Gears of War 3 Interview

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.

Q: What was the mood of the team when the Gears of War 3 advertisement went live on Xbox LIVE on the Thursday before your Jimmy Fallon appearance and the official Gears 3 reveal on the Monday?

CB: Shit happens, man. Murphy’s Law, there’s always going to be something that goes wrong. It doesn’t mean we still didn’t get the great impact with the Fallon thing. Originally we were supposed to go on Fallon on the Thursday and it had to get rescheduled to Monday. I was like, damn it! Then I’m like, wait a minute, we’re stuck in New York for the weekend. Sweet! That was a silver-lining there. Go to museums, go to restaurants and have fun. So you know, you got to roll with the punches, man. You can’t get too hung up on things or it’ll wind up driving you to an early grave.

Q: Do you see more of these mainstream announcements on the likes of Jimmy Fallon rather than the usual press release or E3 announcement?

CB: Once Microsoft was talking about the whole Fallon thing I was at first nervous and excited. I was like, sweet! This is going to be cool. But then I was like, you know this is really brilliant, because if we are going to have a Microsoft press conference and then, oh and that’s all for today, and then the lights lower and suddenly I burst out with a double chainsaw or something, and everybody’s eyes – you could hear everybody’s eyes collectively roll in their head – that would be totally stupid. So I was like, you know, this is a cool way to get news. It’s a cool way to announce the game. It’s a cool way to spread the word to a more mainstream audience. I hope we do more of it.

Q: The end of Gears of War 2 came in for a lot of criticism from gamers for being too easy. How has that affected how you’ve approached Gears 3?

CB: Well boss battles are a complicated, difficult thing. They’re a game development sink hole. You can spend six man months on one 15 minute encounter as opposed to putting that into 15 new creatures you can put into a new mode like Beast. But, yeah, to be fair, the end of Gears 2, the final boss battle really wasn’t a boss battle as much as it was almost like a just pull the trigger moment. What we were going for was that final Call of Duty moment where you have the gun and you shoot the guy type of thing. In hindsight, gamers want a big f***ing monster to slay and they want to spend 15 to 20 minutes doing it. Hopefully that’s something we’ll deliver in Gears 3.

Q: Watching the demo you played during Microsoft’s press conference, it seems a lot more colourful this time around. Is that a reaction to feedback from players saying Gears is brown and grey?

CB: I go back and forth on that to be honest with you. The defensive side of me is like, well, hey, you know what Zack Snyder, you suck! 300 sucked! And you’re like, what are you talking about? That’s the style of the movie. Or The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coen brothers used black and white light – who do you think you are? Man I saw The Road and I didn’t like it because it was desaturated, and you’re like, what the f*** are you talking about? But at the same time you spend hundreds of hours in these worlds. When Gears first came out, it largely, not to sound too cocky about it but in many ways it defined the look of the games in this genre, in regards to the desaturated look, which maybe now is getting a little played out, and gamers are having a little bit of fatigue on it. So bit by bit, we bleed a little bit in Gears 2, we let a little bit of colour bleed through. In Gears 3 with the updated global illumination we’ll have a little bit more colour come through. That’s not to say we’re anywhere near Uncharted, their rich greens and their super lush colours they have with their blues or waters and whatnot. We’re still Gears, but we’ve drifted a little bit more colour in there and I think gamers like it, so we’ve hit a nice medium point.

Q: You’ve said Gears 3 marks the end of the Gears trilogy, which seems very popular in the industry at the moment. When that third game comes out and is very popular, it becomes apparent that it’s not the end of the series. When you say this is the end of the current Gears trilogy, does it mean we won’t see any more games with Marcus Fenix, like post-Halo 3 games haven’t had The Master Chief?

CB: I think sometimes you get to the point where the universe is bigger than the heroes. The lore is large enough that you can tell multiple stories in it, as we have in the comic books, as we have in the books. But that said, when all is said and done you’ll look at Gears 1 to 3 and see it as its own bucket of storyline, kind of like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Will there be a sequel or a Hobbit or something like that? Who knows? But there’s potential for other characters in this world. There’s potential for other things in the universe to happen. It just remains to be seen, right?

Q: Who from the Gears cast has the most potential for their own game?

CB: I think it would be great to make a game like Lemmings with all the Carmine family.

Q: For a second there I thought you were going to be serious!

CB: You never know.

Q: When you started the first Gears did you know it was going to be a trilogy? Did you have intentions of making it a trilogy?

