SourceWe didn't expect to be rolling our eyes during the world debut of multiplayer Gears of War 2. "It's bigger, better, and more badass," says an enthusiastic Cliff Bleszinski, reiterating the three B-words that were up on a large screen in a conference room in developer Epic Games' Cary, NC-based offices. But can the marketing message be more...marketing? We're sure other companies have spoken those same generic, feel-good words about their sequels -- just maybe not out loud to the gaming press and their notebooks and tape recorders.
And we're sure we've never heard such clichés out of Bleszinski's mouth. The 33-year-old lead designer on the Gears series may be slick (he drives a $200,000 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder), charismatic (MTV created a show around his life and his role in the development of Gears 1), and PR savvy (he must've done at least 14 hours of interviews over two days for this Gears 2 event), but he's still got legit geek cred. The guy loves horror movies, Optimus Prime, and, without a doubt, videogames (his name once made it into Nintendo Power as a Super Mario Bros. top scorer, and he made an Apple game called Where in Panama Is Manuel Noriega? on 5 1/4-inch floppy for a high school class).
Click the image above to check out our interview with Cliff Bleszenszki and new multiplayer video footage.
But if Mr. Legit Geek is going to say stuff like, "It's bigger, better, and more badass," then we're going to have to reality-check this. Thankfully, our day with Gears 2, due out this November for Xbox 360, wasn't all a rah-rah PowerPoint presentation (where, incidentally, Epic also shared with us how many awards they've won and how many bajillion units of Gears 1 that they've sold). We had over six hours of hands-on multiplayer time, so we could see for ourselves whether the game was bigger. Or badder. Or more badass.
Yes, Gears of War 2 is bigger. Not necessarily in terms of individual map acreage -- the three stages that we got to play didn't feel larger or smaller than what we were used to. Maybe "more" is the more accurate adjective. More players (support for up to 10 players now). More weapons. More modes (that aren't all cookie-cutter versions of each other, thank god). More maps. And...more.
Epic upgraded Gears' old 4-versus-4 setup to fit players 9 and 10 (and if you don't have that many friends, we got word that Gears 2 might offer A.I. bots to fill in the blanks). The 10-player limit doesn't change the complexion of Gears' standard multiplayer game too much, except in Wingman, a new, multi-team 2-versus-2 (versus 2 versus 2...up to five pairs total) mode whose victors are determined by an overall kill goal. Here, you and your partner will share the same character model since Gears doesn't use the entire spectrum for its armor colors (à la Halo), so you'll see groups of two Marcuses, two Doms, two Locust chieftains, and so on running around the map, attempting to take out the other couples.
Meatflag is another new mode that is essentially capture the flag, only the flag is a person with a gun and a lot of sass. The loudmouth meatflag is played by one of the Stranded, those lost-soul civilians you run into during the campaign. This A.I. character sits in the middle of the map, shooting anyone who gets near him (he even has his own scores in the postgame report). If you can damage him enough to down him -- he can't die, mind you -- then you can carry him back to your team's designated scoring area. If he gets free, however (if the opposing team kills you or knocks the meatflag out of your grip), then your team has a certain amount of time to get him down and into your possession again before the goal marker moves to another location. Yeah, it's still capture the flag. But things are a lot more frantic and fun when the flag has bite.
The third new mode we got to play is called Guardian, which combines elements from the past. "We really liked Assassination in Gears 1," Senior Producer Rod Fergusson says of the original game type where only the designated leader can pick up new guns for himself or the rest of his team. "But it was probably our least-played original mode. Then Annex went out as part of a title update in Gears 1 and introduced the notion of respawn. What if we apply that to Assassination?"
So the premise in Guardian is as long as the designated leader is alive, his team can continue to respawn. Clear indicators always point to both leaders, so dull stalemate situations should be kept to a minimum. But this mode is way more intense and exciting than anything Gears has offered before. Your team must protect its leader while simultaneously hunting down the opposing side's equivalent, and if you lose yours, it feels like the end of the world (and if you make a comeback from there, it's all the more thrilling).
