Cliff Bleszinski interview

Now that Gears Of War 3 has been out long enough for fans to wrap up the campaign, we sat down with Epic creative director Cliff Bleszinski to discuss the game's story, themes and design in detail. We also talk about how his admiration for Miyamoto squares with his work on games that seem to have so little Nintendo influence, the scrapped idea for an aquatic Locust enemy type and his desire to steer the series towards Band Of Brothers and away from Predator.

[Warning: this conversation discusses critical Gears Of War 3 story elements, and therefore contains spoilers.]

Gears 3 is filled with subtle innovations. When you've spent so many years working on the same series, how do you stay sensitive to aspects that could be improved?
There was an if-then chart that went around on the Internet that I retweeted at some point. 'If it's the same game then everyone says it's a rehash. And if you change it, you've ruined my franchise and I don't like you anymore.' I used to say it this way, for Gears 3, if we didn't do anything different people would say, 'Oh, it's Gears 2.5', otherwise it's, 'You've changed too much and you've ruined my memory of what I thought I loved'. So you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

Our ultimate barometer of all of this is, do we want to go down to the playtest lab and play the damn thing? Not just people who are new to the team, or people who are just fans of the franchise. Myself, who's been there since day one. Would I rather be at home on my couch levelling up on Gears 3 right now as opposed to being in this room being interviewed? Absolutely. And I can't always say that about our games, and thankfully now I can. And that's ultimately the test, right?

How much of the impetus behind Horde 2.0 and its tweaks to the formula, like fortifications and upgrades, is driven by the need to stay one step ahead of other developers who ape the wave-based survival games?
You could say a little bit of it might have been inspired by tower defence type games or Call Of Duty's boarding up the windows, things like that. But we knew if we were going to do it we were going to make it an integral thing and go deep with it. Our mantra for Horde 2.0 was "don't fuck it up". Because for many people Gears Of War 2 was Horde mode.

It feels like a natural extension of the player-improvised fortification system that arose in Gears 2 with players staking out a corner of the map and planting Mauler shields.
We weren't doing a lot of that before Gears 2 shipped, but then it became this thing online where you hoarded the shields and boarded up. Later on we added in the ability for some of the enemies to kick over the shields. That desire to build your fort goes back to childhood; there's multiple things I tell designers I work with: first and foremost make your project personal but when in doubt go back to when you were a kid, senses of exploration, senses of wanting to strike out and build your own fort. Your instinct as a human being is to have your own home. So it's just turned out to be a natural fit for the game, as far as fortifying and building things and actually upgrading it eventually to laser fences and mechs.