CB: God bless them, someone at Microsoft made a comment about that, which continues to get attributed to me. You will never piss off gamers more than debuting a new IP – if I came out and was like, well here we are at the EA press conference and we have a game called Bulletstorm and it’s the epic start of a trilogy, everybody would be like, f*** you. Let’s wait and see how well this first game does before we get all excited about that. Gamers are defensive. They have a right to be. That said, we make the first game and we’re like, well, if this goes well we might be able to make a trilogy. We’ll see. Then we do a sequel and, yes, okay we can do a third one. But we never want to make that assumption because gamers will just get back at you and not buy your games.

Q: Is it hard to do a story for that though? If you’re only planning for one game, and it eventually turns into a trilogy, you have to have an overall story.

CB: You deliberately seed a game. In Gears 1 we had imulsion and we had those little dark wretches and we were like, okay we’ll put that in. If we can do a sequel we have a lot of ideas where that could go. I’m sure the guys at Lost were a master of this. They were like, right, throw all these story elements in and we have an idea about what to give you but we’re not going to share it with you, we’re going to have a new season! So, ultimately what started as an offshoot, a mutation of imulsion, is turning into the full fledged lambent enemy in Gears 3. It’s one of those things we seeded. We were like, okay, plant that seed, if we have time it’ll actually grow and turns out to be something big. It’s kind of ironic that I said grow considering it’s a thing that mutates and turns bigger. But yeah, you plan and you hope and you seed and you adjust as necessary.

Q: The original Gears of War set the tone for the Xbox 360 pushing technology. Now Xbox 360 has Kinect. Are you looking to bring Kinect functionality to Gears 3?

CB: I have to be careful with my verbiage here because there’s an example I always want to use but if I use it I’ll get in trouble. You have to be careful with those kinds of controls because if we’re in a situation where Microsoft’s like, we have this new stuff! You should stick it in your game. We’re just like, all right… look I chainsaw you now [moves arm in a cutting motion]. Gamers can smell that a million miles away, and it wouldn’t sell. It feels tacked on, as opposed to doing something from the ground up. So you won’t see Kinect support in Gears 3 any time soon. But that said the technology intrigues me. I’m much more of a fan of motion controls that have no controller than any that don’t. My coffee table currently looks like a MadCatz graveyard, and I would like to have less controllers right now. But the thing that excites me most of all is a hybrid. I think the best Wii games are the ones that use the Nunchuck and some very cool waggle controls, like the upcoming Zelda, or Mario Galaxy 1 and 2. Those are the ones I want to see. You’re going to see more hardcore developers building games that are a good hybrid approach that do it intelligently as opposed to, yeah, okay, fine, we have it. Look, that works.

You could easily do a game where… okay, here’s a free one [grabs a 360 controller]. It’s a hack and slash Bethesda-type game and you’re playing as a guy who has a sword and all these abilities but you have magic spells – kind of like an old Peter Molyneux game where you drew out your spells. You pace the game properly and then you’re like, oh okay, I’m going to draw a pentagram and that summons a demon. And then you go back and who knows? Maybe the next generation of consoles will have that built in and this [the 360 controller] will have less buttons and then you supplement it with voice also. And then you command your troops. So maybe you’re a guy with a sword and he has magic abilities and you tell your guys, go forth and destroy my enemies and drive them before me and hear the lamentations of their women, and they do. It’s just a matter of finding the right creative solutions, right?

Q: Gears has always been a graphically stunning game. Gears 3 is coming out on a five-year-old console. Has it been a challenge pushing the graphical quality significantly ahead of what we saw in Gears 2?

CB: It’s a puzzle. We actually went back – it was a funny thing, a side anecdote – I haven’t told anybody all this yet this week and I’m not lying. Our chief engine architect right now Dan Vogel basically took a Gears test level, put it in the Gears 3 code base, and it ran at 500 frames per second. The point was we’d optimised everything from the way the VSP was running to the static meshes to the lighting to the skeletal meshes that you’re basically squeezing water from a stone and solving this puzzle box on a console. It’s just like the Super Nintendo or the Genesis. When the first games came out like wow, these look great. And then the code’s sloppy here, or maybe something’s not that intelligent here, and you figure out how to tighten every last little bit and tune it just like a car, so you get great performance. So now we have good global illumination. We have free vertex deformation so you have blowing banners and trees that are waving and god beams that if the programmer puts in it made them super cheap so you can put them in all these scenes – and those are in Bulletstorm. Bulletstorm has two suns, by the way, which means twice the f***ing god beams, which is day one purchase right there. So yeah, you figure out how to work smarter, not harder, right?

