Gears of War : Judgement

[Sly Reflex]

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/901953-gears-of-war-judgment-preview-the-bairds-tale

Considering Gears Of War 3 only came out eight months ago you could be forgiven for not getting too excited about the idea of a prequel starring smartass Damon Baird. We know we weren't, and so we accepted an invitation to hear more about the game with our expectations firmly in check.

We were curious to know why the game had been so mysteriously side-lined at Microsoft's media briefing though, and although technically we never really found out the answer to that we did get to hear about a game that sounds significantly more interesting than you, and certainly we, might have expected.

Present in our quiet little corner of Microsoft's E3 booth were Epic Games design director Cliff 'CliffyB' Bleszinski and People Can Fly creative director Adrian Chmielarz. Although Epic are still overseeing the game Polish developer People Can Fly are actually making it, after proving themselves with first person shooter Bulletstorm.

According to Bleszinski a prequel to Gears Of War was a 'no-brainer' but there was considerable indecision over exactly when and where to set the campaign mode…

'You look at doing Emergence Day, day one of when the Locusts first came out, and how do you do a Gears game without the chainsaws? Because they don't come in till later, right? And then we thought about doing it in the Pendulum Wars, where the humans were fighting each other. But again: no chainsaw and no monsters.

So we actually thought the setting that made the most sense was the 'emergence window', several months after when they have their first chainsaw guns and they've learned that an ordinary bayonet ain't gonna count it anymore.

And then we thought about characters and if you look at Gears Of War 3 Baird really didn't get to tell his story at all. And we looked at our customer satisfaction surveys Baird was right there near the top of the list, as one of the most beloved characters in the franchise. Which surprised me at first until I thought about the world in which we live and sarcastic people on the Internet, and it really made sense that one of our most sarcastic characters was beloved by everyone.

So the game is kind of a flashback/testimony/trial of Baird and what happened to him. It's a return to the core values of Gears, of just hardcore crunchy combat, sweaty palms gameplay, challenging - you want to play casual go stay in the kiddy pool. All the difficulty modes here are hard and kind of telling the story of what happened there.'

Following this warm-up we're then treated to the trailer below, an extended version of the teaser shown in the media briefing, which shows a few seconds of campaign gameplay. (But doesn't, Bleszinski warns us, contain any dubstep or Inception horns.)

At this point though we're still not convinced, but as the two begin to explain the details of the gameplay, and its new features, that all begins to change. For a game that's been designed according to the chronology of when chainsaw bayonets were invented, and by what someone wrote on a customer satisfaction survey, Judgment seems unusually ambitious.

Chmielarz starts by talking about a desire to regain the intensity of the earlier games. One of the primary means of doing this is what he refers to as 'S3' or the smart spawn system. This is far more interesting than its name suggests and is basically an on-the-fly difficulty level which monitors how well you're doing and how you're playing, and throws in new enemies specifically to knock you out of your comfort zone.

According to Chmielarz the game not only monitors simple things like your accuracy and how much damage you're taking but also where you are on a map and what direction you're looking in. He give the example of one player being in the corner of an area, happily shooting Locust, and then having S3 purposefully starting spawning them from a different location to confound you.

S3 is also designed to remove any element of trial and error gameplay, so if you struggle through a section and die just short of a checkpoint restarting will not necessarily result in any of the same obstacles. Enemies will appear in different locations each time and if you up the difficultly level you'll get completely different opponents than at lower levels.

'We want to people to be afraid of Locust again,' says Chmielarz. 'So we've found a new way of narrating the story in Gears: Judgment with a system called declassification. So the entire thing is told in flashback, so this is a trial, so when you play you relieve the events that led to the trial and the downfall of Kilo Squad. So imagine that the first time that you play through a section of the game this is the sort of classified version. If you imagine the written version of the testimony there would be a lot of black ink on it, now after playing through any section once you can then unlock the classified version - which is the true version of what really happened there.

