TGS05: Cliffy B and Mark Rein interview

• BlimBlim
• Saturday, September 24, 2005 | 8:20 AM
• 14 comments

Xbox 360

Here is the second interview from the TGS, this time with both Cliff Bleszinski and Mark Rein of Epic who gave us some more details about the very impressive Gears of War. Thanks to Rob of msxbox-world for writing all this !

Cliff B:

As far as the way the narrative goes and you talk about the narrative and you have the main character you have to be very careful when you have a main character with gamers because gamers are very sensitive, gamers are very proud. Over here you have you know your Duke Nukems as your character, he’s your over the top character. In the mid range you have your Master Chief, you don’t see his face and he says “yeah ok were going in” Then you have Gordon Freeman who is a mute, right! I think in the grand scheme of this game Marcus Fenix is going to be more along the lines of a Sam Fisher type character. He’s cool, he’s badass, he does talk but he’s not so much in your face that it’s obnoxious. He’s believable and you like him and you want to root for him but at the same time he’s an anti hero; so if push comes to shove he can be a dick if he needs to!

Switches attention to the game that’s playing the same demo from E3.

Cliff B:

So in this section, basically the way this is playing out is you’re essentially finding a path through the ruined city by keeping light on. Because once you step out of the light the Krill come down and eat you to bits! It’s kind of like frogger, but instead of a log your in the light instead of water its little air piranhas (smiles).

Were working on showing a new slice of the game for X05. We’ve kind of tickled in a little bit of the creepy kind of horror elements but it’s a bit more shooter focused on this part. For X05 we kind of want to show you the pacing as far as building up some of the scary moments. In X05 were introducing one of the new creatures that the Locust use to attack you that has some unique characteristics. Its not just about enemies that take cover and blind fire and mantle over cover and everything; there’s also the different types of creatures the Locusts will use that will fight you in different ways so you have that cool sense of variety when playing the single player.

Question: How complete is the game at the moment?

Were seeing right now about 50%

Question: When do you think the release will be?

When it’s done (laughs).

Question: Can I buy it in time for Christmas?

For this year, no. Maybe next Christmas (smiles). This is art you know, and its art and science. You can’t rush art and we’re scheduling the game, we have a plan that we want to do. But so much of what I believe is fun is iterative, you feel what fun is. It’s something, if it doesn’t feel right; you go back and try something else. You run through usability you do it until it’s perfect because you never get a second chance to make that first impression and if we’re going to teach people to take cover, if the game isn’t fun to shoot the enemies if its not gratifying or the sounds aren’t perfect the sparks all of it then we’ve failed. We have to nail it the first time!

Mark Rein steps up to play the game

Cliff B: He’s not as good as I am (smiles)

Mark Rein: Yeh just wait until multiplayer! We actually do have multiplayer working now but not here!

Cliff B: So we have a lot, as far as the cover deck its like the core of the game we have this whole thing where were doing cover and we want to change the paradigm of how people play shooters. Because I played most shooters right now and you’re the alien; by the way there’s no aliens (points to TV screen) and I’m the bad guy I mean the good guy and you’re running at me and were just shooting at each other and to me it just feels silly to me now. Because if you are actually getting shot at you get behind cover; you are going to get your butt behind a wall! There’s a couple of instances where this game will be context sensitive; jump across like a little gap or whatever but for the most part there’s no jumping in war. You don’t see video guys in Iraq hopping around like Mario right because there are bullet whizzing at their heads and they want to live and that’s the key difference as far as the Locusts; they are savages but they are intelligent savage. They use the same cover system that you use and they want to survive. So they are going to get their head down and they are going to try and move to another cover spot. And you re going to continue to play this game of where you’re trying to flank the guy, get the drop on him and take him out before he takes you out. That is a far more interesting combat method than just running in and gunning like crazy. I’m hoping it will continue to establish the cover shooter as its own genre, much like the stealth game was with Splinter Cell and Metal Gear.

