[360] Gears of War: Judgment

[IamMedellin]

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[IamMedellin]

The New Gears of War Campaign Gets Harder As You Get Better

Last night, I had a chance to play OverRun mode, the great-looking new versus multiplayer in Gears of War: Judgment. Today, I sat down with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski and People Can Fly's Adrian Chmielarz to hear the first details about its single-player campaign.

There are a number of substantial-sounding tweaks to gameplay, all of which will result in a harder-core (and just plain harder) single-player game.

For starters, there's something that Chmielarz called "S3," or the smart spawn system. It sounds more or less like Left 4 Dead's AI director—based on how you're doing in the campaign, the game will change the flow of the game, sometimes dramatically.

If you're doing well, more and more difficult enemies will spawn in different locations, pushing you harder; if you're doing poorly, the game will ease up. This all happens relative to the difficulty that you've chosen at the outset—if you're playing on casual, it won't get too hard.

The idea is to promote replayability, since as Bleszinski pointed out, many people thought that Gears 3 was a short game even though it was technically their longest. That's because it was a bit too easy, in his opinion. The goal with Gears of War: Judgment is to give players something much more difficult.

The other big change is something called the "Declassification System," which is a smart bit of shiftiness built into the game's story. Which, as we already knew, is a prequel that will star the series' up-till-now second bananas Baird and Cole Train over a decade before the events of the first three Gears game. Bleszinski described Judgment as taking place slightly after Emergence Day—to put it in game terms, he called it "Emergence Day's launch window."

(Of course, I asked if Emergence Day had day-one DLC. Bleszinski declined to comment. Heh.)

See, Gears of War: Judgment is a "frame narrative"—the entire story is testimony given at Baird, Cole, and the rest of Kilo Squad's trial for treason. We're not sure what events led to them being disgraced as they have been, and we'll find out over the course of the game.

The flashbacks won't be reliable, however—at least, not 100%. Sometimes, Baird and company will remember things "wrong," and eventually you'll get a "declassified" version of each mission to play. Sometimes that'll mean that you have weapon restrictions, or that the setting or number of enemies are different. Other times it sounds like the implications could be more dramatic, though we didn't get into the details of what that might mean, exactly.

This is all laying the groundwork for a nifty bit of storytelling, though I must say I was a bit bummed to hear about another feature that allows players to "unlock" power-ups and weapons that are fuzzy because they "can't be remembered." But if you spend points, you'll remember them!

I don't quite know why this idea turns me off—after all, having different power-ups will make the levels feel different. But something about it seems silly? We'll see how it looks in the final game.

Most of what I heard about Gears of War: Judgment sounds as though the game will be much faster-paced, brutal, dynamic and difficult than its predecessors.

"There's more game in this game than previously," said Chmielarz.

With the game slated for a 2013 release, we will doubtless see more of the single-player game in the not-too-distant future. Regardless, what Chmielarz and Bleszinski are talking about aren't merely cosmetic changes—these will likely substantially change the feel of Gears.

http://kotaku.com/gears-of-war/

 

[Swarley]

Epic's Art Director Discusses The Look Of Gears of War: Judgment with GameInformer

Gears of War is making one more round on current-generation hardware, and Epic's art director Chris Perna is once again in charge of the look of the series. While no drastic changes have been made to the overall look of the franchise since it began in 2006, Perna and the team at Epic have been making subtle tweaks as the series has evolved. He talked about this as well as the process of designing a prequel in our interview below.

Game Informer: What was your approach when designing Gears of War: Judgment’s visual theme, and how does it compares with what the series has done in the past?

Chris Perna: I think one of the things that we want to get across is a lot more brutality of the Locust, a lot more fear. I think visually, it’s probably a darker theme than the other games as far as the Locust being scary again. We kind of got away from that a little bit over the course of the series. We’re trying to bring some of that back...some of the intensity, some of the fear. You know when we really concepted these things, they were stealers of children in the night. They were these ghostly figures. It was almost a survival horror game at one point. We kind of wanted to get back to the roots of the Locust and emergence day and show them as more vicious and fearsome.

What kinds of tweaks went into making the creatures scarier?

I’m not sure it’s so much an exact visual thing as an overall, encompassing thing with darker levels and scarier behaviors. More dark AI, things like that...they all come together to make them a bit more fearsome and brutal.

Tell us a little about designing the look of Halvo Bay.

I guess the overarching theme of Halvo Bay is sort of a San Francisco-type area. It was an older city that was built on armaments from the Pendulum War days and it gets destroyed. We wanted it to have that destroyed beauty look and carry that theme over, yet with a slightly darker tinge to it because emergence day recently happened.

We’re four games into the series now, and it features a wide range of enemies. How do you go about making a new enemy instantly identifiable when there are so many existing types with drastically different behaviors and looks?

Part of that is the dinosaur chart. We constantly refer to that. We got a bunch of little guys, now we need medium sized guys, and a giant guy. It just adds this palette to the scene when you see these big lumbering guys and fast moving guys. They all orchestrate together to create a really cool combat experience, and we try to think of those things when we design characters. In the past, we developed the Lambent to break cover. They had a specific purpose and that purpose was to break cover and break that game mechanic. They had tentacles and they could reach over cover and grow tall, that kind of stuff. Whether or not we really needed that or whether it was successful or not is debatable, but that is kind of the genesis of those ideas. Moving forward with Judgment, we tried to make the Locust feel scary again and give them a little bit more brutality...give them a little bit more aggressive AI behaviors and teamwork. Things that might surprise some people.

