permanently unlock.
Thrashball Cole — Unlock Thrashball Cole to play as Augustus Cole as he was before Emergence Day — a legendary Thrashball athlete known for his ferocious, flamboyant style. Complete 50 matches in any game type to unlock for the Beta period. To permanently unlock, complete 10 matches as Thrashball Cole during the Beta period.
Gold-Plated Retro Lancer — Before the chainsaw bayonet was deployed at the beginning of the Locust-Human War, the original Lancer assault rifle had a large fixed blade. Complete 90 matches in any game type to unlock for the Beta period. To permanently unlock, score 100 kills with the Gold-Plated Retro Lancer during the Beta period.

Enjoy the beta, but be advised: there are some very skilled, very deadly players in this beta already. I played team deathmatch at a time when only 55 players in the whole world were accessing the beta (very exclusive of me, I know, I know) and I was getting obliterated. At least I was only being trounced by human players and not by the computer-controlled fill-in buddies. There's hope for me yet. I hope you do well, too. Chainsaw the other guy, okay?