Heavy Gear II
by Dave Nash, Designer
If "variety is the spice of life," a lot of what has been lacking in the many "giant robot games" in the last several years has been just that - variety. How long does it take you to get bored of missions that go something like this: Go to Nav A. Blow up some guys. Go to Nav B. Blow up some more guys. Go to Nav C. Destroy the base.... Personally, I expect a little more from games, as does the rest of the Heavy Gear II team.
The story for the game and the mission ideas have long been locked down, and our team is headed full-steam ahead towards beta. However, when I first joined the team almost a year ago, everything was pretty much wide open, just the way I like it. In my first couple weeks as a designer for Heavy Gear II, I read the Heavy Gear source books and played Activision's first Heavy Gear game a lot. Before long, we had our first few design meetings, where we continued to hammer out the storyline and started to discuss the actual mission layouts. That's where the "variety is the spice of games " idea originated.
One of our primary goals from the start was to ensure that each group of missions presented a new challenge for the player. In Heavy Gear II, you play the commander of an elite squad of special operations gear pilots. The story involves the squad heading to an enemy-controlled planet and pulling off some pretty harrowing covert operations. So, from the start, we designers had a lot going for us. Never before has a game in our genre focused on stealth and tactics as much as ours does - usually you just rush headlong into battle and hope you come out a winner. In Heavy Gear II, the odds will often be stacked against you, so stealth and cunning will be the key. In other words, you won't be doing a whole lot of marching in and destroying bases single-handedly.
Next: Some mission ideas
Heavy Gear II
