New screens for Gears of War

[Edge]

A few new screenshots of the environments and what looks like a new enemy from Gears of War can be found here: http://www.jeuxvideo.fr/gears-of-war-s-illustre-a-nouveau-actu-30900.html

Looks pretty nice, you can spot a few rough edges, but overall they're quite impressive.


http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=15595&stc=1&d=1137097949

[Banko]

Why is the grass just a texture? For some reason it made the whole thing just look bad to me :(

[toxikneedle]

i wanna play it :*(

[nutcrackr]

What is up with the lighting on that monster thing, like why is there light underneath his weapon and why does nothing around him look lit up like that? The ground reminds me of HL2.

[Mr. Hunt]

Looks good visually, but the gameplay looks terrible to me... reminds me of Brute Force which sucked nuts.

[Nutty]

I dont like the way they construct levels. They dont build geometry properly.

The archway picture.
http://img.jeuxvideo.fr/photo/00217170.jpg
It doesn't join to the wall properly, you get really nasty seams where designers have slaped stuff over the top of an existing wall, instead of building the contours properly.

My flat-mate is a 3d modeller and has been evaluating the Unreal3 engine and he hates the way geometry is put together with it.

[Marvel_us]

I see what you're talking about.

Meh, I still will probably buy an xbox360 for this game.

[LiquidX]

I dont like the way they construct levels. They dont build geometry properly.

The archway picture.
http://img.jeuxvideo.fr/photo/00217170.jpg
It doesn't join to the wall properly, you get really nasty seams where designers have slaped stuff over the top of an existing wall, instead of building the contours properly.

My flat-mate is a 3d modeller and has been evaluating the Unreal3 engine and he hates the way geometry is put together with it.

But isn't this because a game like this, which is based on the Unreal engine is built like legos so you can just slap parts of maps together? Making it easier for that same arch to be used over and over again? I would think this allows for easy modding and making mulitplayer maps.

[Lil Sassy]

Jimmeny Christmas! :drooling:

[toxikneedle]

I read on another forum that these are very very old and Epic are planning on releasing real new media soon.

[Nutty]

But isn't this because a game like this, which is based on the Unreal engine is built like legos so you can just slap parts of maps together? Making it easier for that same arch to be used over and over again? I would think this allows for easy modding and making mulitplayer maps.

Probably, but for such an amazing looking engine, I think it spoils it somewhat.

[brady]

I dont like the way they construct levels. They dont build geometry properly.

It doesn't join to the wall properly, you get really nasty seams where designers have slaped stuff over the top of an existing wall, instead of building the contours properly.

My flat-mate is a 3d modeller and has been evaluating the Unreal3 engine and he hates the way geometry is put together with it.

I don't even care. :D

[Mr. Hunt]

I just have to add...

It is sad when PS2 games do grass better than this game :\.

[Edge]

Looks good visually, but the gameplay looks terrible to me... reminds me of Brute Force which sucked nuts.

Looks more like Resident Evil 4 to me, especially the way that you move around with the camera pulled back and then it zooms into a behind-the-shoulder view when you aim. Brute Force was just a 3rd person shooter with first person controls, it was more similar to something like Max Payne except you had a squad.

I just have to add...

It is sad when PS2 games do grass better than this game :\.

I've never seen a PS2 game with better looking grass than those outdoor shots. At worst, I'd say it's about equal to the grass in Metal Gear Solid 3. But grass in general tends to suck in games, it's either a flat texture or a cardboard-cutout polygon with an alpha texture slapped on it. Even Far Cry had quite a few flaws when it came to grass (it did taller foliage pretty well, though). It'll be a while before games actually have somewhat convincing grass in them.

[LiquidX]

It appears all those shots have been pulled from IGN, TXB etc. because they were leaked and from a early build of the game so I would not be over critical of those pics.

