Samaritan Might Become Full Game After Gears of War 3 Launch

Epic Games impressed a lot of video game industry watchers and fans with the newly launched Samaritan technology demo, which shows the new graphical abilities of the Unreal Engine 3 technology, but one leading executive says that this does not mean that Samaritan will automatically become the company's next hit.

Mark Rein, who is the president of Epic Games, has talked to 1UP about the newly unveiled Samaritan tech demo and whether it could become a full game, saying, “I’m not going to deny that that’s possible, but at the same time, if we hadn’t had built that technology demo, then we wouldn’t have been able to build Gears of War.”

He added, “It’s like, once we build a technology demo and learn how to do things a certain way, it then enables us to do more of that. So I don’t want to deny that such a scenario is possible, but it’s not currently.”

So it seems that Samaritan is just a small concept that the Epic Games team used to illustrate the abilities of their updated game engine but that, after work on other games is done, the concept might be picked up for further development.

Samaritan was created using a newest version of the Unreal Engine 3 technology, which the company will license in the near future to other developers that are creating video games, and Rein says that it might be some time before the company starts working on Unreal Engine 4.

Mark Rein seemed to suggest that a new numbered version of the company's game engine will only be delivered when console manufacturers like Microsoft and Sony will offer information and test units for their next-generation gaming consoles.

Neither of the two companies has talked about the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox 720, insisting that they will be working with the current generation for a full ten-year cycle.