Epic: There will be no Gears of War 2 for PC

by Randy Nelson { Aug 29th 2008 at 8:30PM }

Sometimes it's just best to get to the point ... even if that point is really sharp and will pierce the hearts of PC gamers. In an interview with IGN, Epic's Cliff "Don't Call Me CliffyB" Bleszinski, designer of Gears of War 2, revealed that, unlike the original game, the sequel won't appear on PC.

"Gears of War is a great franchise first and foremost for Xbox 360, and therefore we're focusing on that platform for Gears of War 2," ~~CliffyB~~ Bleszinski said, adding, "We've decided we're not going to do a PC version this time around." Point made. Now to stop the bleeding ...

[Via Shacknews]

Tags: cliff-bleszinski, epic, gears-of-war-2, microsoft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Alexander @ Aug 29th 2008 8:33PM

I guess Epic hates money.

Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Aug 29th 2008 8:44PM

Yeah because I'm sure people buy pc games in droves.

Phillip @ Aug 29th 2008 8:49PM

Why, yes. When they don't have stupid amounts of DRM, some of us do in fact. Thank you for pointing that out.

syrik zero @ Aug 29th 2008 8:50PM

They probably don't want half the world to download and play a pirated version

WhoMe @ Aug 29th 2008 8:53PM

Watch them swallow their words a year, maybe a year and a half from now. You heard it here first.

Watership @ Aug 29th 2008 8:54PM

If only PC games outside of Blizzard and Valve made money.

Sheppy (of the Fidlious Clan of Wong) @ Aug 29th 2008 9:05PM

Actually, Epic was upset at the backlash their console to PC port received.

1. Gears of War on PC was a buggy mess that crashed many a system beyond the recommended specs. The launch was marred by that.

2. Gears of War was part of the Games for Windows initiative... which means it wasn't even hyped and was destined to fail just so Microsoft can push more gamers onto 360.

3. It was the Windows Live test bed... which insulted PC gaming as a whole.

4. Hey, you got your console game on my PC. Gears of War wasn't designed with the PC market in mind. It was designed with Teh Haloz and GuildenAye players in mind. PC gamers ARE PC gamers. They aren't going to shit themselves in excitement because they get a console game a year later.

CubeGuy @ Aug 29th 2008 9:23PM

@Sheppy

"GuildenAye"? Seriously? Go die.

=C

Neebs @ Aug 29th 2008 9:43PM

When in doubt, insult the person, eh Cubeguy?

Phillip @ Aug 30th 2008 1:28AM

@Sheppy

Amazingly put.

Haggard @ Aug 30th 2008 3:17PM

@Vegeta

PC version of Gears sold 1 million. When you consider that they'd pretty much already developed the game, that's a lot of profit.

You know why this is the case? Because Microsoft's current strategy, despite making Games For Windows, is that they want to make PC gamers buy a 360. The problem is that we're not going to, and by forcing fucked up marketing strategies such as this one, it's only hurting the customer.

CubeGuy @ Aug 31st 2008 1:45AM

@Neebs

You do not mention Goldeneye in the same sentence as Halo.

tmacairjordan87 @ Aug 29th 2008 8:35PM

After how badly done the port for 1 was on pc I'm betting that collective silence I'm hearing belongs to the millions of people not caring

PojoMofo @ Aug 29th 2008 8:37PM

You are correct sir!

Slayer @ Aug 29th 2008 8:45PM

What was wrong with the ported version?

anonim1979 @ Aug 29th 2008 8:50PM

It wasn't THAT bad - if you had 2+GB of RAM and midrange graphics card (and considering how CHEAP value RAM is - playing on PC with less than 2GB is moronic) it worked nicely.

Anyway "People Can Fly" - PC developer (Painkiller 1 devs) was assimilated (Borg style) by Epic - port of 2nd would have to be done by somebody else - it might be much much worse ;)

Kael @ Aug 29th 2008 8:54PM

What makes you say the port was badly done? From my experience, when it wasn't equal to the 360 version, it was superior. I understand sales may have been unfortunately low for a number of reasons, but I don't think shoddy porting was one of them.

Einhanderkiller @ Aug 29th 2008 8:57PM

It wasn't a bad port, it was just that nobody cared about Gears of War.

Vcize @ Aug 30th 2008 1:40AM

Actually it was just that no one cared about Games For Windows Live, which was required to play it.

Since no one wanted GFW Live, there was no online community, which kind of hurts a game that's biggest hook is the multiplayer.

wicko @ Aug 30th 2008 3:39AM

The port was bad because even with high end systems, you get terribly framerate drops for no real reason, especially later in the game, where the framerate would literally drop to 1 during CUTSCENES. I think it was streaming textures and the game was waiting for the harddrive, and therefore a delay every time the drive was accessed.

GFW was annoying as well, but it was ignorable.

Vanillacide @ Aug 30th 2008 9:28AM

Once you turned off the streaming texturing in the INI file there was no more stuttering.

I have a pretty serious gaming rig, and Gear Of War runs at 2560x1600 with everything turned on max at very high frame-rates; so it looks far superior to the Xbox 360 version.

