Gears of War 2 is now confirmed by Microsoft as an Xbox 360-exclusive sequel with a worldwide release date on November 7th, 2008.
Ahead of the official Microsoft announcement it was confirmed that the original Gears of War sold 4.5 million copies worldwide.
“Gears 2 is going to be bigger, better and far more badass than the first one, which was just a set up for all the things that we are going to see in Gears of War 2,” promises creator CliffyB after the following Gears of War 2 teaser video that sees the return of Marcus Fenix.
Click on the bottom-right corner arrow to view it fullscreen.
Dr. Michael Capps from Epic Games was present at Microsoft’s Game Developers Conference (GDC 2008) keynote and talked about the latest version of the Unreal Engine through a Gears of War tech demo. To quote: “We’ve been pretty busy since we launched Gears of War” Tim Sweeny from Epic then came on stage to show off what Gears of War would look like if they had launched it today. I suppose they can’t call it Gears of War 2 yet without an official announcement.
You can now do lots more things on-screen. The tech demo showed “over 100” Locust enemies running around a typical Gears of War environment. Improvements were shown in dynamic fluid effects with more realistic water splashes, rolling waves, etc. There’s also more advanced character lighting, ambient occlusion to improve shadow highlights, high density crowds, realistic specular and environment bits, and more realistic sound effects. In regards to physics, Epic displayed Soft Body Physics. He showed a giant cube of meat rolling on screen and manipulated it in crazy ways — looks really organic, basically. And now he’s on to destructible environments — almost anything can be destroyed, shown with exploding wooden fences and concrete, and there’s structural degradation of solid objects. — Liveblogs via Eurogamer, 1UP, IGN & Teamxbox.