Just incase you have been living under a rock for the past three years let us give you some background information - there is a man named Cliff Bleszinski who created a small gaming franchise titled Gears of War; this franchise went on to help the Microsoft's Xbox 360 become the success it is today. Cliff's second addition to the series, Gears of War 2, launched last week and immediatley after he took some time out of his busy schedule to sit down with PlanetXbox360 and answer a few questions; before you continue the interview below make sure to check out our full review by clicking
here.
PlanetXbox360: Can you name two or three specific differences between Gears of War 1 and Gears of War 2 that a casual or even a hardcore gamer might not pick up on?
Cliff Bleszinski: It’s all the stuff in the cover system. We put put in so much work behind the scenes tweaking the hell out of it just so it works. And it’s one of those things that when it works, you don’t even think about it and you just play. But when it doesn’t it, if it’s broken, it’s infuriating. So we wanted to remove ever single edge case, every single random instance where a person was going to press a button and take cover and nothing happened. It was one of those things where we sweat the details.
We shipped Gears of War 1 with a very good cover system. From there it was cool, a lot of people started using cover systems and that’s fine. But then we knew there were a lot of things we could improve and day one I was hitting up Ray [Davis], who’s the programmer on the project, and just being like, ‘Dude, we need to continue to tweak this because there are a lot of things that bug the hell out of me. And from there, from all the hands on with the game everyone so far has thought the cover system has been damn near perfect.
PlanetXbox360: What additions were made to Gears multiplayer and how do they tie into the New Xbox Dashboard?
Cliff Bleszinski: We aren’t really leveraging the new Dashboard. It just works. It’s one of those things that when it’s hooked in it’s really cool. But we have a number of things that make the Live experience better. We have a party system so that you can hook up with your buddies. It basically keeps an entire group together and just hop from mode to mode to mode and basically play the darn game all night long. We have a mode called What’s Up where basically you just hit a button and at a glance you see the status of your friends and what they’re doing in the game immediately. It’s extremely handy for just building those parties. And we have an optimized net code so that gamers can have a smoother experience overall.
PlanetXbox360: How long until Epic starts selling COG armor sets for Microsoft Avatars and how much do you think Epic/Microsoft should charge?
Cliff Bleszinski: Honestly. If that was one of things we had thought of we might have considered. But we have been so busy getting the game out. So maybe somewhere down the line. I would love to have my little guy wearing a Marcus Fenix suit.
PlanetXbox360: In your opinion what is a fair amount to charge for something like DLC avatar clothing?
Cliff Bleszinski: I have absolutely no idea man. That’s a total Microsoft platform strategy type of question. I don’t even know if they are charging or what they are charging. I’ve been totally out of the loop with all of it.
PlanetXbox360: One thing I was reminded of while I was playing is that it takes a hell of a lot of bullets to kill these bastards. How did you and the rest of the team decide on the weapon balancing? In comparison to other shooters, it takes a lot of bullets to put down a Locust.
Cliff Bleszinski: Well the number of bullets it takes to kill a Locust depends on difficulty. If you’re playing Casual it takes a third of a clip. If you’re playing casual it takes about a full clip. And it takes less if you active reload because your bullets are “hot” or stronger. But it was deliberately by design to make sure they didn’t go down in two bullets in order to basically show the player that the AI is doing something. Because if a guy comes around a corner and you just shoot him once you don’t get to see him move to a new location or see him take cover or do anything interesting. It’s just, ‘Bam! You’re dead, now where’s the next one.’ Suddenly your game can turn into a bit of a cannon fodder type of experience with the AI. And that can be good with some games. But for us it panned out nicely with the fiction because we deliberately talk about the Locust having thick skin and mean bastards in the sense that they’re very difficult to kill. And then, when you see hundreds of them pouring out of the ground you know you’re in for something.
