Gears of War 3 Preview

By EVAN SHAMOON - Stars and Stripes

"Gears of War 3" is big. Not just in terms of the anticipation surrounding its release—which, if pre-orders are anything to go by, is enormous—but also the sheer scale of the experience.

The game has been in development at Epic for three years; its campaign is the biggest created to date. There’s a brand new arcade mode on top of it, which allows players to experience the campaign competitively with friends, along with an updated version of the popular Horde mode and an all-new Beast mode (more on those in a bit).

It is, as they like to say in the industry, "a pretty full box." But perhaps the coolest thing about "Gears 3" is that all of these modes, including the entire campaign, can be played cooperatively with four players.

"I’m a big co-op player," says executive producer of the Gears franchise, Rod Fergusson. "I play a lot of really lousy games just to play co-op. Fortunately, one of the nice things about making games is you can help craft experiences that you want to have. We really focused on [co-op] this time around."

As in "Gears 2," players can join at different difficulty levels. "Even though we’re playing in the same time and the same campaign, because we have different difficulty settings, we get a slightly different experience from each other," says Fergusson. Creating a campaign suited to four players required a fundamental rethink of various aspects of the game’s design.

"We don’t like to do co-op where it just sort of clones," says Fergusson. "Like, it’s just not ‘the main character cloned three more times’ kind of thing. When we do co-op, we want it to be story-based, and for the characters [to] have a relevant story."

Epic spent a great deal of time finding ways both to explain and to make use of the fact that four people must be present at all times. This meant working on the story with noted British science-fiction author and writer of the "Gears" novels, Karen Traviss. "Crafting the story was a challenge, and then applying the four player co-op to the game mechanics was interesting because we had to have lots of cover available," says Fergusson. The team had to find spaces that would allow players to create their own gameplay—looking for flanking opportunities and the right ways to do particular attacks.

"It’s been nice," Fergusson says. "We’ve kind of gone back a little bit toward more of a ‘Gears 1’ experience, where we had these spaces that we called ‘combat bowls’."

He points to the first ‘Gears’ game, which let players decide how they wanted to take on the holes constantly opening up around them in Embry Square, which was very much an open space.

"‘Gears 2’ was a little bit narrower," says Fergusson. "When you’re inside of a worm or you’re inside of a tunnel… it’s a little bit more linear and narrow. So [with] four players, we really had to open that back up again, sort of get it back to the combat bowl…. there’s a little bit of nostalgia going back through and having that feeling of the ‘Gears 1’ emergent gameplay." What’s more, players are never lonely this time around. "Nobody can do anything alone. They’ve always got three witnesses."

With "Gears 3" Traviss, who worked both as a journalist and defense correspondent before turning to works of fiction, has taken her first crack at the interactive aspects of the franchise.

"Karen is really knowledgeable in all things military in her writing style, and being a novelist she added a different approach," says Fergusson. "So I feel like our story is a deeper, richer, story because of Karen’s involvement. You’ll see that in just the amount of cinematics. The story we’re telling in the game is really robust, and Karen had a large part to do with that. Plus, because she writes these characters in the books, she has sort of a deeper insight into [them] beyond just what people see in the games," Fergusson says.

Beast à la Mode

Beast is the game’s most significant new mode. In many ways, it’s the inverse of Horde, strapping players in the boots of Locust ghouls with a single directive: Destroy wave after wave of invading humans. As the player progresses, these enemies become tougher, in terms of both tactics and weaponry (not to mention that all the while, the clock ticks down to zero).

Points gained for killing enemies and assisting teammates translate into currency, used to buy different Locust units to play as. Wretches and Tickers are available from the outset, but over time mega units like the Armored Kantus become available. Given the popularity of Horde mode, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that Beast mode will score high marks with fans as well.

"I think the hardest thing has been to manage scope," says Fergusson of this final chapter in the Gears trilogy. "In the past, when we were doing ‘Gears 1’ and ‘Gears 2’, we got to a point where we had to focus on cutting scope. It’s like having kids: When you have one kid, they get 100% of your attention. When you have two kids, [each gets] 50% of your attention. When you get three kids, they get 33% of your attention. It’s the same way with features in a game: Basically, the more features you put in, the harder it is to keep them all polished." The rub, of course, is that this is the final game of the series. "We’ve been really reluctant to cut stuff, because we don’t have that obvious, ‘we’ll just put it in the next one’ kind of thing."

Thankfully, when the game’s release date was pushed from April to September, took off some of the edge for that team. "We didn’t have as much heartburn," says Fergusson. "Because basically the only thing that changed from April to September was that we added a beta, and then it just gave us a whole bunch more time to polish. So the campaign is that much more polished. Horde and Beast are that much more polished. We were really grateful for that extra time."

----

----

More games news

Game reviews

Copyright 2011 by Stars and Stripes