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Special Gaming Section Gears of War 3 W By Karen Moltenbrey hen Epic Games introduced the world to the grizzled war hero Marcus Fenix in 2006's Gears of War, the developer did so using its new multi-platform Unreal En- gine 3 (UE3), developing the game engine alongside the title for the Microsoft Xbox Epic Games culminated the popular to its limit to achieve the game's rich aesthetic. saga with platform. In fact, Gears of War was the first console game to be released that took advantage of all the CG technology that the UE3 had to offer: fully programmable shaders, per-pixel lighting, high-dynamic-range rendering, dynamic shadows, and more. Several years later, it only seems fitting that the developer utilize its latest revision of the same engine to bring Fenix's struggle to its conclusion. But make no mistake about it. UE3 had undergone major updates since its debut, par- ticularly affecting the rendering, the AI, the material system, and the lighting and shad- owing. As a result, Gears of War 3 is by far the most technically advanced title to run on the UE3 to date, due to the continued refinements that squeeze every last bit of power out of the console for a game that looks better than its predecessor, even though the core hardware re- mained the same. To this end, Gears 3 is once again a showcase of sorts for the engine's tech- nology, as well as the artists' creativity. In Gears 3, players resume the fight as Fenix, leader of Delta Squad. The story takes place a year and a half after the fall of the last human city in the previous title, as the war against the Locust rages on, only now a new foe, the Lambent, have emerged and threaten what's left of the human population. As the Lambent invade, Fenix and his followers find refuge on pushing the Epic Unreal Engine 3 the CNV Sovereign, an abandoned aircraft carrier that has been turned into a village of sorts. Upon learning that his father is alive at a secret base called Azura, Fenix and his crew make their way there, where the elder Fenix has created a solution to rid the planet of its invaders, but not without serious consequence to the father, who sacrifices himself to save humankind. "It's a big blockbuster action game with crazy combat and visceral action," says Wyeth John- son, lead artist. "We try to blend that type of gameplay with interesting cinematic events and tell an interesting story in the process. So we use the technology that is available to us in the Unreal Engine 3, to make sure that these experiences are as polished and epic as possible." In particular, the Epic team focused on the lighting quality. They wrote a new global illumina- tion solver, called Unreal Lightmass, which provides high-quality static lighting with next-gen- eration effects, such as soft shadows with accurate penumbrae, diffuse, specular inter-reflection, and color bleeding. Moreover, subsurface scattering and other parameters in the tool help make the characters' skin look more realistic, while enhanced specularity makes metal surfaces look more like metal. "We looked at the game and asked ourselves, How can we use this lighting to make the en- vironments feel more realistic, more grounded? Therefore, we focused most of our effort on February/March 2012 19 Gear Gear s of W ar s of W ar 3,