Gears of War 3 interview: Cliff Bleszinski

Gears of War 3 design director Cliff Bleszinski talks to Tom Hoggins about the new game and the future of the Gears franchise

Gears of War 3, one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the year, will be released on Tuesday, September 30. The Telegraph's review gave it four stars. With the title about to launch, Tom Hoggins spoke to designer Cliff Bleszinski.

So Gears is done and ready to come out. How are you feeling? Relieved, nervous?
I feel good, the reviews are coming in pretty strong. Confident that we’ll get the online in really good shape, getting the dedicated servers rolled out. I feel like we’ve wrapped it up as a trilogy, put a bow on it and put it under the Christmas tree for gamers.

Do you pay much attention to reviews?
Oh yeah, between every interview I’m on my iPad like an addict. Sometimes I don’t really care what people say, and sometimes I care too much. When it comes to reviews I want to make sure everbody loves and enjoys it. And I want to make sure the right person is reviewing it, if you’re a Final Fantasy Tactics guy, you probably shouldn’t be reviewing Gears of War.

If there was one thing you were most keen on improving for Gears 3, what was it?
Making sure the online actually works. Because gamers have gotten savvy to the world of rentals and used games, so if you ship a game with a campaign that isn’t 300 hours, you’re going to be a rental. We want to make sure we have a deep multiplayer suite. So making sure the online works is huge to combat that issue. We don’t want to do the whole online pass thing. God bless each publisher for having to battle this battle their own way. EA are fighting their own way through it. But for us, we want to make sure that we have a game that’s big enough, that’s worth $60 on day one and you’ll want to keep through a steady trickle of DLC.

How much did the beta help you to achieve that?
It was huge. It was immense for us. We weren’t originally going to have it when we were shipping in April, so being able to suss out the issues to make sure the game is rock solid for September was absolutely enormous for us as a studio. We were so glad we were able to do it.

It was your first beta, right?
Yeah. We were pretty beta and demo averse previously. I had gone on record and had a really bad quote a while back I said something like “It’s like hooking up with a girl, you know, once you do it, you’ve been there done that.” And as well as being inappropriate was also very short sighted. Especially in this world, where we needed to regain gamers trust after Gears of War 2 and that was what the beta was able to for us.

What kind of problems did you feel you needed to fix?
Matchmaking was incredibly slow. We also completely redid matchmaking after every match, so you would have to find new people which added to the search times. And while Warzone and Execution are loved by Gears purists and are great ways to play the game, we have a world where people are increasingly distracted by social networks and things like that. And a game in which you die in the first five seconds and you’re out for three minutes isn’t neccessarily the one that’s going to be the most sticky. So I think adding infinite respawning in Team Deathmatch was a wise decision for us.

Were there any other games you looked at while rebuilding the multiplayer?
You know, it’s hard to ignore the kind of RPGish grind that’s infiltrated games like Halo and Call of Duty, so that was a big influence on us. We wanted to make sure players had a steady stream of unlocks, kind of like fighting games in their heyday, where you had to unlock all the characters to add longevity. That was an influence on us. As well as making sure that we have servers, I believe we’re in a world where shooters need to have dedicated servers on day one, regardless. I hope gamers are going to feel spoiled by us and start demanding it from other games.

As a third person shooter, do you feel you have any inherent disadvantage to first-person when it comes to multiplayer?
First person is always going to be successful, but we provide a nice alternative to first person. We’re always talking about Call of Duty and how it’s so big now, why is it so big? Because it’s a world you easily understand, much like football or whatever your sport of choice would be. And we have to teach people what a lancer is, what a Locust is and what an emergence hole is. But at the same time we thought if we just had a typical AK47 and iron sights and you were going down Flatbush Avenue in New York, we would get lost in the holiday shuffle. It’s the fact that we’re third person, and we have the chainsaws and monsters is what makes us stand out and provide an alternative for people who don’t want that down the barrell experience 24/7.

Story-wise, 3 seems slightly lighter in tone than 2, is that true?
We certainly have our share of giggles, but we also have our share of dark moments. The thing that is different is that we use a lot more colour to bleed into the game. We’re at the point where Modern Warfare 3 looks less saturated than Gears of War does now. We’re not Uncharted, and let’s be fair, Uncharted is amazing. It’s travel porn as a game, lush and gorgeous. But we’ve maintained the core Gears roots while allowing a bit of colour to come through, because it can be exhausting to be in such a desaturated environment for such a long period of time.

Do you feel that’s an area where you’ve become a victim of your own success. Where a lot of games have taken on that brown-wash aesthetic and overused it?
Absolutely, the “Greys of War” right? That’s the thing where people were dismissive of the property. Thankfully we have our grouper fans who are there in every form to correct you and be like no the game does have colour now. For me, it’s always been a bizarre thing because it’s like going up to Zack Snyder and being like “300 was stupid because it has sepia tones”. And you feel like no actually, this is a design decision our artistic director took with the first Gears 1. But again, when we started really thinking about spending hundreds of hours in this world, we realised that something super dark and super desaturated can limit you sometimes.

Dom seems to have cheered up a bit, though.
Well, he has his good days and he has his bad days. But he has a beard now, and nothing says you’re distraught more than a beard. We thought about putting him in a bathrobe, but that wouldn’t really work for combat.

You had Karen Traviss on writing duties for you this time. How did that effect the construction of the game?
Karen understands these characters better than anyone. Our previous writers did a very good job, but Karen has focussed on them for novels. Hiring Karen to write the game was an immensely great step for us. She understands the military, she has a huge amount of respect for our services. She just gets it. She could write a Gears novel in a month if you asked her to. I don’t think she sleeps.

