I HATE the fucking PS3 controller - Cliffy B

We recently got the chance to sit down Cliff Bleszinski, Lead Designer on Gears of War 2. Read on to find out what he thinks of host advantage, Unreal Engine licensees and…the PS3 controller?

The original Gears of War was massive, and when a sequel comes along people expect it to be doubly awesome. Where do you start with it? Do you just take it and make it bigger and better?
Yeah, we were originally saying the bigger, better, more badass thing which was marketing speak, and ultimately became a self parody of itself which is why we want to reinforce that the game is more epic, yet more intimate. We all kind of got together and went through a process of working out what would be new in Gears 2, what would be better than the original, and we came up with a huge list and talked about it for a week. Maybe the campaign would be a little longer, and we knew that we had a better story and would have new weapons, different multiplayer modes and Horde.

I think getting Josh Ortega on board helped a lot in having a fresh perspective on existing characters, and smaller things like having Steve Jablonsky who did an excellent job on scoring, not only on the battle music, but the in-game music as well. We got a very talented writer and composer, and hopefully we’ve built a package that people will play for years to come.

What was the most important thing you wanted to improve upon from the original Gears?
Well in regards to doing something that has a little bit of heart in there, the campaign and the story were the obvious ones. At the same time though I was dying to get back in and tweak the cover system. When I played the first game I thought we did a really good job, but then there were so many little problems with it too. You’d be running and accidently slam into a wall, or you’d dive towards cover or launch a swat turn and you couldn’t interrupt it, whereas you can now. And when you got knocked down I wanted to crawl around and all that stuff. We’ve tweaked all of those things to a very high level and that’s what I‘m really happy with.

Back to the script writing and the directions that the plot took. How much control did Josh have and what was the direction he took with the universe you created?
Basically the way we do the process is, I come up with a two page treatment and then Rod and Mike tear it to shreds, and then I do another treatment and another until we have something that feels like a solid outline of the game. So we have a two page outline of all of the levels and then Josh comes in and that’s the way that Gears 2 panned out. We’re all just learning as we go, the process is continuing to evolve but, erm…Josh is a very charismatic guy, he’s a force of nature. You know he’d battle and push so that we got the product and, more specifically, the best narrative in the end.

Is there anything particular that he pushed for that was maybe a challenge?
I can’t answer that without spoiling any of it to be honest. You know, narrative-wise we’ve taken some risks and we’re doing some things that I haven’t ever seen in a video game before.

4page Interview

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under Gaming, Miscellanous, Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.