As an example this is the stuff that COG would want to keep away from the public, like the very existence of new enemy types or some kind of ugly truth like COG was about to destroy certain areas without first checking whether there were any friendly units nearby. So this translates to additional challenge in a mission, like you'd have limited time and suddenly the mission you think you understood and got you need to play in a completely different way. No longer can you hide behind the first cover you get, you have to be very proactive.

Sometimes you run out of ammo and, well… good luck. These are the simplest examples but sometimes the environment changes in the classified version. The other side of declassification is you can declassify mission details, the details are kind of hazy - and I mean that literally. Every now and then you will see these sort of fuzzy objects, is it really there or not? And you can earn the right, by performing well or by grinding, to materialise that object. So, for example, you see a mech there and you earn the right to materialise the mech and it will materialise. And your testimony will dynamically change at this point.'

Chmielarz also explains how the increased difficulty and the greater number of enemies on screen at once has led to changes having had to be made to the control system. You now have the option of a quick throw for a grenade, and a single button can now be used to switch between your two primary weapons - with a pistol accessed by holding that same button down.

But then Bleszinski chimes in again with what is obviously his pet subject: the decreasing lack of challenge in modern video games.

'In this generation of games it's hallway, cut scene, hallway cut scene, and right when you feel you're getting in the flow of the game it's like, no! Cut scene! Cut scene! In this game you have long stretches of awesome, challenging combat that when you finally get a cut scene it's there not only to advance the story but to give you a break! To let your palms dry from the sweat and intensity of the experience. So you're relieved to see the cut scene rather than being annoyed that it's being crammed down your throat every two feet'.

At this point we're shown a second video introducing the new OverRun game mode, which has previously been described as a mix of Horde and Beast modes from the previous games. The basic gist is that two teams are fighting over a generator in the middle of a map, with one playing as human COG forces and the other as Locust. One team has to destroy the generator the other defend it, with the two sides switching over half way through.

For the first time this will see the introduction of multiplayer classes into Gears Of War, with the humans represented by a different character each in the story mode. Baird is an engineer that can deploy sentry turrets and repair barricades. Cole is a soldier that can drop ammo crates and resupply the engineer’s blowtorch. New character Sophia is a medic with special health-giving grenades, while Garron (an ex- UIR soldier) is a scout who has a sniper rifle and a beacon grenade.

The Locust classes are the Wretch, which can jump over obstacles; the Ticker, which can eat barricades and grenades; the Kantus medic unit; the self-explanatory Grenadier; melee expert the Bloodmout; the shield-carrying Mauler; the ranged fighter the Serapede; and the burrowing Corpser.

It all sounds very good, but as the pair end their sales pitch and begin to invite questions, we're still more interested in the campaign mode. So we ask Bleszinski first, whether Judgment is the new serious, more gritty Gears Of War game he's been talking about making for the last few years.

'I think a little bit of that tone will come through in this game, we're not really announcing who the writers are for this game yet, but again I can't suddenly take the Gears Of War franchise and overnight get some of that DNA out of there. Because Cole is still Cole, Baird is still Baird, but there will be steps to mature the franchise.

'It can't just be an overnight sudden thing, because then it wouldn't be Gears. So this follow-up coming up relatively recent time frame after Gears Of War 3 suddenly completely changing course doesn't make sense. So keep that in mind for future progress.'

We ask then whether it would it be right to infer then that the advent of the future generation of consoles is the point at which he'd be looking to make a more significant shift in tone. 'One might assume that, but I'm not committing to anything,' he says with a grin.

We also ask about the obvious problem with dynamic level design: that it makes it difficult to insert set pieces and other hand-crafted moments. A problem common in role-players with procedurally generated dungeons, and an issue that occasionally arises in the Halo series as well.

'It's a very good question,' says Chmielarz. 'But there are ways around this in the way that you maintain the uniqueness of the experience by being surrounded by these larger-than-life events that looks like a $200 million action blockbusters.'

'You'll have the set pieces of the Hammer of Dawns raining down around you and things like that, blowing up the buildings,' Bleszinski assures us.

'The problem with this current generation is that we rely a little too much on that, and things like quick time events, at the expense of gameplay. And what is really interesting is multiple systems interacting and meshing to provide scenarios that we didn't even anticipate, that make our testers really stay awake at night,' he adds.

