An early tagline for Gears of War 2 was “Bigger, Better, more Badass.” Now you’re describing it as “more epic, more personal.” What do you mean by that?

Cliff Bleszinski: “More epic” in regards to the battles, but also in regards to the scope of the problem that’s going on, as far as humanity’s back being against the wall. They’re in this spot they’ve holed up on called Jacinto that’s roughly the size of Manhattan and is threatened with complete collapse. Since the best defense is a good offense, The COG has to launch this full scale attack against the Locust and actually go down underground to where they live and take them out. And of course stop whatever the hell is sinking these cities and put a stop to it. It’s quite the huge task for humanity.

But at the same time in the midst of all that, Dom has his personal quest (to find his wife). Yes he has his duty to humanity, but he also has his responsibility to his wife and to finding out where she is. So those two things are kind of the bookends to that.

Expect lots more action in this "epic" follow up...

There’s a different look to the environments this time around. It’s six months after and winter is approaching, can you tell us how that effects the overall look and feel of the game?

Cliff Bleszinski: The game has this metaphor – the first game was “nightfall” as a background theme and the new game has an autumn vibe. As in the “autumn of humanity.” And we’re headed into Winter. The game is a little bit darker, thematically, than the first but it’s more beautiful. A lot of people remember the first game as being all gray colors, and this time around we designed the game to have more scenic vistas. So you’ll come over the hill and see this beautiful valley below you, and it’s this breathtaking moment – so of course all hell is about to break loose. The game is a little more saturated than the first as far as visuals go, not just completely grayed out everywhere. And there’s a lot more variety; you’ll see these little mountain hamlets with slushy snow everywhere and flurries falling all around all the way through to the mysterious areas of the Hollow, which is unique and looks like nothing anyone would expect to find underground and then to things like driving a tank up a mountain in a blizzard and everything in between. You’ll also get to see Jacinto, where humanity is living and everything in between.

So are you moving away from the concept of “destroyed beauty” that marked the first game?

Cliff Bleszinski: It’s still very much there as a theme, but it’s a back ground theme. I mean yes, you’re going through these beautiful cities that have all been destroyed, but you know we kind of want that to be “over there”. We don’t want to push a theme like into players’ faces; we don’t want to cram it down their throats. We want it to resonate in the background.

I think Gears is very much a franchise that’s about these big badass guys with chainsaw guns killing these lizard men. That is what it is. But there’s also sadness in the background and these secondary themes of loss and redemption. Those who play the game and really “get it” they start picking up these secondary elements. We just want to keep them a little more subtle.

It’s kind of a bait and switch. You say “ooh, look, badass guy, blood flying everywhere” then all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, this is a universe with a war over an energy source, and everybody in the universe has lost somebody and they’re conscripting people into the army and things are getting increasingly desperate and it’s a very, very dark situation. And that kind of resonates over a longer period of time. More so than blood ever will.

Let’s talk about the multiplayer a bit. In the first game, many gamers felt like the single player was the more enriching experience…

Cliff Bleszinski: I would have liked to have shipped with more modes.

… so going into this game, what was your overall outlook regarding multiplayer? What was your main objective?

Cliff Bleszinski: If you look at what we did with Gears 1, and you objectively look at how we pulled it off; it was a new IP, completely new universe, new version of our engine, new console, Epic hadn’t done a campaign based game in years, since the first Unreal (we produced Unreal II, but that was Legend Entertainment that developed it) so basically the odds were stacked against us. Plus, we did it with a team of like, forty guys. And the fact that we pulled it off was basically a miracle. At the same time, we have some of the most talented people in the business.

Now with the sequel we can really step it up a notch with a longer campaign, and now that we’ve established who these guys are we can start exploring some personal story arcs, we can introduce some new guys, we can go places we’ve never gone in the universe. And the multiplayer can ship with many more modes than we shipped with in the first game out of the box. We can do a better job with achievements, bring in more robust online functionality with the party system and screenshot mode and things like that. Better spectator mode, the list goes on.

Now that we’ve bled out of the eyeballs to establish the universe, now it’s time to really - it’s not that we’re not working hard, we’re just having a little bit more fun because we’re not even questioning whether or not we can cover things like that anymore.

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