Continuing with the whole cover thing it’s like if we are going to do cover then lets go deep on it. So not only do we have like your straight cover where you can go from point A to point B , but your standing cover utilising different heights as far as seeing your character doing it. But also have circular cover with your back against a pillar and circle around the pillar. Creatable cover where you will knock over the pillar or where you blow up the car, the gas tank and then it lands and you can take cover behind it. Destroyable cover like the visual language appears; if it’s wood then it’s not safe so if you’re behind like an armoire or whatever your enemy is shooting at you and will chip away at it and eventually destroy it.

So there’s nothing more gratifying for me right now than seeing a Locust take cover behind a bookcase and then breaking it apart and he’s sitting there like “oh sh**” and your like “ now I’ve got you” its like you’re pulling a hermit crab out of its shell making him exposed.

Question: Will the AI take alternative cover if its cover is destroyed?

Absolutely, yeah as opposed to just sit there. The key is not only to make AI that is intelligent but is obviously entertaining and reacts properly to you. I mean the AI that’s in this right now is very much a first passage; entire systems that since E3 that we’ve had a dedicated programmer working on. To figure out where the line in the sand is. If this is a chess board (points to table) and this is the Locust and this is me; this is the line you never want the Locust to get past me unless he’s trying to take cover over here or flank me. The same thing for me trying to do this with him right! Figuring out where that battle line is and where that’s drawn. Also we have the AI mantling over cover too and you can climb over cover and everything and you like to see the Locusts coming at you like hurtling over the cover seeing them want to get closer and eventually getting to that melee encounter that were working on you know like where you’re struggling with them and your hitting the button to try and dig your chainsaw into them things like that.

Having a deep cover system there is something the game’s all about and that’s a deep system but I’m also a fan of having simple systems that I brought adjacent to that. Sometimes it’s ok to have a little button mash or a stick wiggle or something like that. The cover is deep, the weapons are deep, the exploration of the game play, the AI and then sometimes a guy grabs you just hit a button and you see these characters full screen, Unreal Engine 3 looking beautiful you get to interact and then you go back. You kill the guy or he kills you go back to the game play or go back to the last save point.

Question: Will there be traditional first person shooter elements such as finding hidden routes/ areas to get hidden weapons and equipment?

When humanity fell back to the Jacinto plateau in gears of war when they implemented there scorched earth policy. When you stage a mass evacuation like that you can only take a certain amount of people. So only 10% of humanity was able to escape so a lot of people were left behind, these people were called the stranded and they had to live almost like dare I say it ant frank, in hiding because the Locusts were everywhere. And so they have all sorts of secret passages, they have their resources set up so they can avoid the Locusts when the Locusts come, especially at night. And so if a stranded is alive then he’s obviously been thrifty and he’s been able to figure out how to avoid this very horrendous nightmarish threat. So a long story short I like secrets! And if I could use that Nintendo (makes beeping noise) that would work; but I can’t!

Question: Can you tell us something about the Xbox Live content in the game?

I’m a fan. We want to do downloadable content; were still figuring out whether that’s going to be free or premium and how that would actually work. Co-op will be playable over Live. We are working on a verses mode but I don’t want to talk too much about that right now. Its about cooperating with your friends its like the car you see at the beginning that’s going to require both of you to mash at the same time, we have like elevator doors that you have to pull over and things like that but you also want to kill your friends! I mean come on they punch you on the shoulder or you yell at them online. I’m a huge fan of Live right now and it’s like playing Unreal Championship 2, Halo 2 online its like, I’ve got these random friends on my list and they’ll message me. Some of them are old people and young people of all ages it’s like amazing how.. When people are cool on Live they are cool but when they are dicks they’re dicks! It kind of brings out the best and worst in people. The bottom line is its still fun!

Question:Can you tell us briefly about the different weapons in the game?

Cliff: Ahh, there’s no laser guns in this game.

Mark Rein: Haha he didn’t ask what isn’t in the game!