'What I remember from Skyrim is not a cut scene or a story moment, but when it was at night and I saw a deer,' says Chmielarz. 'And I felt that the discovery was all mine, this was special for me. So we are trying to create these kinds of memories.'

'I just keep thinking of the more dynamic shooters that were in the Mega Drive era, what they would throw at you depending on how well you were doing and what area you were in, and it's kind of full circle from that,' concludes Bleszinski.

The other implication of this approach though, we point out, is that Judgment will feature a significantly higher difficultly level than many might expect. And this at a time when publishers are trying to attract as many players as possible by making games as easy and linear as they can, with little emphasis on learning or demonstrating a skill.

'When you look at Mario when he's at his best is what they'll do is they'll give you a new world in Super Mario Galaxy and they'll say 'Here's a new suit, now go out and have fun with it', says Bleszinski. 'And then, 'Now prove that you’ve learnt how to use the suit and we'll give you some more rewards'. There's going to be a lot of that in this game, it's not just going to be cakewalking. You actually have to engage and try.'

Does this mean Bleszinski thinks gamers are starting to rebel against this generation's often patronisingly low difficultly levels? Are we about to enter a second age of genuinely difficult video games?

'I think there's a reason why Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have a certain strong following now, because I think the nature of this generation of consoles has swung to a bit too easy, a bit too leading you completely through… 'Oh no, the player might get lost! Let's give them a completely obvious way to go'. Players playing games want things to be a challenge, if they get lost they'll find their way.'

[Sly Reflex]

Some Canadians working in Electronics Boutique have started reporting that the release of this will be March 1st 2013. No point in linking, because EPIC will destroy the threads when they see them.

[Sly Reflex]

Oh dear. I can sort of understand stopping power going, but the active reload buff retiring is a bit off. I wonder how pissed off all the gnasher fans are going to be when they realise that they won't be able to blow people into chunks for 10 feet away by pre-activing as the round starts?

[Sly Reflex]

I hope they nerf the fuck out of everything bar the Hammerburst (which I understand is returning to its burst variant?), the Torque and the Longshot. The only things that need a buff are the sawed off, which is extremely shit no matter what they do with it, and the digger, which unless you are using it like a makeshift mortar is pretty rubbish. In fact I hope they keep the sawed off but make it different like the Hammerburst changed over the course of the 3 games. Either that or restore it to when it was actually good and put it as a power weapon. That would be funny if that happened. People rushing the sawed off as a power weapon.

[hinn888]

Previously rumoured for a February 2013 launch, Gears of War: Judgment now has an officially official release window, and that February rumour wasn't all that far from the mark.

Epic Games Director of Production, Rod Fergusson (AKA GearsViking on Twitter) has confirmed to G4TV/XPlay that the game will be launching in March 2013, meaning there won't be all that long a wait to play People Can Fly and Epic's next instalment in the Gears series.

"You heard it here! Gears of War Judgment will be released in March... But @GearsViking won't let us say more yet," reads the tweet from XPlay.

[Sly Reflex]

Some new Overrun stuff here.

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/59838/gears-of-war-judgment-overrun-mode-tutorial-comic-con-2012-trailer/

Somebodies being paying close attention to all the DOTA shit flying around.

[Sly Reflex]

http://www.oxm.co.uk/44603/gears-judgment-gets-free-for-all-exclusive-screenshot/

Free for all mode confirmed.

Not content with a new developer and some new leading men, Epic has added a new multiplayer element to Gears of War: Judgment - Free-For-All mode.

We went over to its Carolina HQ to try it out, and you can find out all the details in the new issue of OXM, but in the meantime we've got an exclusive new Gears Judgment screenshot to share.

[Sly Reflex]

They've put it in because people have been asking for it for a while. It'll be crap. I sort of worry that the popularity of Brothers to the End will kill Wingman. Now, I'm no fan of Wingman, but it's way better than playing camp the Boomshot. It least with Wingman you have to be an aggressive player, all BttE is is win the initial push and then camp it out until the other runs out of lives or you managed to milk the stupid bot. I'm as guilty as the next man for doing that, but it isn't fun at all.

