Gears of War 2 : Interview with Cliff Bleszinski
by Reece Heywood at Sep 30, 2008 5:48am
A few weeks ago we managed to attend the Gears of War 2 press event grab Cliff B for an interview and get hands on with Gears of War 2 for several hours.
Today you will find the interview along with impressions. Later today we shall also be releasing the interview in audio form (MP3) for you guys to listen on the way home from work or such.
Interview with Cliff Bleszinski:
Ve3tro: Will Skorge be involved in Gears of War 2’s Multiplayer at all?
Cliff: Yes, Skorge is playable in Multiplayer, just like RAAM was in Gears of War 1, but as you can imagine you won’t be using his dual wieldable chainsaw staff, haha! He’s a slick, tricky bastard that makes RAAM seem like a bewildered pussy cat.
Ve3tro: It has been a few years since you started working on the original Gears, as you mature and take yourself more seriously do you find it’s harder to put yourself in the mind of a Punk Kid who just wants to blow stuff up, or do you find yourself wanting to make more mature games.
Cliff: That’s a good question. I think that’s the million dollar question for your average game designer, or even a Hollywood Director. Deltora still likes monsters but has Adult responsibilities, so I think it’s possible for someone to take themselves more seriously but occasionally switch into that childhood sensibility that allows you to create giant monsters and amazing battlefields. So yeah I think it’s good to grow up a little bit, but at the same time to occasionally switch into that frame of mind.
Ve3tro: In the first Gears, there was a ton of COG tags to collect, will there be any type of collectables in Gears 2?
Cliff: In Gears 1 you had the COG tags that were everywhere, in Gears 2 there are scraps of paper hidden around the levels, which give you a deeper insight into the story of Gears. Of course we let the player choose if they want to read them, if they don’t they can just collect them for the Achievements.
Ve3tro: One of the most common criticisms of the first game was that it was quite short, is Gears 2 longer?
Cliff: It’s longer. Yeah, it’s definitely longer but I’m not going to go into details about how much longer, but I can guarantee that it’s longer. In a world where campaigns are getting shorter and shorter, the Gears 2 campaign is longer than the first. When we started out we knew what we wanted to get into the game, but we were surprised it turned out being the length it is. Of course, once you’re done playing it through you can fire it up and play Co-Op with a friend.
Ve3tro: Gears now has a competitive community behind it in terms of Multiplayer, are any of the maps designed with competitive “MLG” gaming in mind?
Cliff: We don’t do anything like that and we don’t have any plans to do that in the future either. We just make Gears maps as Gears maps allowing the MLG gamers dictate which map is best for each type of match. I’m a huge fan of competitive gaming and I’m really amazed people can make serious amounts of money from it too. When you turn on ESPN 8 and see people chopping wood as a sport, then people try telling me competitive gaming will never be a sport? It’s important to make the multiplayer of Gears 2 appealing to Causal & Competitive gamers alike.
Ve3tro: Going back to the game being longer than the first, because you’ve got more of an in-depth story is part of that taken up with a lot of dialogue? I’m concerned you might end up doing a Metal Gear, where you have to sit back and discuss the meaning of life.
Cliff: We deliberately make sure our cut-scenes are 3-5 minutes in length, just because when you start watching a video game is the moment it stops being a video game and becomes a movie. Cutscenes from some game designers are a dirty word, it’s like “Oh no, we don’t want to do any of those”. We’re okay with having them here and there, because in the right place they compliment the story perfectly. We have moments where the guys kind of walk along and talk at the same time, but we allow players to skip that at any time with the back button. We empower the player to have the experience he wants.
Ve3tro: So it’s a bigger game, because there’s more action?
Cliff: Oh there’s definitely more action, but there’s a lot more story too.
Ve3tro: Gears 1 shipped with a few DLC maps, will Gears 2 be doing the same?
Cliff: We do have plans, but we’ve made no announcements as yet. You’ll probably hear more about that in the next couple of weeks.
Ve3tro: Some gamers claim that Gears 2 will be more like Gears 1.5
Cliff: Oh, that’s cute.
Ve3tro: What would you say in response to these “1.5” accusations?
Cliff: I think if you fired up Gears of War 2 and a Beserker burst out of the wall or you had to traverse sections of light and dark avoiding Kryll, then you could call it Gears of War 1.5, but that’s not the case. Neither of those things make an appearance in the game and we have loads of new bosses and a tremendous single player campaign that’s longer than the first. The story has a lot more depth than the first, we have a tremendous amount of new weapons and heaps of new multiplayer content. Plus we have Horde which is a huge Co-Op experience. It’s clearly head and shoulders above the last game and I’m a little disappointed that gamers would make that assumption.
Ve3tro: You hear it a lot from fans of the first game, especially on the official Gears of War forums.
Cliff: When you make a sequel to any hit video game, at its core it still needs to be the same game. You know, Mortal Kombat is Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider’s Tomb Raider. GTA is always an open world with hijackable cars, you need to know what areas you need to evolve your game and you need to know which areas to leave alone. We’ve tweaked the cover system and added all these new assassinations, so when you add up all the features into a new package it’s very much Gears 2.0, maybe even 2.2!
Ve3tro: Mods were quite a big part of Gears of War PC. Did you take any inspiration from community made mods and applied them into Gears 2? There were a few Locust “Wave” mods similar to Horde which surfaced a week or two after the PC release.