Q: If the 360 has a ten year life cycle, will that process of graphical improvement continue over the next four years or is there a cut off point?

CB: I don’t know how long you’ve been playing with PCs or in the business but are you familiar with the finished demo scene?

Q: Nope.

CB: Back in the day those guys would take, like, within 20k and a software render they would do things the 3D effects cards couldn’t even do. It wasn’t necessarily a practical application, but it’s just a matter of finding the right code magic and the right tricks. If you do what seems like full glossy and blur on your screen but it’s just some sort of trick and people believe it’s a glossy and blur then you did it. That sleight of hand and convincing somebody you did something – David Blaine levitating on a silly TV show – people believe it happens and maybe it didn’t but that’s what you do and people buy it.

Q: Could you talk a little bit about Beast mode?

CB: Of course. Beast mode is our class-based monster mode. You get to play as all the different Locust creatures you’ve been fighting for two and now the third game. All the way from the suicide bomber ticker to the shield boomer with his shield and explosive flail, all the way through to the berserker, who has very bad eye sight but has a very nice Hulk smash as well as the ability to just crash through all the coalition’s fortifications. Like, screw your couch! I’m going to knock your sandcastle over, which is very very empowering. It’s really amazing when you spawn and you see you as this giant berserker and you as a little ticker and you as the serapede, which is this electric centipede that shocks and eats people, all going out to nail the humans who are running and screaming like oh they’re everywhere! You really feel like you’re bearing down on them. It’s up to five players. It’s got a little bit of that Horde lineage on it, but it really feels unique because it’s so class-based. The kantus resurrects guys; everybody has a role; and it appeals to different people. Some people like to be medics. Some like to be gunners. Some like to be defencemen.

Q: After you made Horde everybody was doing Horde. Do you think Beast will have the same effect?

CB: Maybe. Who knows? Maybe the next Halo will have a mode where you’re just all Covenant or something like that. That could be cool. Yeah, they get to finally kill Master Chief over and over again. But Gears is one of those games that everyone liked to knock when it came out. Like this isn’t innovative! And suddenly story-based co-op and roadie runs and cover are everywhere. And every game has Y to look at stuff now. And you’re like, okay, that’s cool. I’ll take that. I was getting Google Alerts for Gears and it’s like, oh this game has a Gears of War-like Horde mode. Maybe they’ll have Beast but that’s the beauty of Beast. It’s all monsters and not every game has monsters.

Q: Were you tempted to do something Left 4 Dead style now that you can control the Locust?

CB: We’re not doing the Versus with that. It’s one of those things that, you know, we looked at the development schedule and everything and we were like, look, you look at what we have to ship with this game, from a campaign that’s amazing with four-player co-op that you can replay with Arcade mode and the mutators we’re putting in. We’re not talking about it but we’re going to have a Versus mode that’s great. And then we have a Horde mode which we’re unveiling later. And Beast mode. At some point it’s too much. Maybe down the line we’ll get around to doing a Versus like that, but we have to be very very careful with super asymmetrical modes like that. Personally I wasn’t too big on playing as the zombies in Left 4 Dead. I just want to shoot zombies when I play that game.

Q: In terms of Gears features that have been appropriated by other developers, has anyone stolen Active Reload?

CB: I haven’t seen it yet.

Q: It seems like an idea everyone should take an no-one has.

CB: I know, man. It’s weird. I’d like somebody to but I haven’t seen it anywhere, and I’m like, okay. It’s one that’s so Gears you can’t deny it. Like the roadie run, maybe. Cover existed before Gears. Co-op did. But with the Active Reload, you guys as journalists would be like, come on! Really?

Q: That would be a blatant rip-off.

CB: Yeah. There’s inspired by and then there’s just straight up George Lucas go see somebody type stuff.

Q: I assume you’ve been keeping an eye on the conferences this year.

CB: As much as I can from this tiny cold room.

Q: What stood out for you? What game are you really interested in and would like to see more of?

CB: I could beat the Microsoft drum all the time. Deus Ex, I’m a big fan of that. I think that’s a genre that’s wide open. But I think Nintendo’s back. Nintendo strayed. Nintendo had an affair with everybody’s mum, and now they’ve come back to the marriage of the Mario and the Kirby and the GoldenEye fans. For me that’s good to see, because I dusted off my Wii for Mario Galaxy 2 and I’m hoping to keep the dust off of it.

Gears of War 3 is due out on April 8 2011.