The RAAM’s Shadow DLC also took place prior to the trilogy. Did that serve as any indication of what we can expect from the world?

Yeah, and I think we really learned a few things from RAAM’s Shadow as far as quality and visual bar and things like that. I think that visually, this will be more of an enhancement from that. We’ve tweaked the engine a bit and added advanced bloom and different types of effects, and it’s really pushing things in a different direction. So, I think it will be an evolution from RAAM’s Shadow.

At no point has the series taken a drastically different art direction. The characters look like Gears characters, and the world looks like Sera. How do you stay within that world and use those characters and make it look distinctly like Gears while still making it seem fresh?

Yeah, that’s tough. Because you want to kind of evolve it. Gears of War 1 was Grays of War, right? I mean it was gray and brown and it was very desaturated. In some ways it changed the industry, because people tried to copy it and then everybody did it. We had to look at evolving that a little bit. So what we did with Gears of War 2 was push a little more color into it. It was subtle, but there was more color in it. If you go back and look at it, we tweaked the lighting and stuff like that. With Gears of War 3, we said “how can we evolve this further, and what should we do?”. We looked at engine tech and things that we wanted to do there. We said “wow, we can do this whole global illumination system and have this dominant directional lighting and make our shadows better, but it doesn’t work so well with desaturation. Let’s increase the colors even more. Let’s add some vibrancy to the environments and the characters and stuff like that.” So Gears 3 is the biggest jump. I think if you fire up Gears 3 and then go back and look at Gears 1, there is a pretty drastic shift in color and palette from 1 to 3 and that was done on purpose to evolve the franchise. Another thing we looked at doing was playing around with characters. For 3 we put them in their summer armor because the planet was hotter and stuff like that. How do you change these characters, yet still keep them recognizable in silhouette? That was a big challenge. We found that if we kept the circular breastplates, then what they wore in Gears 3 was kind of the under armor. That was the stuff that was under the stuff in Gears 1. That kind of worked for keeping things the same yet a little bit of an evolution.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of designing a younger Cole and Baird?

Yeah, sending him back was kind of tricky. Baird is actually an officer when he starts out. He’s cropped and trimmed. What we did was take a look at Baird in Gears 1, and he was acne-scarred. Denis Leary was part of the inspiration for Baird. You know, just this wisecracking, kind of *** guy. If you’ve ever Denis Leary’s stand up he’s smoking and drinking and just kind of ripping. So, that was Baird to me anyway. So we took him and we gave him some acne scarring and some battle damage and dirt and that was Gears 1. Pretty much throughout the whole Gears series, his fiction was getting busted down to private, and he was pissed about it and taking orders from Marcus. We took a look at where he was and then we said “well, what is he like as an officer? Well he’s fresh and he’s confident and he’s cropped and his hair is a little different, a little neater. His face doesn’t have acne. It isn’t dirty. And he’s a little bit younger and he doesn’t have the lines on his face and the battle wear.” So that’s what we did there. And Cole was an athlete, so he’s thinner and more agile. We kind of took him and made him a couple years younger and made his body a little more fit.

 

[IamMedellin]

Free Baird goggles for your avatar when you watch a teaser trailer on the Gears of War FB page

 

[Swarley]

March 19, 2013 Release Date

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[Handleit_44]

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.

"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.

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.

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.

 

[KINGOFOOTBALL]

Traviss has penned about 4 books now ? Seems like people think her writing is good. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book.
I stand by my statement that Ortegas awful decisions in GOW2 with the lambent was almost irreversibly bad. It was awful and unnecessary and a blatant Halo ripoff. Traviss did "ok" for part 3. Doms climax was great despite the annoyance of the lambent story arch. She completely missed an opportunity in the last act which was just bizarre. Marcus and his dads relationship was cardboard. They havent seen each other for how long ? ...can a fella get a hug ? Do we have to have Adam tell me a paragraph worth of information only to say "i ..i ...ill tell you when youre here" leading up to an anti climactic reveal ?

I think Chuck Beaver needs to clarify if he means dialogue or plot.

 

[IamMedellin]

Blasphemy...

You could get Bill Shakespear, Tolstoy, Faulkner AND Acesuper in a room and give them 20 years to finish this project and They STILL couldn't write a better story than Gears 3..

Without a Doubt, the Greatest Story not only of This Generation, Not Only in All of Gaming.....But in the HIstory of All Entertainment...

 

If this Doesnt move you, you're just Dead inside

 

[Swarley]

 

[DoubleDeuce]

A mod should change the thread title to Gears of War: Judgement. :yep:

Judgment* :shifty:

And I'm fucking excited for this game. I love Gears 3, and it's definitely the most polished of all three, but neither the third nor the second instilled in me the fear of the locust like the original. Scary ass locust in numbers never seen before? Count me in!

 

[Handleit_44]

 

[Swarley]

 

[Champ]

We now have 4 more videos. One of them shows you the new Free For All gametype. Next is the Mansion map of the campaign. Then Overun's "Junkyard" map. Then finally "Museum" from the campaign.

http://epicgames.com/community/2012/12/new-extended-gameplay-gears-of-war-judgment-videos/

 

[Swarley]

Just announced that this game will come with a code to download Gears of War 1.

 

[jms493]

Just announced that this game will come with a code to download Gears of War 1.

I wonder how much I can sell that code for?

 

[Twigg4075]

I wonder how much I can sell that code for?

I can't imagine much considering the triple pack sells for like $20.

I would much rather them include a free season pass with pre-orders or something. This is a pretty dumb incentive.