I hope CTL games a make over too. Cross the games up from of KotH (GoW2) and Submission (GoW2). Replace the leaders with and NPC stranded, make holding the stranded fill up a counter and finally make it so that any team holding the stranded cannot respawn while they are in possession. I know you love the gametype as it stands Nag, but it's boring as fuck to play. Pulling leader is a proper fucking pain in the arse.

I wish it used trueskill or something as it is now to pick the leader so the best players would always pull leader. I think all the gametypes could do with a long hard look at apart from Warzone. Execution should mean execution, no gibbing with the Gnasher. If you want the kill you have to do an execution. The fairness of the other gametypes is a bit shit as well, but we al know that anyway. Fucking stupid spawns.

[Sly Reflex]

The sawed off and retro are back!

I'm glad to see it looks like they've put all the characters in. Awwww take it!

Bairds armour looks really blue.

[Sly Reflex]

Did you notice that you can pick health up too? I think the people that have the aura around them just picked a health drop.

I dunno if it's just the way they cut it, but it looks super fast. Check this.

Looks pedestrian now.

Lol at the smoke tag. I forgot about that.

Bernie man, got to love her.

Now go look at the Judgement vids. The games gradually getting quicker and quicker.

[Sly Reflex]

Massive interview with the writers.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-30-gears-of-war-judgment-writers-on-what-makes-the-series-special-and-how-to-improve-it

In the past, the Gears of War series hasn't been particularly lauded for its writing.

Dead Space story producer Chuck Beaver called it, "literally the worst writing in games," and Gears of War 3 scribe Karen Traviss didn't instil much confidence when she called herself "a writer who doesn't read novels."

Epic Games seems to have taken these criticisms to heart and has brought on Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter author and New Yorker contributor Tom Bissell along with his writing partner Rob Auten - a consultant at 20th Century Fox who worked on Avatar - to pen the upcoming prequel Gears of War: Judgment.

Thus, the question on everyone's minds is thus; Why Gears? And: What are they going to differently?

I caught up with Bissell and Auten in a phone interview to answer these questions and more. After hearing them discuss this latest collaboration, it's become clear that this is a radically different beast than the bombastic slaughterfest we're used to, even if it still contains chainsaw sodomy.

"So why Gears?" I ask Bissell. To polite society it may seem like a regressive move after penning critically acclaimed novels and having short stories made into movies.

"It's just how fun and intense the combat was," he says. "The first time I played Gears seeing these locusts you'd blow apart with a shotgun kind of walked the line between being really horrifying and almost comic. The way you navigated that really delicate line of violence that was crazy but also but also had this - Cliff once called it Gallagher hitting a melon with a sledgehammer."

"I'm a sucker for it," he continues. "I really like how it feels."

Auten's initial intrigue followed a similar trajectory. "When I got a console Gears was the first game I went out and actively purchased." He says that whenever a new Gears game comes out he has to play it day one with a buddy. "It's always sort of been kind of a special game playing experience for me." Between that and Bissell's exposure to the series having written a profile on Gears designer Cliff Bleszinski for the New Yorker several years back, Auten felt that it was a perfect opportunity for the pair.

Okay, so Gears is fun. We all know that. But what makes it rise above a guilty pleasure into something that respected literary folk would want to dedicate a long-term commitment to focus on?

"I'll tell you the thing I like about Gears the most," says Tom, who elaborates on this in the Gear of War 3 art book he scribed. It's "all these conceptual contrasts in the game. It's a rifle game, but you fight so close to each other it feels like a gladiatorial combat game. It's a sci-fi game, but all the weapons are projectile weapons grounded mostly in the technology of Vietnam. It's a game about these characters' relationships - it's kind of a buddy game - but it also gets into some fairly dark stuff."

"It takes place in its own world that has been completely divided by its human population, much less a major conflict going on with an underground enemy," adds Auten. "There's beautiful destruction but also beautiful architecture. It's visually and conceptually unique. And in that space it's enabled the creation of these very memorable and recognisable characters."

