The next update for Epic's hugely successful Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War fans will be out "Definitely within a couple of months," Mark Rein has revealed.

Speaking to Team Xbox, he added the developer wants "to have as regular a stream of new stuff coming for the title" as possible.

Rein reaffirmed that "there'll be a fun little surprise in the next update," although wouldn't spill further beans. "I don't want to say specifically what we're going to have," he said.

And will the next Gears update be a free download? Epic would "love to have everything be free," Rein explained, although "There's a lot of pressure on us, having the leading game on the platform, to be part of the downloadable economy... there's external pressure on us to participate in that."

During the interview, the Epic boss also described a PC version of GoW as being "inevitable," but said technology is a key hurdle to overcome.

"The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console... to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That's a challenge.

"UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it's helping us get optimization on the PC. So it's just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it's worth selling... or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?

"It's inevitable, but it's just not there today."

February 14, 2007