Plus you can choose keyboard&mouse or 360 controller as control mechanism, or switch between them at will.

The only sucky part was Games For Windows, they should've released it on Steam instead -- would've been perfect then.

wicko @ Aug 30th 2008 10:37PM

Not for me it didn't. I tried every config tweak I could possibly think of, even looked at UT2004 cvars to see if there could be anything thats just not listed in the gears config files, but still nothing worked.

I have a good rig, 8800GT, 4GB of ram, E6550 @ 2.33, was even running RAID 0 with 3 drives, under XP and vista I had the same issues.

To be honest, it really didn't look any better. It looked like they used the same textures from the 360 version (meant for 720p res, not 1680x1050 like my monitor), I was pretty unimpressed. It was a lackluster port, especially considering how much later after the 360 version it was released.

syrik zero @ Aug 29th 2008 8:37PM

I was upset that the added a battle to the end of the PC version. People that buy stuff early always get shafted by the man...

AK @ Aug 29th 2008 8:45PM

Damn The Man!

Ihavepants @ Aug 29th 2008 9:02PM

Don't worry, the extra content for PC was far below the quality of the rest of the game. It was a chore to play through.

syrik zero @ Aug 29th 2008 9:09PM

Even if that is true, (from what I'm reading right now, it was) I still want to kill that giant

arrrgh @ Aug 30th 2008 10:48AM

you'll get plenty of that in november dont worry

Aeskel @ Aug 29th 2008 8:40PM

WOW WTF!

seriously -_-

TheMan726 @ Aug 29th 2008 9:20PM

DAMN YOU AK

Phantom @ Aug 29th 2008 8:42PM

You hear that , that's the sound of me still not buying a 360 .

I guess the only reason I didn't get one was because I could just get most games on PC anyways . So with my PS3 and high- end PC , I'm set to go .

AK @ Aug 29th 2008 8:46PM

You hear that?
That's the sound of me, not caring.

Phantom @ Aug 29th 2008 8:47PM

Well, I didn't like gears anyway , I prefer RPG's (DS) , RTS (PC) , and other various games like platforers , RPGs , MGS4 , and LBP (PS3)

syrik zero @ Aug 29th 2008 8:55PM

I like how you threw games in with game types. Haha

AK @ Aug 29th 2008 9:25PM

That's nice, but I still don't care.

How can you prefer a game (little big planet) that isn't even out yet?

arrrgh @ Aug 30th 2008 2:13PM

fangirls get like that.

ps3 fangirls seem to be getting antsy in their panties these days

Sinister Rouge @ Sep 3rd 2008 4:41PM

"with my PS3 and high- end PC , I'm set to go"

Now there's a frugal gaming rig.

Snowblind @ Aug 29th 2008 8:43PM

Gears did badly on the PC and when they did the port, it annoyed a lot of the 360 fans. They'd be pretty stupid to mess around with their fanbase like that again.

Noshino @ Aug 29th 2008 10:38PM

their fanbase? I could have sworn that the crowd that had been keeping them afloat were the PC gamers...I guess I was wrong

Not an Epic fan, but they have been pissing over the PC crowd for a while, not only was Gears not as good, but I heard some people complain about UT3 claiming that its interface is more aimed towards console playing...

Snowblind @ Aug 30th 2008 5:04AM

Well, I personally wasn't much of a Gears fan, but I did buy the original, and was then rather annoyed when they announced a superior PC port a few months later, with exclusive content. They pretty much abandoned the 360 fans that made Gears so popular.

Like I said, I wasn't a big enough fan myself to really care, but I can understand why a lot of the Xbox fans felt a little betrayed.

Noshino @ Aug 30th 2008 9:40AM

you didn't read what I said...

Their initial fanbase of years has been the PC gamers, when they announced their next project, Gears of War, and said that it would be release for the 360, it crushed many of their fans.

Some time later they announced they would be releasing the superior edition for PC, it was a mediocre port...

Then they announced UT3 would be multiplatform, one of those really acclaimed PC franchises, guess what? everything was more focused arodn console playing.

And now they are announcing that Gears 2 will be 360 only

Seriously, 360 fans act like if they were betrayed, but that isn't true, their PC fans have been betrayed by Epic for a while.

ph15h @ Aug 29th 2008 8:46PM

=/ Maybe that's for the better. I remember buying the PC version of the original and although with new editions to the game, many new glitches showed up and the game just felt sluggish, nothing like what I remembered when I owned a 360. Better to have a good experience on one console than a glitchy version that was ported to the PC that wouldn't get much support.

mezzanine @ Aug 29th 2008 8:46PM

Then there shall be no Gears of War 2 PC purchases. Brilliant.

Heh {XBL: P4nic 4tt4ck} @ Aug 29th 2008 8:51PM

There wasn't going to be any even if the game did ship for PC.

:D

Phillip @ Aug 29th 2008 8:51PM

Your deduction skills are impeccable. Excellent work!

Dirty @ Aug 29th 2008 8:50PM

Im guessing that they didnt make much on the first one. Financial incentive should be the first indicator of any decision.

Also its a lot easier to control the end experience with a console with set hardware parameters than with a pc. Im guessing that this is where people had most of the problems.