Cliff: No I think it’s important from a positioning standpoint you know. This game to me yes its sci-fi yes there’s monsters there’s some over the top elements. But for every crazy monster that I’ve put in the game I’m pulling it back. So your weapons are explosive based, you have grenades, flash bangs. There’s an interesting twist to the rocket launcher that I’m not quite willing to expose today I’d probably get a kick if I do. There’s a couple of pistols in the game, we have your shotgun, we’re working on a flame thrower as well so all those kinds of stuff. There is a sniper rifle that were going to show you at X05 called the “Long Shot”. It’s actually like a high tech sniper rifle that is actually bolt action so you get that kinda best of both worlds. You get that nice scope and you see that nice animation.

Question: Do you have to go and search for weapons?

It’s a combination of having the first few weapons. The great thing about seeing the characters you can actually see what he is carrying, right so you have one gun which is the right shoulder slot the other gun in the left shoulder slot so there’s two main guns, a pistol and a grenade slot. And that’s all you can carry so you are forced to make that decision. So you start off with like the Lancer which is like the assault rifle with the chainsaw and probably a shotgun. You kill the Locusts and you can pick up their Hammer Burst. The thing about the Locust is since they are from the underground of the planet and they are scavengers any weapon that you can use they can use against you as well. So there’s a never ending pool of weapons to draw from.

Question: Why did you opt to do a 3rd person game as opposed to 1st person?

I like to refer to it as 2nd person I know it sounds a little weird but its like I love FPS’s but I wanted to show more a sense of character and also showing the character interacting in the environment. Like seeing his hands plant or seeing him climb over or seeing him grab onto things without having to worry about the weird hand (does strange gesture) and all that kind of stuff. The short version of it; I’ve been making FPS’s for like 8 years and now I want to try something a little bit different. You know it’s like I think this has the best of both worlds. It’s very tight view on the character; it’s kind of like knees to waist up; it’s not like he’s very small. I want to show the character, I want to get a sense of who the character is and kind of offset him from the crosshair so he’s not in the way and then you have a target button for aiming; so it’s almost first person. You can see down the barrel of the gun but you also see the side of his head, so you can see like the light transmission when he shoots the gun coming through here. You can see him like grimacing or holding up his hand to give orders to his squad, things like that. So it’s kind of like reminds me of the best of both worlds.

Question: In your estimation how long do you think it will take to beat the single player portion of the game?

We’re planning the game point A to point B start to finish; my goal is to make it entertaining and worth $50. That means start to finish, cool moments. So were not willing to commit what time that will be I just know as a designer I’m not a fan of padding in games where they are like “ahh our game is not long enough lets copy this level and flip it and make it so now you have to go all the way back to your chopper” and I’m like alright already! So I would rather have new scenario where new things happen and make it entertaining so that’s my design philosophy for it.

Question: How easy or hard do you find it to program for the 360 platform?

We got it up and running two weeks ago like really really nicely on the 360 and we were pleasantly surprised. I ran through the office grabbing all of our designers, and artists going “come check this out, come check this out!” and we really had this watershed moment where we were looking at the game, running at a good frame rate not even as optimised as it’s going to be on the 360 on a HD TV and we’re like “okay!” because in the past coming off we’re making Unreal making out of the PC it’s like the PC is always the apex platform to work in. A PC developer generally tends to have a bad perception of a consoles as far as thinking you have to scale down all of your attach rates and goal overheads but in this instance were running high res textures , were running in HD resolution were using post processing effects, the lighting looks tight, the visuals look perfect and it’s like a breath of fresh air really!

Question: What’s your goal regarding the frame rate?

Cliff: As high as possible (laughs)

Mark: well we’ll be at least double where we are here I mean were definitely over 30 all the time. Our goal for Gears of War isn’t so much a particular frame rate. This isn’t a fast paced run and gun game like Unreal Tournament where we want 60 frames per second all the time. This is really about using a high degree of visual acuity, lots of great graphics, lots of detail to help tell the story. I don’t know if you noticed but I walked around back behind the room, an area where you don’t have to go as part of this demo so it was fully modelled out, looked beautiful everything is normal mapped. Our goals were to provide this cool believable world; so we’ll be over 30 but we don’t need to be 60. If we find were hitting 60 then were going to throw more visual effects in, throw more things going on, more post effects.

