Building a Better Gears of War

GS: In your respective roles, what is your process when approaching a new mode or map?

JB: It's kind of a long process; there's no real set way. With a map, we start with a basic…what we call a shell. No complicated geometry, no art in it at all; it's just really ugly boxes. And then, we sit down with a group of people, and we play it, and we play it, and we play it, and make changes based on feedback until we're sure it's done. Then, once the layout is complete and it's balanced and fun, we do an art pass on it. We continue to, honestly, test the hell out of it. That is much the same as we do for a game type. We have a new idea; we try and test it and iterate as much as possible to find what works best.

LP: Weapon ideas can pretty much come from anywhere. We often have bigger design group meetings, but there are suggestions from all kinds of places on the team…or where we see kind of a hole in effectiveness. Like, hey, we don't have a weapon that's particularly effective between this weapon and this weapon, so what can we do to get in there? From there, either one of two things will happen. If it's a pretty straightforward bullet projectile weapon, we'll go right at it with code and try to start working on it. If it's kind of a funky weapon, like the digger launcher, then we'll have a designer come make a proof of concept prototype…an early playable version of it…and see if it's visceral and fun. At that stage, it's all about getting people excited about the idea and to get what we call "buy in" on it. Like, hey, if everyone on this team thinks that this digger thing is cool and promising, then we know it's a go. From that point on, it would go through coders and they would make the final version. And there are just loads and loads of play tests and iterations on how effective these things are, how the effects on them look…and the particles and the results, enemy exploding, etc…just iterations day in and day out.

GS: Could you tell us about the new modes in the beta and your decision to tweak them this time around?

JB: One of the biggest changes between Gears 3 and really any other game that we've shipped as a company is that we have very much refined our play test process. It's gone from "Hey, do you have time to come test this at my desk?" to a very regimented process where everyday at 4 p.m., we have a group that gets together and people take notes. A set design team will go over the notes and review all the feedback to see what's bugged and respond to that feedback on an e-mail list and kind of open it up so that everyone in the entire company gets involved in the process and gets involved in that discussion. As a studio, we're very open to new ideas, and we've done a lot of work to track stats. So every move that players make…every button press, everything that happens, everywhere they go is recorded now, so we can review that process.

We started to do a little bit of that in Gears 2 and just looked at the data that we had, and figured out what we wanted to do with it, and where we wanted to go with Gears 3--the next game. We decided we wanted to make the game more accessible and kind of easier to approach. We had a lot of problems fracturing our community up into lots of playlists instead of one large playlist to find other people to play with. So we looked at some of our game modes. We had Guardian and Submission, which internally we all liked, but they were somewhat similar in terms of being objective based, and we wanted to combine them into one game type so that somebody playing it can understand in the first 30 seconds and be successful. So we combined those two into a single Capture the Leader game type. We did something very similar. We had two game modes, one called King of the Hill and one called Annex, and the rule differences between the two were extremely subtle and not easily apparent unless you had played for a long time and knew what you were doing. We did the same thing and got rid of Annex entirely and took some of the rules from that and rolled it into a single game type that just took the name King of the Hill.

Just doing their job.

Lastly, when you looked through your playlist and saw, "I can play Guardian or I can play Annex," as a new player, you had no idea what either of those meant. But if you see Capture the Leader or King of the Hill, you immediately know what you're supposed to be doing. I mean, Team Deathmatch is the other one; you immediately know just by reading the name what your objective is and what you're supposed to be doing in that game type. Boiling down the rules to something easily understandable and very quickly approachable was our biggest goal with this and, obviously, making them as fun as possible.

GS: And how do you think the community will react to the modes being combined?

JB: Our hope is that it will be very positive. The testing we've done has been very successful internally…and some of the focus group testing we've done. There are people who say "Hey, Guardian is my favorite mode. Why did you ruin it or why did you get rid of it?" But hopefully, those people will find just as much good in the new game type as they did in the old…as well as they'll have 10 times the number of people to play with so they'll have more fun in the process. That is the hope. We shall see once the beta starts. That's the big reason we're doing this…to see what the reaction is to these and what can we do to fix them if there are issues…and are they getting the attention that they deserve.

GS: Let's talk about the new weapons for a bit. How do you see the new weapons changing things up? How are you going to maintain that balance where people aren't just going to be using the same weapon over and over again?

LP: One of the big things when we went into the forums with an open mind [was], "Tell us how you play and why you play the way you do." We had this earlier assumption that the shotgun was just overpowered because there were so many kills with it. But we kind of started to see was that people just like playing closer range and that they like getting into each other's faces and getting intimate…and that the game offers this style of combat that they didn't get anywhere else. So it wasn't about that weapon being overpowered but that it was the most suitable weapon for the style of play that they wanted. So for Gears 3, they want to play this way. What other tools can we give them to play that way and add more variety to the mix? Yes, you can play up close and get into people's face, but here's four or five ways to do it. The other thing about the up-close style of play that is so effective if you're a new player [is] it's very easy to hop online and get trashed. It's very intimidating, and one of our other goals is that we wanted other tactics to be effective as well. So that if you were a rifle player or you liked to sit back and snipe, we wanted that to be a viable tactic as well. I think what we've ended up with is the most accessible and balanced version of our multiplayer yet, and I really hope to see that the stats in the beta are going to support that.