Gears of War 2 will have more than these three modes (including Warzone, the standard elimination-style deathmatch), but Epic isn't revealing what they all are at the moment. But all three of the ones we played seemed to work equally well on all three of the maps from our demo. Gridlock returns with its courtyard of rubble and rusted-out husks of old cars, only much prettier. We didn't play it, but run-down (well, everything's pretty much run-down in this universe) and rainy Subway will make a comeback as well -- but that's all as far as returning maps go. The rest are all new, and the plan is to have plenty of them. "It's looking like over 10 new maps, at least," says Bleszinski.
A lot of new gameplay changes not only make a visceral game even more visceral (thus the "badder" part of the equation here), but they just plain make sense, too. Would-be lumberjacks will have a lot more gut-ripping fun with the Lancer in Gears 2, but at the same time, they won't be invulnerable like they were before. Other new moves like wall hugging, the ability to interrupt doorway "SWAT" turns, being able to crawl to safety while bleeding out, and a ton of new execution styles give the game more realistic combat options.
Some weapons now have "stopping power," which the developers put in specifically to stop the silly antics Gears 1 players have resorted to. "We had some issues with the way that Gears multiplayer...was played when it was released into the wild," says Fergusson. "Our favorite weapon, the Lancer, was getting underused, and it became more of a shotgun battle. One of the things we saw people doing a lot was just charging, evading, and then shotgunning up close. It became a constant shotgun/evasion battle." So in Gears 2, if someone's running right at you, a few rounds from an assault rifle or a pistol can slow him down to the point where he'll have to turn away and look for cover or die in his tracks, thus nullifying the old charge/evade/attack tactic. It won't take long for most folks to get used to the idea that dashing toward an armed target is no longer a good idea....
After the initial adjustment period, Gears 2 players should end up more well-rounded warriors than their Gears 1 counterparts. In the sequel, some maps' power weapons will rotate in between matches. So where a Longshot sniper rifle used to be, a Torque Bow may sit in round two. The general class of offensive hardware will be the same (like those two sniping-style weapons), so you should still have a basic idea of what you're getting into without it being too predictable. And the new Achievements will help make sure players aren't running around like jackasses, trying to complete their "Kill 100 enemies with chain saw gun/grenade tag/curb stomp/etc." goals. Now the game will only count one of those specific kills per round toward that corresponding Achievement in order to encourage everyone to use different weapons.
Of course, you can't be "badder" if you're dead and spectating from the afterlife sidelines. The new, dynamic battle cam, however, lets you study the remaining players in new ways. You can still track individuals with the traditional "follow cam." You can also observe parts of the map from a bird's-eye perspective, only the camera will automatically shift around, giving you a cinematic view of the action.
Gears 2 also offers a completely free-floating, user-controlled "ghost cam." No big deal, you might say, but Epic's letting you have some fun with this. "We're going to have this photo mode [like] Pokémon Snap or Dead Rising," says Fergusson. "When you press the A button, it shows you your screenshot and automatically scores it based on how many particle effects are going off, how close the characters are to the center of the screen, is anybody bleeding, is there an execution going on...." To keep this off-action action competitive, the game will automatically upload your screenshot and score to a website leaderboard, so you can compare your wartime photojournalism skills to other players.
We also suspect Gears 2 will have some sort of video-capture mode like the one seen in Halo 3. No one at Epic confirmed or denied this, but we did see status messages saying "Watching a video" instead of "Playing Gears of War 2" in our Xbox Live players list during our demo. Simple placeholder text (the game is still in development, after all) or a hint at a new feature to come?
We probably would've been satisfied with more weapons, maps, and (especially) modes for multiplayer Gears of War 2. But the gameplay tweaks may be the stars here. A different animation here, a new move there...Epic's making it difficult for us to go back to the old game (just being able to crawl is a huge deal!).
So is Gears 2 bigger? Definitely in the features department, yes. Badder? The game is more violent, so...check. And more badass? Yeah, we'll have to give that to the 33-year-old Lamborghini-driving geek. "We're feeling really good that we're going to be delivering something incredibly special," says Bleszinski. "We're looking forward to chainsawing the hell out of you guys."
The new screens can be seen here.
And the new multiplayer gameplay/Cliffy B. interview can be seen here.
This looks awesome, new game modes, halo3 esque lobby system and loads of cool finishing moves! roll on november
