Gears of War Realm

As of today, Gears of War for Windows has shipped to retailers. You should be able to find it on store shelves later this week. It’s MSRP is $49.99 and I’m sure a few retailers may be having specials on it in the coming weeks. This now places the game $20 below the price of the Xbox 360 original.

Here’s a portion of the press release from Microsoft that details all the changes in the Windows port of the game.

In addition to retaining all of the content from its Xbox 360 counterpart and all previously released downloadable content (seven multiplayer maps and the Annex game mode), “Gears of War” for Windows will feature exciting original content, all-new Achievements to unlock and ultra-high resolution visuals, including support for DirectX 10. Five new campaign chapters expand upon the riveting story (including an epic battle with the fearsome Brumak), and the action-packed multiplayer offering is bolstered with three exclusive multiplayer maps, a “King of the Hill” game type and Games for Windows – LIVE support to deliver online matchmaking for LIVE members. A new game editor will allow users to develop an unlimited number of user-created levels with complete access to the Unreal® Engine 3 Editor.

Read on for Microsoft’s Official Press Release.
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[H] Enthusiast, a division of [H]ard|OCP put together an expansive article looking at the performance and image quality of Gears of War for the PC. It goes into great detail of the game’s performance across a wide array of hardware and Windows versions. If you want to know what hardware to get for your best chainsawing experience, this is the article to read.

Today we are going to focus on highest-playable settings. We will be testing not only the GeForce 8800 GT, but also the 320/640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS, GeForce 8800 GTX, and Radeon HD 2900 XT in Gears of War. We have set out to find the highest-playable settings in DirectX 10 and then in DirectX 9, compare performance between both and figure out what is the best mode to play this game in. We will provide image quality screenshots afterward to look at how DX9 and DX10 compares and if there are any differences between ATI and NVIDIA hardware.

There is one extra that is coming along with Gears of War for the PC later this month that hasn’t been talked about much. That is the Development Tools that is coming along with it. Gears of War will ship with the latest version of UnrealEd for creating levels and Kismet to script the interaction in the level.

For many people this will be new to them, so Epic put together this great overview of how the tools work. Below you can find an easy streaming Flash video, along with a downloadable Quicktime 720p HD format.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Downloadable Video Formats


(Right Click To Save File To Your Computer)

For those of you looking for someplace to get you started on Unreal Engine development. I would recommend the BeyondUnreal Wiki. There user Solid Snake has also begun to mess around with Unreal Engine 3 work using the Development Kit that came with Roboblitz.