Digital Foundry vs Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

[Administrator]

Just how does one tackle remaking one of the most visually influential games of the last decade? It's a difficult question and one that developer The Coalition - along with partner Splash Damage - seeks to answer with the release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on Xbox One. The original Gears of War had a tremendous impact on the industry as a whole both in terms of the development process and its game design. Visually, as Epic's first outing with Unreal Engine 3, Gears was a landmark release for real-time rendering. Re-envisioning such a game on new hardware is no small task - so just how successful is this latest effort?
It starts with the game's beating heart - the game engine. While Gears of War 4 is in development using Unreal Engine 4, Gears Ultimate instead opts for more familiar ground - the original 2006 source code. From the beginning, the Ultimate Edition was designed to capture the original experience as accurately as possible while updating its presentation for the current generation. More recent versions of Unreal Engine 3, and even UE4, were considered early in development, but the decision to stick with the original codebase was made in order to preserve the original simulation. Re-scripting things such as enemy behavior in a new engine would have changed its core DNA, resulting in something that wasn't quite Gears of War. Despite the huge visual upgrades, authenticity to the original experience is a key component of the Ultimate Edition.
This approach also extends to map design - the original grey box map layouts were kept in the transition but virtually everything else was tossed out. Every asset was compiled and re-authored at a much higher fidelity before being placed back into the game. It's an approach not unlike that of the Halo Anniversary remasters - keeping the original simulation and level structure while improving the overall presentation. Unlike Halo, the requirements necessary to run both the original version of the game and the Ultimate Edition simultaneously were simply too high, making it impossible to toggle between the two versions on the fly.
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