How much did she input into dialogue, or was she was she just involved in the overall plot?
It’s a collaboration. For instance she wrote this line with Carmine drooling over bacon, and now it’s become a meme on the internet already. There’s definitely a lot of back and forth. I got to hang out with Joss Whedon a couple of times being a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and he told me “Buffy suffers = show good” and I was like thankyou for dragging me through my twenties with a lot of agony, dude, I appreciate that. But I realised that for Gears for many ways, Marcus suffers = game good. So Marcus definitely goes through some stuff in this game.

Was this story arc for Gears always planned as a trilogy?
Subconciously on a certain level it was, we always had ideas about where it could go, but we never wanted to say that publicly. I think if you say a new game is going to be a trilogy then it puts gamers on the defensive. Gamers are like “really, we’ll see”. They’re a smart crowd.

First time Gears has had four player co-op. Why now and not before?
Because it’s a pain in the ---. It really is. I remember we were sitting there talking about it saying “let’s do it now.” With each added player there’s an exponential falloff in the amount of player who will actually play. With Gears only half the people played it with a friend, and we were concerned that by the time you get to four player only a few people will actually play it in four player. But I believe that if you put an amazing game out there that has four player co-op, “if you build it they will come”. So maybe you’ll play it through yourself, then invite a friend, then maybe you will have a party and have multiple people go through. Replay it in arcade mode with mutators and stuff like that. We put a ton of effort into campaign to make you want to play it through, then play it again with a friend.

You say it’s a pain, so how do you accomodate your design to work for one player and then all the way up to four?
Yeah, you can’t just assume the AI is going to be standing in this corner so that player one can come round the corner and see the amazing cinematic like in Dead Space or something. So we have to create these four player bottlenecks, where two players have to open the doors for the other players and kind of limit who goes where at certain points in the game. One of the things that makes it difficult but also is one of the biggest benefits in that the only way you could play as Sam is to be Player 3 in Act 2 or as Carmine is be player 3 in Act 1. That’s kind of cool in that you can see their perspective and not neccessarily always play as Marcus or Dom.

When you reach the third entry of a trilogy do you feel more pressure, or do you feel you’re in a groove so you can let loose a bit more?
There is a huge amount of pressure, but you kind of have to ignore it and embrace it at the same time. Gears 1 was such a success and a huge breakout for us, and then Gears 2 was still huge but we still had our missteps. So the third one is kind of a compromise between the two, the lightning in the bottle you had with the first game, combined with the lessons you learned from the second game, and then polished up into its own nice little package.

Gears has always been about Delta squad’s journey. But in 3 it seems you have ratcheted up the kind of epic quest almost to high fantasy levels. Was that something you were going for?
Well we have our Helm’s Deep in the form of Anvil Gate. We do useability tests for the games and the levels that consistently rate the highest in Gears aren’t the crazy levels on a truck or on the back of a Brumak, it’s the Alamo levels, where you hold out against overwhelming odds.

When you released the first Gears, you kind of defined the idea of this generation’s visuals. Now we’re five years on, do you find you are restricted by the technology now?
I think if we bring out any more products on the 360 depending on life cycle, we’ll be able to squeeze more water from that stone. That said, I still think there is a huge amount of room for improvement in graphics. We want to get to Avatar-quality and real time and beyond. I think we can absolutey get there, hopefully in the next generation if everybody ponies up and does good hardware.

And how far out is that?
Who knows. I could tell you, but I’d violate an NDA.

Fair enough! I’d like to talk about boss battles, if I may. The first Gears you had Raam, who could be a bit of a slog, then you had the end of Gears 2, which many people felt too easy. How do you then strike the balance between the two?
It’s a similar thing with puzzles, you either get it within the first two seconds or you never get it. Finding that balance is a combination of useability and internal testing. As well as putting loads of glowy bits on enemies so you know when to shoot. I hate to say it, but when in doubt, shoot it in the face or shoot it in the glowy bits. But we’ve gone with an almost Mario like inspiration for the boss battles with multiple phases. I’ll tell you one thing, boss battles are difficult. Because you spend tons of man-months on what is essentially a ten to fifteen minute encounter, where you could spend that time coding up to five enemies that could be used throughout the campaign. But at the same time there are high notes in campaign’s that players like. One of the goals for this game was to make the majority of the bosses have functional AI so we can just drop them right into Horde. We’ve managed to pull that off with a few of them.

How do you feel about boss battles personally?
As a gamer, I love them. As a developer I find them incredibly frustrating and difficult as it is finding that sweet spot.

Did you play Deus Ex, do you feel like some boss battles can spoil the tone?
I’ve played a few hours. But I’ve heard that game was controversial with the boss battles. I can’t really comment on it because I haven’t got there yet, but players were claiming that if you play as a tank the bosses were fun. But if you played as a hacky type guy they were very difficult. That’s a problem I’m happy we don’t have to grapple with.

You’ve said this is the end of the trilogy...
Which everyone heard as the last Gears game ever.

Who said that?
People on the internet. People tweeting me all the time saying “I can’t believe this is the last Gears game ever made!” People just don’t listen!

What kind of things would you like to explore in a future Gears game, there must be more stories for you to tell?
We have some DLC that’s coming up. We’ve confirmed we’ll be doing campaign DLC. One thing I can tell you is that you’re not going to see Marcus or Dom or Cole in it. I believe that DLC should be unique and cool, like Lost and the Damned, Gay Tony, Mad Moxie’s Underdome Riot. All those kind of things. DLC’s the place where you play and have fun. So that’s one thing that’s an indication of where things may be going in the future.

Do you think Gears will stay strictly action, or are there other genres you would like to explore?
Well, we could do first person, we could do an RTS we could do anything with it. We’re just limited by our bandwidth. As a studio we are in a very good position to be a slave to our success with the Gears franchise. And all good things come to those who wait.