Saturday, July 28, 2007

Gears of War PC Content NOT Coming to Xbox 360


Saw over at ActionTrip that IGN PC has posted up a Q&A with Epic Games about Gears of War (PC), and apparently the exclusive content is not coming to the Xbox 360.

You can read the Q&A here, but basically the gist of it is that the PC version of the game uses an enhanced version of the Unreal Engine 3, and it's not really technically compatible with the Xbox 360 version.

They also go on to detail that the exclusive Single Player content takes place during Act V, and begins with Delta Squad in the APC fleeing from the Brumak and ultimately taking the beast down to get to what we've already experienced as the beginning of Act V. It'll also explain the train and how the lightmass bomb got on there, which was basically the only major plot whole in the Gears of War narrative.

Now, call me crazy, but this basically smacks of BS to me. Why? For Single Player content at least, they could port it to the older version of the engine, it's just that at present they don't want to take the time to do so. Also, the whole Brumak battle and extra content they mention was obviously supposed to be included in the Xbox 360 version to begin with since it properly fleshes out a plot whole in the story, so either Epic created it and waited to release it as cash-grab content for the PC version, or they couldn't get everything done in time for Emergence Day and for whatever reason chose this content to cut.

Whatever the reasons, if Epic wanted to, they could port this to the Xbox 360, and since doing so would be a nice cash grab (and also wouldn't require new Achievements since it's part of Act V), it wouldn't surprise me if we still see it in a year. Remember, for the longest time Epic was also denying the existence of a PC version of the game...

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