[Mr. Hunt]

I've never seen a PS2 game with better looking grass than those outdoor shots. At worst, I'd say it's about equal to the grass in Metal Gear Solid 3. But grass in general tends to suck in games, it's either a flat texture or a cardboard-cutout polygon with an alpha texture slapped on it. Even Far Cry had quite a few flaws when it came to grass (it did taller foliage pretty well, though). It'll be a while before games actually have somewhat convincing grass in them.

I was talking about MGS3 ;). MGS3 had actual 3d grass that moved with the wind and when something interacted with it, this looks like a texture :\.

[oneils]

I dont like the way they construct levels. They dont build geometry properly.

The archway picture.
http://img.jeuxvideo.fr/photo/00217170.jpg
It doesn't join to the wall properly, you get really nasty seams where designers have slaped stuff over the top of an existing wall, instead of building the contours properly.

My flat-mate is a 3d modeller and has been evaluating the Unreal3 engine and he hates the way geometry is put together with it.

I don't know my ass from my elbow...so don't be too harsh with me...but I think what the designers are trying to do is build a setting that has an invading species taking over another species' cities?? Does that make sense? It looks like what we have is say an earth like architecture being swallowed by something alien. Hope I'm making sense. So this could explain why some of the geometry is weird looking...as in certain elements clash.

[toxikneedle]

Here's what Mark Rein said about those screens:

First the demo baloney....

There is no chance a demo level of Gears is hitting the Xbox Live Marketplace this month, next month or the month after that. We love the Xbox Live Marketplace and Xbox Live Arcade and have lots of cool ideas how we can leverage them but not until the game is finished and we don't realistically know when that will be at this point in time. I can tell you however that the game is incredible and there will be lots of cool stuff in it that you didn't expect to see. Sorry for the tease.

Now, about those screenshots. Those are NOT new screen shots. In fact they're quite old and some aren't Gears at all. Here's what I wrote about them in a different thread on this forum...

These are very old images, mostly from our internal PR Kick-off meeting with Microsoft back in December 2004. They were never intended for release and they don't come anywhere close to representing what the game looks like today. In fact some of those images don't represent the game AT ALL! The grassy field images are from our GDC 2004 Unreal Engine 3 demo and NOT from Gears! That is TWO YEAR OLD engine demo content we showed to Microsoft PR people to give them an early flavor of what the tech could do. As you can probably guess we're pretty unhappy that these crappy images have surfaced. Unfortunately this isn't the first time our publisher has released content not intended for release and it feels like a punch in the gut every time it happens.

[oneils]

Lol, so I don't know my ass from my elbow!

:p

[Edge]

Hmm, well I guess that's not a very good representation of how the grass actually looks in the game, then. Guess that makes sense, it did kinda seem like those scenes were just slapped together in a short amount of time (I didn't think the flaws were big enough to mention, however).

[EvilEye]

All of us who have played Kameo knows that the 360 doesn't have problems rendering realistic grass ;) So, yes, it looks like these shots comes from an early build.

[brady]

All of us who have played Kameo knows that the 360 doesn't have problems rendering realistic grass ;)

And lots of it! Amen to that.

[Badboy_12345]

As you can probably guess we're pretty unhappy that these crappy images have surfaced.

if those screens are crappy then imagine how the game looks now :cool:

[superklye]

Does anyone else get this feeling that the game just isn't going to look anywhere near as good as these screens when it finally hits? I want to believe, I love Epic and all, but those just seem TOO good to be true. :-\

[Edge]

Does anyone else get this feeling that the game just isn't going to look anywhere near as good as these screens when it finally hits? I want to believe, I love Epic and all, but those just seem TOO good to be true. :-\

Eh, I'm not really worried. They did show the game up, running, and playable almost half a year ago on final Xbox 360 hardware, and it looked just as good as those screens. It ran a bit choppy, but they say they were only running on 1 core at the time and were already working on making the game multithreaded to run on multiple cores, not to mention all the standard optimisations they'll be making to the engine and specifically to the console. If anything, they'll probably try to improve the graphic quality as much as they can, if just so that they can show off how powerful UE3 is to everyone (it's served as their benchmark for the engine since it was first shown, afterall).