Cliff: It’s like a military budget if you don’t spend your budget every year you’ve got enough money.

Mark: we’ve done only, what we like to say is the most low hanging food optimisations thus far. Very low optimisations were only running on one core, so we know we can get a lot more power out of this system than just what were showing here and that’s exciting for us.

Question: What will the replay value be like in Gears of War?

Well one thing were doing in the game that I think is really compelling is this idea of parallel splits. It’s a single player game at its core but being able to play co-op. Player one plays as Marcus and player two plays as Dominic and there’s these moments where; did you see the E3 presentation where they are going through the campus and the big monster comes out.. Where the first guy who gets there chooses does he get to take the high road or the low road? Whatever route he takes the other guy takes the other way and then you’re both running in these areas where you can’t physically like, you know you’re blocked off but you can see each other and you can constantly flank each others enemies. If you are playing the game by yourself and you pick a path it’s like a choose your own adventure at that point. You pick that path and you can’t go back until you play the game again to see how that other section plays out. So there’s some replay ability as far as how that goes and then as far as like if this table (point to table) is like you know, the cover set up as far as how the scenario is going to go and the physics based cover and everything its like we randomise where the enemies come from in a number of instances. We have a section very early in the game where there are emergence holes where the Locusts are climbing out and we change where they are coming from depending on where you come in on the scene; where you take cover is going to play out differently in every single scene. So there’s that kind of Meta dynamic replay value there as well as that overall splitting path where you can choose and then co-op, multiplayer I think there a lot of potential there for replay ability.

Question: Will you be able to choose a completed level to play again once beaten?

Well for me it’s like breaking the game up into a series of 10-15 maybe 20 minute moments it’s like mini chapters. I want something to happen every15- 20 minutes maybe because I have bad attention span being raised on MTV or maybe just because I want something exciting to happen but the game will auto save on a regular basis and then we’re going to bookmark each one of those chapters and then allow you to go back. Halo did something similar as far as picking each chapter; you can try a different difficulty, there’s nothing wrong with allowing that. It’s like “oh I did chapter four section 3 on godlike mode” and people are like wow and then what we can do is give you (pauses). Were planning on and I can’t really talk much about this much yet but kind of lead into it a little bit; we’re working on a trophy room where you can hang up all your challenge in your own trophy room and invite your friend on Live to come and check out your trophy room and things like that. But don’t talk too much about that because were still working on it! (smiles)

Mark: but your still being videoed!

(room fills with laughter)!

Question: A question about the environments, in the trailer we see a rocket hit a building and the building stayed the same afterwards. Will there be more destructible environments?

There’s going to be physics based destroyable environments as far as everything being set up in certain instances like a house of cards. The demos you have seen previously haven’t really leveraged physics much beyond rag doll physics, some debris going around. We’re working on scenarios where the enemies are in cover and you can kind of knock down a pillar and collapse the building behind them on them. For the game there will be a clear visual language as far as like I mentioned wood is destructible. If the pillar is of wood then you can destroy it, or if it’s stone or concrete it will generally tend to hold up. The engine is being built primarily for visual effects as far as animations and post effects, going down that kind of geo-mod route is not a route we plan on with this generation of technology.

Question: Will there be any kind of back story to the game and the characters?

Were hoping that there will be a second and third game in the franchise; we have planned for how that will play out. We have a story bible and as I mentioned Eric Nylund is doing the writing on the game he’s a great writer, he developed the Halo novels. For me a universe is irrelevant, it’s not interesting or cool unless you have a sense of context. Every place that you go to in this world has a history as far as how it played into the pendulum wars which were the wars that happened before the Locust hoard attacked on emergence day. Each soldier relates to the other soldier as far as where he was that day when the Locusts attacked its kind of a unifying sad event that everybody had happen to them as far as losing family members, losing businesses and losing everything that meant anything to these people. So you have a greater sense of desperation as far as humanity truly having its back against the wall and taking itself very seriously in the franchise and taking the universe seriously. I think that’s something very very important; especially if we’re going to get a movie made! (grins).