Cliff: To be honest I didn’t check out a lot of the mods made for Gears PC, just because I was so busy working on Gears 2. If anything Horde was inspired by “Invasion” which was a game mode Unreal Tournament shipped with. A good chunk of the employees at Epic did come from the mod community, I’m a huge supporter of it as is everyone at Epic and I think it’s wonderful that people can buy a game and become part of the industry by creating user made content.
Ve3tro: The Demo that you were playing and we’re not playing, you were using a “rock worm” as mobile cover. Is that the only type of object you can use as mobile cover?
Cliff: Movable & triggerable cover were two of the things we really wanted to do in the game, so you had the worm in that one sequence, you also have the “Meat Shield” hostage option. You also have cover that pops up out of the ground in certain sections of the game. I won’t reveal much about what’s going on there, but we still have a few more tricks up our sleeve as far as that stuff goes.
Ve3tro: Shotgun rolling was a popular thing in Multiplayer, which made the whole experience less “tactical” than it was meant to be.
Cliff: [Annoyed tone] Yeah I know.
Ve3tro: Have you found a way of stopping that in Gears 2?
Cliff: Yeah, I’m not a fan of that shotgun rolling crap, it really wasn’t the game we built. What we’ve added in this time is the idea of “Stopping Power”. So if you’re coming at me with your shotgun and I get a beat on you with my lancer it will physically slow you down to the point you’re nearly at a standstill, so you can’t just run right at me. Even if you were to evade, it would slow your evade down too. So that will hopefully reduce that problem significantly. If they come up behind you and get you, then it’s a fair kill just like chainsawing you with my lancer. But when everyone is doing it, it’s bullshit.
Ve3tro: We’ve been playing the first Act on the floor today and we noticed that 60% of the fighting was on an epic scale. Are there a lot of Epic-Scale fights in Gears 2?
Cliff: If the entire game was on 11 like that, there would be no frame of reference. We like to pace it like a roller coaster, from Foot combat then Build, build build until the next assault sequence. Then later on you’re in a tank powersliding through thousands of Locust with reavers landing around you and all hell’s breaking loose. We do have a lot more sequences that are a lot like that but we use them sparingly throughout the games campaign.
Ve3tro: Rod Fergusson mentioned that the marketing for Gears 2 is going to be twice as big as the first game. So far we’ve seen a few Dev Diaries, the UK will be getting a gold version of the US Lancer replica, what else can we expect? Any kind of energy drinks?
Cliff: Haha, “Emulsion juice”!! There are honestly a lot of things being worked on right now, there’s the new TV commercial which will be the successor to Mad World which was hugely successful, which I can’t really say what it is yet so you’ll have to wait and see on that one. They’re also working on a bunch of other cool little things like COG tags etc. When you have a partner like Microsoft, you can be sure that they’re going to market the hell out of you game. So trust us when we say there’s a lot more stuff coming up.
Ve3tro: Do you think the marketing scale could be compared to a giant like Halo 3?
Cliff: I honestly don’t know what the figures are, but when you partner with a company like Microsoft they certainly know how to make a video game phenomenon a worldwide phenomenon. Just hit and hit big.
Ve3tro: Anything you can tell us about the Gears of War movie?
Cliff: Well the guy who directed the last Underworld & Die Hard movies is currently attached to it, as well as Chris Morgan who is writing the screenplay – he’s also doing the graphic novel. They’re working on it as we speak, so hopefully we will end up with a good Video Game movie.
Ve3tro: Do you have a separate team working on the Multiplayer?
Cliff: There’s a lot of overlap in regards to who works on what, there are a certain section of guys who only work on Multiplayer but it’s not setup like it’s a separate shop. The whole game is made through a group effort, so we place developers on time rota’s to work on certain areas of the game. The producers and Mike are like the RTS commanders of the company, sending people to chop wood and harvest ore and things like that, its part of a resource management structure. We always have a lead Multiplayer designer that focuses on that.
Ve3tro: So the whole company’s larger than before?
Cliff: Definitely. I wouldn’t say we’ve doubled in size or anything, but we’ve certainly staffed up since the last game shipped. We’ve got better at using the tools and combined all our man power to make a game that’s bigger than the first.
Ve3tro: For the people who don’t know, could you describe the principles behind Chainsaw duels.
Cliff: It’s pretty simple, two guys engage in a duel after both of them enabling their chainsaws and whoever presses the B button the fastest in the 2 second time frame has the highest chance of winning. There’s still a little bit of randomness in there which is okay to have, when you look at poker or blackjack there’s the random shuffling of the deck.
Ve3tro: The crowd system sequences appear to be mostly 1 way combat, firing from a distance with pretty heavy duty weapons. Will there ever be sequences where you engage in 2 way combat with the crowd system locust?
Cliff: It’s largely one way. The only times that it’s two way is when you’re powersliding through them with a tank, things like that. The thing with locust is that they take a lot of bullets to take out, so if you were on the same level as them you’d never have enough time or ammo to take them out. The only time we utilise the crowd system in Gears 2 is when you have enough range and firepower to do so.
Ve3tro: Well thank you for taking the time to talk to us Cliff!
Cliff: My pleasure!