JB: We had the vast majority of people who played in Gears 2…Lee, maybe you can confirm this. I want to say 90 percent or more would die in their first round, never get a kill, and never come back.

Lee: 90 percent of people who get killed in their first match and do not get a kill, never play a second match.

JB: So that's a huge portion of the audience that we're just missing out on. And so by making these weapons that suited their play style and giving them the opportunity to get that kill right out of the gate and have a good time, the hope is that they will choose to stick around and find everything else that the game has to offer along the way.

GS: Like you mentioned earlier, Gears is all about close-combat play. How do you think a new feature like spotting will change how Gears is played?

JB: I'll let Lee talk to that because it was his idea and his baby. And I will say for the record, it completely changed the game in a fantastic way.

LP: Spotting for me came out of my personal preference. I like playing games online, but rarely do I like talking to people online. Gears is a pretty tactical game, and it rewards squad tactics and working with your team. Then again, I don't want to talk to random people--insert derogatory, 12 year old in the basement questioning my sexuality, etc. So spotting for me…I wanted a nonverbal way to tell people, "Hey, there's some ammo," or "Hey, there's an enemy there," to communicate with people, you know, in a completely safe, I guess, way.

GS: In a PG-13 sort of way?

LP: Yeah, and people don't like to be told what to do. You can't make a system ordering a teammate around; all you can do is [have] people give that information. Spotting plays into that, "Hey watch out!" You're never telling them what to do. You can't really be upset by that. So for players who liked playing a longer-ranged game or more tactically, this was a very powerful tool because one of the reasons that our close-ranged gameplay worked out so well is that it's easy to sneak up on people and cover slip around and get up on people quickly before they know you're coming. This allows a coordinated group of rifle players to be able to point these people out. It provides a good balance between those styles of play.

To chainsaw or not to chainsaw?

GS: How has the multiplayer evolved throughout the course of three games? What have you guys learned?

JB: In Gears 1, multiplayer was a last-minute decision that we rushed out the gate, and we were lucky to get it finished. I mean, seriously, it was a two-man design team, and I think a two-man programming team, and that was it on the entire project. It was very much an add-on to the game, and Gears 2 had a little bit larger support and evolved in the same way that Gears 1 to Gears 2 did. I think in Gears 3, the biggest change is what we mentioned earlier. We finally said, "OK, what's wrong, and how can we fix it." And we went out to the community and opened the dialogue with them and said, "What do you want?" as opposed to us saying, "Here's the game and here's how you're going to play it."

In Gears 2, there was a little bit of a rocky start with matchmaking online not being as effective or good as it could have been, and we didn't really support that much other than going online and shooting each other. We addressed a lot of that in patches later in Gears 2, but the vast majority of the audience has never seen that. So in Gears 3, it's a much deeper experience, in terms of leveling up your characters [and] unlocking new things, weapons skins, and characters…and all those various things that are available to you…medals and titles. It's a much deeper experience that wasn't there before. And then coupled with the dedicated servers, the much better matchmaking, and the accessibility, our hope is that we can find a much wider audience that sticks around.

LP: If you were to sum up our philosophies, it would be that I think Gears 1 took us by surprise, with just how the tactics evolved online…who people are playing. And we didn't expect how people would be playing the game. In Gears 3, now we've embraced what they wanted and we're really bringing to the table what people are going to like.

GS: Is Gears of War 3 where you want it to be? Are you happy with where it is now and is it what you had originally envisioned?

JB: I would say that as a developer, I'm never going to be happy. I will always want to be tweaking and changing and updating and fixing. That aside, in terms of, "We have a date to make," the beta is out the door, and I think it's phenomenal. I'm very, very happy with it. I'm very eager not only to play online and play with everybody but to see how they play and what's there. The whole point of doing the beta for us is that it gives us exposure obviously, but we can see what the weak spots are and where the chinks are in our armor and correct those problems before we ship.

LP: For me, there's always this tremendous amount of emergent tactic that comes online when there's so many people playing any multiplayer online. For me, I have a boatload of fun. We were playing here…the game is a lot of fun. I'm very happy with where it is. I think the beta is going to be very interesting in showing how these things are going to emerge online to be popular tactics. What's going to be the next super effective thing that we didn't see coming? With the ease of filming something and putting it on YouTube and disseminating, "Hey, here's this tactic. Let's try this," suddenly, 10,000 people are out there doing it. Never before in gaming has there been such an easy way to spread these emergent behaviors…so very hard to kind of counter for that, so very interested in seeing how it plays out.

GS: Guess we'll find out soon. Thank you both for your time!