- We were very much on the fence that, I don't even know if multiplayer is gonna make it in "Gears" at that time. We were at the start of summer and this thing is shipping in fall. And there was a very specific moment where we were having those discussions of, do we just cut this? I'm Lee Perry, I was gameplay designer and lead level designer on "Gears of War I" and this is the story of how multiplayer almost didn't happen. [intense music] Generally speaking somebody who is a level designer is somebody who's putting together the world around the player. And it's a very challenging role to hire for sometimes because there's so many different facets of just being a level designer. And depending on the size of a team sometimes a level designer is a very specialized person. Sometimes there's a level designer who's just visuals, just a scripting guy, sometimes just a lighting guy. But they all kind of carry the same broad badge of level designer. So the thing at Epic back then was it was a very small studio. Everybody was fiercely independent, and so you get games like "Unreal Tournament" where one level designer wants to make pyramids in space. And one level designer is making a castle and one level designer is making skyscrapers and everybody was kind like, eh, you just kinda make some cool stuff and we'll put it in a game. [intense music] We had this real transition period of like trying to make a coherent thing. And part of that was Microsoft came along and we needed to make a project for what would end up being the Xbox 360. We need to make a thing for a console that is like a coherent, actual game. [laughing] As opposed to just a lot of really cool stuff stuck together. It wasn't gonna be focused on multiplayer. It was very much about making a cool single player experience. And part of that came out of some levels that were gorgeous at the time that we ended up taking to GDC and everybody who saw it was like, oh my God that's like one of the greatest things ever. And it became kind of like the hook for what we needed to bring to life in terms of like making it like a real game. It had the basics of a cover system in it. And that alone between how it looked between it having cover, all of it kind of came together into something that like nobody had really seen at the time. And the characters of a big chunky dudes who look like they've got Christmas hams for biceps. It was kind of comically violent. [guns shooting]

- [Game Character] Nice.

