Thursday 27th October 2005
REIN LASHES THE REVOLUTION CONTROLLER
"The most crappy, cheap, I-wish-I-hadn't-bought-it gimmicks ever". This and more gold inside.
12:03 Epic is famed for knocking id off the top of the fps throne with its Unreal series and it looks like its sown up the next gen too with Unreal Engine 3 technology being snapped up by every publisher and its mum.
The studio is currently working on Unreal Tournament 2007, Unreal 3, Gears of War and the Unreal Engine 4 (even though 3 could be considered fairly newborn), and the ever quotable Mark Rein has gone on record in another forthright round table interview.
Speaking in the Next Gen Panel at the IGN Live conference, Rein aired his views on subjects ranging from how he defines next gen to the PS3 vs 360 and of course, the Nintendo controller. Below are what we think are the highlights.
On what the Next Gen will bring
"When asked by a journalist at the X05 event 'What's the big new thing in your game aside from graphics?', I said 'uh, graphics.'"
"I mean give me a break. Close your eyes and play a game and tell me how much fun that is."
Rein then cited the reason Burnout was a better a game than Pole Position was because of the graphics. You can see his point from one angle - consumers are far more likely to pick up a Burnout than Pole Position from a 'back of the box' screenshot judgement but surely there's more to it than that?
"Everything you can do in the next generation is all revolving around the hub that is the graphics. We think graphics is the key most important thing in next gen"
On the business of developing for Next Gen
"I've heard EA and Activision make totally ridiculous statements that, 'oh it's gonna take 30 million dollars a game and 300 people...' that's just a bunch of bullshit. They're just covering up for their own management incompetence, or mis-management I should say."
"The thing is, our team sizes are only about 50% than in the last generation and we're making some fantastic games. Gears of War right now is only 25 people. That's smaller than most current generation teams."
Quite impressive we're sure you'll agree. We'll give him bonus points for that one.
When asked what the best way to make money on a game was, the outspoken Epic boss replied:
"The way to make more money on a game is to make better games. It doesn't matter if the cost of the game goes up, just make a great game. And this is true for anything in life - if you make the best of anything, it's gonna make you a lot of money."
Tell that Double Fine or Oddworld Inhabitants. Seriously though, that is quite a heart-warming statement, though sadly this philosophy is often abused by some, causing life to be harder for other developers whose games deserve such a philosophical backing for their games. See 3D Realms and the always-in-development Duke Nukem Forever.
Rein on the Revolution
When one of the panellists spoke of how it would revolutionise gaming, Rein snapped:
"Don't kid yourself! You're gonna see more crap, cheap, I-wish-I-hadn't-bought-it gimmick games based around that controller than you can ever possibly imagine. I guarantee you there's gonna be lots of people who say 'the whole reason for this game is the controller' ...and all it will be about is the controller and not great games."
"Nintendo knows it's gonna make great games, but wait. Raise your hands if you own a Gamecube.
"Keep em up if you own either an Xbox of Playstation 3 [he probably meant 2]."
He was shocked when a large part of the auditorium lowered their hands
"Really? All those people who lowered their hands don't own a PlayStation or Xbox? Wait! Raise your hands if you ONLY own a Gamecube and no other game console."
Hardly anyone raised their hand
"Wow! That's not many though. That was less than ten percent. Hard to make a business on less than ten percent."
Rein on controllers in general
When talking about controllers that could better the FPS genre, Mark Rein took out his Xbox 360 joypad and said "There's nothing wrong with this controller. It's great for playing games and FPS games, as evidenced that they've sold more FPSes on console than anybody's ever sold on PCs."
When asked if he could imagine a controller that combines the functionality of a mouse and keyboard, he said "I could, but it's not the Nintendo Revolution controller."
Even Sony's PS3 controller wasn't safe from the wrath of Rein!
"I don't think anyone knows what the PS3 controller looks like, but we're sure as hell praying it's not that stupid thing they showed at E3"
On the Next Gen machine technology in general
When talking about the Revolution, Rein was equally illuminating...
"The machine sounds great from the rumours, but nobody knows anything concrete about it. They haven't announced anything to developers yet!"
Rein then shared that he loves the 360 and thinks Microsoft is making a mistake trying to align itself too tight with the High Definition TVs, as it looks great on normal TVs and people may think they need to own a HD set to appreciate the Next Gen jump.
In regards to the PS3's built in Blu Ray disc and the Blu Ray disc format in general, "it's going to be "somebody's Achilles' heel [referring to either Sony or Microsoft]. Having more disc space is a good thing, but it all depends. Having High Definition movie playback is a good thing. The potential risk of playing a Blu-ray disc is that you're not going to be able to play them on your TVs, meaning everyone has to go out and get those TVs with HCMI, copy protected stuff in them and that's going to be a big mess."
As to whether he thought PS3 was close to 360 in the end, Rein said, "I think the systems have their pros and cons, but ultimately the quality of the games will be roughly similar on the two platforms. The nice thing is that games are scalable, so if we can get more frame rate on one or throw more polys on the other then we will, but for the most part, you'll see the same kind of games, like you see with Xbox and PS2."
Mark Rein. Man. Epic boss. Legend. Is he the West's Itagaki? Possibly. We'll have more Mark Rein gold for you, some point soon. But you can also check out our most recent chats with Rein here and here.
Danny Boutros