Gears of War 3 Preview

Gears of War 3 is a big deal. The Gears series is one of the hottest properties in gaming and it's exclusive to Microsoft. Cliff Bleszinski's stage demo at Microsoft's E3 conference impressed everyone, and we caught up with him to talk about how Epic approached development of the sequel, the improvements to the game engine, and Nintendo's return to the hardcore.

Cliff Bleszinski: I assume you guys got to see the Microsoft press conference?

Yeah I was there.

CB: Yeah, we figured stage demos weren't risky enough. It was probably a good idea to add four-player co-op just to tempt fate a little bit. It actually went off without a hitch, which blew my mind. So that was cool.

Q: Gears of War 1 was quite an intimate experience. Gears 2 spread it out a bit. Now Gears 3 has four-player co-op, will the combat be more spread out or will it still be intimate and visceral?

CB: Well to be fair one of the things we probably messed up with a little bit with Gears 2 was that the game was a little bit too linear. If you were to look at the top down views of the maps in Gears 2 there's a lot of these snake-like corridors. Whereas the best parts of Gears 1 maybe had some scenarios like that, but it opened up into a bowl, it got narrow again, and then it went to another bowl. That's something we want to get back to in Gears 3. We think it limited what we were able to do with Gears 2. Maybe there weren't as many flanking opportunities. The combat distances wound up moving along down these tunnels. So especially with four-player co-op those bowls make a lot more sense. So it's essentially an arena. You go in and okay, I tell you what, I'm going to go on to the top of that hill over there, I'm going to snipe. You guys go round the right and get the grenades. He's going to go round the back and try to get the boomshot and we're all going to take out the enemies that way - and those great strategies come out. Whereas when the level is too linear you really can't do that. It's a good question.

Also, regards to intimacy, keeping the combat distances snug, keeping it in your face. We're not a sniper game. Some sniping sections are fun. But we have cool moves, like "bag tag", where you can knock somebody down, take them as a hostage, stick a grenade to their head and kick them into a crowd, which is always fun. And then we have the Pendulum-era Lancer you can see behind me that Anya has, where you have the charge, just run towards somebody, and now you can chainsaw and kick somebody away. Clearly if you're going to chainsaw an explosive enemy you don't want to have them explode on you. You kick them into other enemies. So we're adding more intimate combat moves to ratchet it up a bit.

Q: My impression of Gears is that it's always been a bombastic game, the kind you'd equate to a summer blockbuster movie. Is that something you're ramping up with Gears 3, or is there an opportunity for perhaps more subtle dynamics rather than just the bigger, better and more bad-ass thing you spoke about with Gears 2?

CB: Well, I'm not going to sit here and say this is the bigger, better whatever. That was very played out by the time Gears 2 shipped. To bring it full circle, one way I like to explain Gears 3 is that it's going to be the best-looking, most enjoyable, most feature rich, but most importantly the most polished Gears game we've ever shipped. The beauty of shipping in April is we can sit there and polish it until it shines. But that said, in regards to storytelling and things like that, one of the things we're doing this time around is having a narrative past in the maps. By narrative I don't mean cinematics. I mean, come into a room and a designer has deliberately placed a guy in the corner with a shotgun in his mouth who's dead. And you're like, what happened here? Or you have propaganda posters on the wall that explain things. We have a char level that we debuted in the Ashes to Ashes trailer, where you see a mother huddling a child that just got destroyed by the Hammer of Dawn. Basic passive narrative elements where the player absorbs the story because it's more effective, it's cheaper and it's just something gamers can seek out story wise instead of having it forced upon them. That's one example of us being a little more soft-handed as opposed to beating people over the head with the chainsaw anvil.

Q: Were there any particular games that you looked at that do a great job of that kind of thing?

CB: BioShock.

Q: In the period between Gears 2 and the development of Gears 3?

CB: It was largely BioShock and BioShock 2. BioShock 2, you know I was very sceptical about it but I thought it was a very solid follow-up to the first game. Those were the two big ones that did it recently. You know the other game that surprised me with regards to the way they dealt with narrative was Heavy Rain. Every ounce of my being wanted to dislike that game as a gamer. I was like, it's just Dragon's Lair. And then I saw the trailers and I'm like, I'm not going to play that. But I played the demo and everybody at work was like no play it, play it, play it. And then, like, two days later I'm like burning through it, like this is amazing. I think it's the birth of a new genre. I think it's great.

Q: Has your experience with Heavy Rain impacted on Gears of War at all?

CB: Not really. You won't really see us do the amazing branching narrative you get in that game, which is the core of what they're doing. But that said, we're more confident in our abilities as storytellers than ever, and we're taking narrative risks here and there. Each character has great personal moments to them. Cole has his moments. Marcus' dad has suddenly contacted when he thought he was dead, things like that. But we also have parts where in the campaign you suddenly - after the first act player one is Cole and player two is Baird. You're entirely new characters. You actually have two plot lines that overlap Pulp Fiction style and ultimately merge in one great cool point. So we're able to take these kind of risks now that keep it interesting instead of just Marcus' perspective.

Q: You mentioned Gears 3 will be the most polished Gears game yet. Is that a response to people moaning about the Gears 2 glitches?

CB: Well, the first thing is the internet hates a vacuum. You look at the iPad, and people were dismissing it initially because like, well my iPhone has a bad battery life so I'm going to wait and see. It's like no, that thing lasts for ten hours easy and it's great. But you still have to fight that much harder against that perception. We're not perfect. We make our mistakes. We have made them in the past, but we just continue to support our games. If you look at Gears 2, the matchmaking upon ship was not the best. It was very very slow and clunky. We've continued to refine that over the course of the game. Six title updates later, which just came out a few weeks ago, helped put Gears 2 back in the top ten of Xbox LIVE. It's one thing to release your game. You can't have abandonware, especially in a world where there are rental games and used games everywhere. So we're continuing to support our products and continuing to refine our online experiences. It's the same thing with Gears 3.