- It was so violent and goofy and kind of over the top you couldn't really take it that seriously. It's you know, it's some guy with a chainsaw going, aah and slicing someone in half. And it was grosses like the "Gears" games were we never really wanted to make queasy violent stuff, it was always about being fun. [chainsaw cutting] So one of the things that massively framed how "Gears of War" worked was this drive to show off witty characters. We knew from games like "Battlefield 1942" is an example which we all loved, everybody at that studio. Man, we played that game so much. We loved it. We were acutely aware of the fact that like when you're shooting at someone in, in a game like that in "Battlefield" you know, they're three pixels tall on a horizon maybe it something pops out and you headshot it, et cetera. So we had this major drive, especially pushing as like a technology company to show off all of these like characters. Previously you would have like a low poly character that had just, what color is it? You know, there's one texture that's mapped on there. That's like, this guy's got brown hair and he's got this colored skin and he's wearing a a cloak that's this color. But as soon as we started doing stuff that was much more sophisticated. You've got that color channel but you also have the normal map. And then you've got like a specular and then sometimes you would have like a bump map. There's like all these different facets of textures that go onto everything in the world and not just characters had those but every little bit of debris on the ground the tiling textures on walls, et cetera. That actually ended up influencing a ton of stuff about "Gears" with specifics about how do we get enemies close enough to you that you can see them? How can we narrow in the camera enough that like they're filling enough of the screen that they matter? And it was a very tricky balancing act to try to get a shooter to work with somebody who's, you know 12 feet away from you in game. And so there was one level called street fight, where it was just like this narrow street and there was a couple of doors and stuff over here. And there was some enemies over here, and there was like a line of cover between the curb on both sides. And it was so radically condensed that when we first played that, and we had enemies hopping into cover, you felt so much more vulnerable. You felt like that person, if they really wanted to like roll over here or whatever is like an imminent threat but they were also really visible, even when they're in cover. And even when the cover looks good, you know you see them pop up and it's always artificial AI. Like they hold it for too long or whatever but it looked really good. But the very core concept that we wanted to show big characters, it shaped everything. It shaped why we ended up having cover, it shaped why we had the little roady run thing where the camera you know, adjusts slightly. And then when you slam into cover and the camera's up here and it like tightens in on stuff. The drive to just show characters kind of designed a big chunk of the game for us. [guns shooting] We knew from a very early point that we wanted to do multiplayer. We had these moments where we're looking at what we had made and had to offer. And it was so daunting because any attempt to like mentally connect what we were doing with what "Halo" was doing, we were just dramatically losing that battle. In terms of the manpower we had associated with the effort, you know, we didn't have a team of people making just multiplayer maps. More than that, we weren't really having a whole lot of fun playing multiplayer in it. We were very much on the fence that like, I don't even know if multiplayer is gonna make it in "Gears" at that time. And we were, you know, at the start of summer and this thing is shipping in fall. And there was a very specific moment where we were having those discussions of, you know, do we just cut this? Because we're never gonna be able to compete with that. [man shouting] [gunshot] It's a very challenging thing, especially as a designer and especially as a level designer but we didn't really realize early on how challenging that would be. We kind of pushed off a lot of that while we were bringing on the much harder task, seemingly to us at the time was to make this single player tense, dramatic new way to play a game. And we still didn't have what we felt like a as like a fun multiplayer. We went through a phase, we were like, what if we make game, make a map that is very similar to "Counter-Strike's Dust", just to see what that's like to play with our cover system. And it was always a train wreck, those games. I mean, they play fundamentally different, everything that we were trying to kind of base our previous multiplayer knowledge from were worlds where I could be in a room and I'm sneaking through it, and an enemy comes through this door in, in 1.2 seconds. He pops you in the head and you fall down dead and you never saw him come at you. You had no idea he was gonna be there. And that was kind of like what all of multiplayer was through, through most of "Gears I" was just these very frustrating moments of it. I think, you know, a lot of the the maps that we were pulling our influence from were as well, you know "Counter-Strike" maps and "Unreal Tournament" maps. And every first person shooter map was all about mobility. One of the things with how we always made uh, "Unreal Tournament" and "Unreal" is, especially with "Unreal Tournament" is how fast a character moves. [shouting] [lasers shooting] I mean, you're running around in scale like 25, 30 miles an hour, just whoo, full time. Somebody runs through the room and they're just like a blur. And so it was a massive departure when we went to working on "Gears" and we wanted things up close, how do we design gameplay for characters that are moving at kind of a normal human amount of speed? And so it changed everything about the scale of the maps, the density of the detail of the maps, because in "Unreal" I just would've blasted through here at 80 miles an hour. And how do we slow players down and make something that's creepy and has horror elements to it? It was a massive shift for most of us to try to make that transition. [guns shooting] It was really only up until like the beginning of that summer before we shipped, where we made what amounted to a test map that kind of became gridlock. It was all low cars, low covered walls. We forced the enemies to come out at one location. You're running outta the hall and the enemies are across from you at this other hall. And you know, they're coming from that direction. You're not gonna be able to kill 'em, at that distance and much like in a single player campaign the whole point was that you had the opportunity to see what those people were doing. And so I could walk in behind the cover and my camera is going to see. And you're like, okay, two of them went to the left and the rest of them are coming up here or whatever. That changed everything, from that point if you got shot in the side because you were focusing on someone, it was way more your fault than the person coming in on the side. I mean, that's the golden rule of almost any game to me. Is the best games on the planet, like when you die, ideally you think of it as a thing you did instead of blaming the game for it. That was like the fundamental shift of when it clicked for us was that one map we had a play test in that it was hooting and hollering. And like, everybody's like calling out, you know, okay. Three of them went that way, watch outside. Okay, two went this way. It was much less just, you just running in between rooms and suddenly dying. Early on when you know, in an "Unreal" map when you're streaking around the level, you're running in and outta rooms, around corridors and aah, somebody's in your face, et cetera. With "Gears" you had this tension of like, you knew there were enemies over there and you needed to be able to see them and have this like situational awareness of what was going on in the map. And that was massively helped out by us using cover, especially low cover. You know, it's almost, it's a joke in the industry and it certainly carried on for a long time about these chest high walls everywhere. And that cover system that gave us the view of the battlefield. Let us inform the player that oh, there's three guys over here and they're coming in over here, and this other guy is kind of flanking you over here. And it's important to like see what the enemy are doing as opposed to they just pop out of the door next to you. One of the absolutely most core principles with "Gears" game play is things have to be visible. "Gears" has this, this kind of meathead veneer to it, of like dudes, aah at everything, I'm cutting worms and chainsaws or whatever, but like under the hood of it is fundamentally a lot of really cool tactical stuff that wasn't simulated, right? You know, it's not like, oh, I entered cover and now I get a plus three on my shooting stat or whatever. Getting into cover and staying behind cover, and flanking people worked just because it worked. And it's like, if I run up to the side over here and I see someone who doesn't notice me and he's looking this way, I get shots on him or whatever. It just organically happened. And gridlock allowed every example of that to just happen naturally. [intense music] [guns shooting] We had just finished a play test and everybody was super excited about it. And it was a, a very like open discussion in that room with the people who were play testing that as to whether, you know, is this enough to continue keeping this as a feature and whether we were gonna ship with multiplayer at all.

- Aah, come on.

- And from the moment that that map occurred, we knew that we needed a lot more maps that were of that flavor basically that still had as many lessons learned from our single player campaign as we needed to bring in the multiplayer. It basically took everything that made the tactical versions of gameplay for "Gears" just really snap and pop. And that's basically kind of became we need to do that as much as possible with all the future maps. And really recognize that these are the things that make them function. We need this in all the maps. [guns shooting] So we definitely learned from gridlock, like the power of low cover and central visibility over an entry area. In every map, we really wanted to have the faucet of where enemies came from so that you could like see the choices that they were making up front. Or at least if you didn't see somebody you knew they did something else, like okay, only three guys ran outta here, the other two must be running to this area over here, et cetera. And so we kind of just had like the playbook for how to make maps after that, like everything that we could think of where you could put low covers. And it was like oh, a graveyard, tombstones. Tombstones are low cover, we'll make one of those. I think for the most part, any map in "Gears" that had like, you know, the good bones there for low cover and good visibility, et cetera. Those were always a win-win, every time we had something that felt like a classic "Gears" map we knew that was gonna keep benefiting us for title after title. One of the cool aspects about Epic back then when they were just like, you know a couple dozen of us, there was a fair amount of freedom kind of like how "Unreal Tournament" had maps from all different flavors and genres and stuff. I don't really recall ever a specific moment when we were like, we should try and do this thing. It was like so many things that happened in, in "Gears" were, were happy accidents that like we were able to recognize sometimes and kind of like capitalize on. [calming music]