Question: Any specific plans (in regards to a movie)?

Who knows; you never know. They made Dukes of Hazard! (smiles)

Question: In regards to the AI, will they work as a team or tackle you on an individual basis?

Mark: absolutely

Cliff:We’re implementing a hierarchy where you have a base drone who is the standard Locust and that there’s the elite guard called the Ferron (spelling?) and they are kind of the crimson guard of the Locusts. There’s also the guy were going to be showing at X05 that’s actually lower than the standard drone and how that dynamic plays out we have some cool surprises planned out in how the interaction plays out with him. You talk about story, you talk about the creatures you talk about the interactions between them we have an entire document that outlines the different types of Locusts and how each Locust feels about the other Locusts as far as does it respect it, does it fear it and all that. From there we draw upon that to figure out what the hierarchy is; its our job now to make that clear in the game using visual and audio cues and make the AI obvious.

Question: Do you feel that details like that (as far as back story) are important to make a game more immersive?

If you have a large bible when you’re working on the game; if we know that Marcus’s favourite food is hotdogs, does that actually make the game better? No, but it’s those kinds of details that we can draw upon as we’re writing dialogue. It’s kind of like a writing exercise where you might do a writing exercise of the squad of Delta Company sitting down playing a game of poker and the kind of things they talk about as far as their wives or what’s been going on or what their hobbies are things like that. That’s what gives you a sense of who these guys are; so that stuff in my opinion may initially seem ancillary but I think it’s very very important.

Question: Can you switch your stance from left to right a la splinter cell?

Yes were working on the click, right now you can do it when you are in cover as far as you pop up and kind of swap over.

Mark: There’s going to be a lot of character animation in this game its just incredible. There’s a lot of detail just in characters; there’s multiple ways to charge doors, there’s all the different cover animations, there’s reloading. Making the characters feel real through animation is a very important goal for us.

Cliff: For instance if you look at Dom’s arm right there (points at action on the screen) there’s a tattoo on his arm and it says Maria. That’s his wife which he made reference once or twice in the game; but the fact that its there is kind of a little detail there. Well that’s the kind of stuff that makes you really believe that these are living breathing characters.

Question: It’s a very dark looking game are you going to feature many daylight levels?

Oh yeah! We have day scenes we have night scenes but we also have some weather effects that were working on in keeping with the Locusts and the theme of light verses dark. The scene we showed at E3 the military academy, that was a daylight scene. As we graph out the overall single player campaign we actually say ok this happens at two o’clock in the afternoon this happens at four o’clock. There are scenes where these guys are like the sun is going to set, the Locusts can unleash crazier things we better hurry up and finish this mission before it gets dark. And then it goes from bad to worse and you get caught outside.

Question: Where did some of the initial inspiration behind the game came from?

If you look at Halo and you look at Doom a lot of the inspiration comes from Aliens. So that’s like a cool movie and I’m a fan. I draw from books and comics and anything around me that I find interesting and I kind of put my own unique twist on what that is.

It’s important to note here that the sequence that you are seeing here is just one section of the game. The entire game isn’t just about getting eaten by Krill. There’s some very large monsters that you’re fighting in some instances, there’s some puzzle based physics based puzzles that we’re working on, some vehicular elements in the game as well.

Question: Can you tell us anything more about the squad mechanics in the game?

You can order the squad but I want to keep it a very simple system. I play a lot of games where it feels like you are sweeping your guys along “ok don’t be dumb, don’t get shot at” (laughter) and its not so much about in a lot of games squad based game play as it is about babysitting. I don’t want it to be babysitting because the focus of the game is using your guns, getting in cover and taking out the enemy, mantling over cover , creating cover that kind of thing. The AI system as far as the orders you are going to give them is going to be very versatile. Were not really pitching what that is going to be today but I promise you that it’ll be there and it will be easy to use. I want the guys to take cover and be smart and think on their own. Issuing their marching orders!