"People knock Gears for being derivative, but in 2006 there was nothing else that looked like Gears out there," Bissell explains. "Gears looked like a heavy metal album cover meets Full Metal Jacket meets Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings. And that was really different in 2006. I mean no-one had really combined those strands of popular entertainment before, so that to me is what makes it cool."

Auten then describes it as "a web of many different threads" or "a grandmother's patchwork quilt" in the cosiest metaphor ever attributed to the series.

This isn't to say the new writing team - and Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly - will tone down the violence. In fact, that's one of their favourite things about the series.

"It doesn't consistently take itself too seriously," says Auten. "Seeing these big and scary creatures come out of the ground is a fun and visceral experience."

Bissell, who's generally socially conscious about how violence is portrayed in the media, reckons Gears sidesteps some of the moral grey areas that haunt typical shooters where you go around blowing people's heads off. "Gears of War is an over-the-top action game filled with lots of larger than life moments and characters and the violence is a part of what I really like about it because it's very explosive," he says. "I would feel a little bit differently working on a game like Call of Duty or Battlefield which I think have a different level of responsibility with the fidelity of combat and human on human violence."

Both Bissell and Auten are also drawn to the series because it taps into an adolescent part of their brains that gets excited about visceral sci-fi/fantasy adventures.

"What I love about Gears is that it feels like I'm 14 again," says Bissell. "As an adult you go to a part of your imagination that you cherish so much from when you were a kid and a teenager - loving sci-fi, loving Star Wars. And making this game that's way darker than that but captures some of those sci-fi loving emotions you have when you're discovering this stuff - it's a total blast.

"The first time I sat in at the studio and saw Fred Tatasciore as Baird say a line I wrote was one of the most joyfully deliriously happy moments of my writing life."

Auten explains it's not simply nostalgia because he played the game in his twenties. Rather it's a sense of deja vu from being that age and filled with wonder. "Even as we and the rest of the audience age forward I think there's something really special about the series that takes you back to that kind of place no matter how old you are."

Clearly both Bissell and Auten understand and appreciate the series on a deep level - deeper than most people consider the story of meatheads slaughtering muscular gun-toting insects, I reckon - but the question remains, how will they leave their own mark on the series?

"We really tried to make this a character driven game," says Bissell. "We really worked hard to make Cole and Baird's friendship actually feel like something that's not stated. It's not told to you. 'These guys are best pals, watch them go.' We actually tried to give them more moments to actually see them relate to each other as guys that really love each other and we worked really hard on making that connection something that's actually real."

That's right, Bissell used the L word to talk about two dudes from Gears of War. And he means it too. This won't be Brokeback Platoon, but it's important to the team that these characters' friendship feels real, deep and authentic.

"Their connection is sort of like a camp friend," says Auten. "These guys haven't known each other for very long and they've fallen for each other very quickly. They rely on each other, they are kind of a dual creature and they share brains and brawn between them."

Besides fleshing out Baird and Cole, the new writers are thrilled at the opportunity to create two new major characters. "It's exciting that we're allowed to bring characters this substantial to a franchise that's so established," says Auten. "We've already plotted out their backstories and what happened and why and maybe someone will explore some of that material as well."

"We're kind of in love with [the new characters] and we really hope people will love [them] too," says Bissell.

He then explains that the locusts are relatively simple villains because that allows for more time to delve into these character moments.

"The nice thing about having the locusts as the enemy is that we never really hear about their motivations. They're monsters. And that gives you a lot of time to work on the character to character stuff.

Because when the moral rightness of their characters is established you don't have to argue over the ramifications of marching through these endless waves of enemies like you do in something like Spec Ops. They're monsters that you're plowing through because they will f***ing kill you if you don't."

Perhaps the biggest change the writers are bringing to Gears of War: Judgment is its unique narration that alters based on what Classifications - Gears parlance for "additional challenges" - you accept.

Since the game is told in flashback by a squad giving testimony before a judge, there's plenty of wiggle room for how these recollections can be told.

