Science in the Triangle

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When Triangle-based Epic Games makes announcements, they apparently don’t pull any punches.

Epic President Mike Capps took the stage after an introduction from Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Apple’s Sept. 1 press conference to announce Epic’s first foray into mobile gaming — Project Sword.

The currently codenamed title doesn’t come out until this holiday season, but Epic already released a free technology demonstration through the iTunes store called Epic Citadel. The demo allows users to walk through an environment rendered with the company’s Unreal Engine. And it’s this component, not the “all-new action role-playing adventure game” itself, that has already turned some heads in the gaming world.

Epic has plenty of experience with next-generation video game hits. It sold almost 12 million units in its Gears of War series worldwide, and its Unreal Engine powers critically acclaimed best sellers like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect 2.

But there’s a big difference between creating amazing graphics on a mobile device and a console intended to run high-performance games. The Xbox 360, for example, has a CPU three times more powerful than that of the iPad.

Nonetheless, the tech demo wowed some critiques so far.

Jerry Holkins, co-creator of Penny Arcade webcomic and the PAX gaming convention, raved about the graphics power.

“We’ve run it on everything it will run on here at the office, and it is very nearly horrifying in its fidelity and expressive power, from the iPhone 3G up.”

John Funk, at the Durham-based Escapist Magazine, said he “certainly never thought I’d see graphics like that on a mobile game.”

In an interview with the gaming blog Gamasutra, Capps points out one big benefit with the iPhone and iPad devices is memory. And that can help when rendering complex lighting and textures.

“You’ve got 16 gigs of flash memory, which is way better, faster memory than what most people have generally on a home PC. So that stuff works really well. It’s the big environments that get really complicated on the rendering tools for iPhone. But yeah, we’ve got some tricks for it.”

The tech demo looks pretty sharp, but as with any title, the true value will involve gameplay as much as the art.

What do you think of Epic Citadel? Does it represent any advances for mobile gaming?