It was a big undertaking ”just from the narrative side” as all four are ”story-relevant characters” in Gears of War 3. It’s partly why the Lambent ”came to be.”
”Well, there’s a reason it took until Gear 3 to do it. There are so many challenges in trying to accommodate four players, especially the way that we do it. We didn’t want to do an army of clones; we wanted to do story-relevant characters,” said Rod Fergusson.
”And so as soon as you say you’re going to do four-player co-op in the Gears world with story-relevant characters, it’s a real challenge just from the narrative side. Basically nobody goes through anything alone, they always have three witnesses.”
There’s the issue of gameplay too like searching for cover. ”And beyond that, you have to think, ok, we’re going to have four people running around and they all want to take cover, and they all want to flank. It really causes you to have to open up the environment, and create room, and make sure all those things are available to that number of players.”
”We’ve gone back to that Gears 1 approach to what we call ‘combat bowls’. Here’s a play space that’s big enough, and you can go explore it and do whatever you want to do because there’s room for you to do it,” said the executive producer.
”With four people, you can’t really restrict their movement too much.”
The enemies had to change as well. Gears of War 3 introduces the Lambent as the main bad guy as the Locust, while still present, aren’t the primary focus.
”Four-player co-op is part of the reason the Lambent came to be. When you have four guns and better human control, they all want to be effective and they all want to kill stuff. You have to take the enemies up a notch for them to be able to compete against four really good guns shooting.”
”So the Lambent have their mutating arms that allow them to shoot over cover. The head mutates, the arms mutate, they’re able to shoot at three different players at the same time. These sorts of things we had to build into our design. It can’t be like, ‘ok, once we go to four-player co-op, we completely dominate the game’,” continued Fergusson.
”I mean, generally speaking, it’ll be easier to do it in four-play co-op, but we’ve tried to build in a conflict or an enemy that keeps the challenge. We want to make sure the challenge stayed reasonable, that it felt like you were still accomplishing something.”
”So yeah, four-player co-op affected level design, enemy design, story design, networking – all these sorts of things were all aspects we had to take into account.”
Check out the full interview between Rod Fergusson and Edge. Gears of War 3 releases exclusively on Xbox 360 September 20th.