"The outcome is the same; it's not a Choose Your Own Adventure," says Bissell clarifying that there won't be branching paths. "What does change is the narration itself. You're never going to hear the same game narrated."

"When you pick them [classifications] the narration changes. And when you succeed at them the narration changes. And so what's cool about it is that it's going to be very hard to play through the game and hear the same narration... It's the same event from slightly different perspectives.

"I'm calling it quietly, sneakily innovative in that it I'm not entirely sure a game has been told quite in this way before. Other games have done aspects of it, but we've been really committed to this aspect of the testimony and I think it really works," proclaimed Bissell.

This shift in how the story is told could have a big impact on synchronising the storytelling and gameplay that tend to exist as conflicting pieces of entertainment in so many shooters.

I asked the pair of writers how they felt about Halo producer Matthew Burns' assertion that most shooters have bad writing because the template of going around shooting hundreds of dudes is inherently at odds with telling a mature story.

The problem is "deeply structural to the product itself, at a level where no amount of 'smart' versus 'dumb' choices can really change things," said Burns on his blog, Magical Wasteland.

Looking at a game "centred around shooting aliens with guns and lasers" or another "navigating an environment and punching people until they died" Burns deduced that "the very second you try to wrap actions like those in a 'good story' that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story".

Auten thinks this premise is flawed and that "anything can be done well". It just needs to be given the attention it deserves from the get-go.

"A shooter game can have a good story. One of the things that was really positive for us is we started working with the team here at Epic from the earliest conception of the game. We were involved in the conversations about what kind of game is was going to be. And from that perspective it helped us... We're listened to when we say, 'Can we make a little tweak?'"

Bissell, however, agrees with most of Burns' assessments.

"Matthew's essay really struck a chord in me because I think he's fundamentally right," he says. "If you're trying to tell a story in a shooter where you're doing shooty things, then have a cutscene in which the hero drops to his knees and agonises about finding his lost wife, that's never going to be good, ever."

So instead, Bissell proposes both the design and story change to be more harmonious with one another.

"In this game the story is literally moving through the level. The story elements we're adding and cutscenes are the testimony moments and talking to the judge. The story of this game - what happens in this game is actually traversing from point A to point B. That's the story! We're getting all of our storytelling juice into the moments that the player's actually playing.

"There's not that weird disconnect where the story is telling you our hero cherishes life so much he's willing to charge across the world to save it and he's going to kill a thousand guys on the way there."

"Gears has never been about the sanctity of life. It's actually the opposite. It's a brutal, savage world in which people are fighting for their lives. I think Matthew's right in the sense that most people choose to tell the wrong kind of story in a shooter space. This is a brutal, savage game about a brutal, savage world in which people do really brutal, savage things and it's all is grounded in itself. So we're not seeing contradiction in it to the degree I think a lot of shooters suffer from.

"When you're making a shooter story, you have to be very careful about the kind of story that you want to tell for there to be any hope that it'll be good."

I approached these writers wondering, why Gears? Having heard what they had to say, a better question would have been, why not?

I'm a bit undecided on this game, I think it might deliver something people don't really want.

[wholehole]

I wouldn't say I'm especially excited for it but I'm looking forward to playing it. It'll be just another Gears game regardless of all their chatter, same as Halo 4. At this point in the series we know what to expect and I'd be surprised if they release anything too different.

[Sly Reflex]

One of the main guys who plays Gears on youtube has played Overrun. It's quite a lengthy talk but it's quite interesting. It sounds like dota from wha he talks about.

[Sly Reflex]

She best have a foul mouth.

[Sly Reflex]

Just make the voice actor for her do Griffon's lines with extra swearing. That'll do me.

[Sly Reflex]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ARGciY5WA

[Sly Reflex]

Fucking hell, I think they removed all videos to shit I put up last night.

Here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKKdHR5uoPA

[Sly Reflex]

Terrible idea. Although it will eliminate humping, something which Gears if renowned for.

[Hendo]

Do the same as CoD, give lots of points to the person who did all the damage.

[Uncle Dokuro]

Although it will eliminate humping

I never took you as someone who is anti-humping.