Parameter name: request
Translate Request has too much data
Parameter name: request
And so we're back again at the brink of extinction. The last vestiges of humanity are scattered across the planet Sera, while the depleted COG forces lick their wounds upon ageing aircraft carriers bound for nowhere. The monstrous Lambent, dormant for months, are stirring again; the Locust are coming. This is it, this is the end.
Several similar shooters – Killzone, Halo, Resistance – have predicted the demise of mankind at the hands of space monsters, but none have quite matched Gears for its apocalyptic fury, its sense of relentless, bloody grandeur. Gears of War 3 doesn't take long to settle into familiar rhythms. After a brief prelude recalling the events that lead to the first game in the series (super solider Marcus Fenix disobeys orders to rescue his father, fails, and gets kicked into military jail), we're aboard the CNV Sovereign a Raven's Nest class ship, with Fenix, Dom and Jace, just as the Lambent awaken.
[Possible spoilers]
From monstrous plant-like tentacles that have erupted across the planet surface burst scuttling creatures named polyps, that run about like face-huggers. Your first job as Fenix is to clamber through the bowels of the boat, rendezvousing with colleagues, before heading out onto the deck to save the craft from the onslaught. But then a call comes in – a chopper is on its way and it must be protected. On board is Prescott, the chairman of COG who disappeared after the sinking of Jacinto city in Gears 2. And he has unexpected news about Fenix's scientist father…
"It's always been a father/son story – that's where the original idea came from," explains executive producer Rod Fergusson. "So we wanted to provide some closure, we wanted to explain what is going on with Marcus and his dad and the queen – all the questions we raised in Gears 1 and 2. People thought we were becoming the Lost of video games – we kept asking questions but not providing the answers. So we wanted to answer a few of those … but not all of them. You don't want to lose the sense of mystery."
The return of Prescott is an interesting development. Hated by the solders for his perceived abandonment, he swaggers aboard the CNV Sovereign shouting orders and making demands. Fergusson won't say much, but he hints at a fascinating story arc for the leader, and plenty of conflict with Fenix. "Gears has always been a little anti-government," he explains. "The COG are seen as 'the man'; Prescott represents the evil side of that order. There will be some interesting revelations. After Gears 2, we wanted Hoffman to have authority, but he represents the good side – Prescott is the bad side. Marcus has always been an anti-hero – he's anti-establishment, he's the anti-Prescott."
[Possible spoilers end]
Making space for these personal narratives is something that Epic has gradually warmed to. "Initially we weren't very confident in our story-telling," says Fergusson. "We'd just come out of Unreal Tournament and a lot of arena-based titles that weren't based around stories. When we got to Gears it was a new type of game on a new platform with a new team, so when we started out we were really focused on pace and capturing a sort of summer blockbuster feel; we shied away from emotional moments.
"In Gears 1 we originally intended for Marcus to have a younger sister who died. We had this moment where Marcus goes back to visit his father's old house and hears her giggle echoing through the building – and it kind of spooks him. But we chickened out, we weren't confident that we could pull it off and were afraid of it being laughable.
"When Gears 2 came along, we were more confident and wanted to take greater risks – that's why we had Maria's death scene. We wanted to get more drama going, and with Gears 3, we wanted to take that further. That's why we've brought in author Karen Traviss, who's doing a great job with the novels – she had such a deep understanding of our characters because she's been writing from inside their heads for so long. She brought more depth and emotion into the story."
The aircraft carrier sequence ends with an attack on the CNV Sovereign by a gigantic leviathan, which hauls its hideous torso onboard, flailing at the human survivors with vast tentacles. To combat it, Marcus and Dom break into a storage depot and jump into two silverbacks – bulky mechs equipped with gatling guns, grenade launchers and heavy armour (though all that the front – the back is hugely vulnerable). Stamping onto deck you can hit a button to kick obstacles out of the way or boot incoming Lambent monsters into the next star system. From here, it's a familiar boss battle – Fenix must move in and shoot the gargantuan sea creature in its eyes to dislodge it; but after dealing with a wave of Lambent underlings, the beast returns, this time with the weak spot in its jagged mouth. Fortunately, Cole arrives just in time, piloting a chopper and promising to blow the leviathan apart, with the help of a container full of exploding Tickers . Though pretty conventional, this is a hell of an encounter for the first few minutes of the game and an exhilarating statement of intent.
For the third chapter of the act, we rewind an hour and find out how Cole got there. Rather than hiding out on a ship, he's been searching the islands of Sera for Stranded, small groups of human survivors. The search takes him to his home town, Hanover, a demolished city of mock Renaissance architecture, and makeshift corrugated iron strongholds – a typically arresting Gears environment. Were the human colonists of Sera inspired by the real city of Hanover? "Actually no," says Fergusson. "There are no ties between Earth and Sera and there's no indication if Earth even exists in that universe. We started out with the idea of a coastal village that we wanted to be really foggy and creepy, but ultimately it became a bigger place and home to the Cougar thrashball team."
This battered environment continues the Gears concept of 'destroyed beauty'. With the attention to scenic detail combined with heavy use of highly tinted lighting, I ask if movie directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanely Kubrick have been influential. "We've looked to a lot of European and Eastern European architecture for inspiration," says art director Chris Perna. "It's not quite photo real and is stylised, yet still has the feel of a real believable place. To achieve our look we do a lot of stylistic tweaks through lighting and post process. Your Scott and Kubrick references are not that far off. We light a lot of our environments like movie sets so the lighting comes off as a bit unnatural, but provides a dramatic look or 'wow' factor that you might see in a Scott film, for example."
Interestingly, though, amid all the catastrophic destruction, and throughout the decimation of the human race, you'll never hear characters talk about numbers of dead. "We made a conscious decision – and we passed this on to Karen when she was writing the books – never use numbers," says Fergusson. "Any time you ever see anyone quantify anything in the Gears world, they'll say a certain percentage of our died. We didn't want to get in to that whole area of how many people are there in the world, how many are there left? We didn't want people trying to do the math!"
Cole, Baird, Sam and Carmine first head out to a shopping mall to look for food – and once again, it's a conveyor belt of pulverising set-piece battles against rampaging lambent hordes, including mutating Drudge creatures. These can transmogrify in a number of ways, either elongating their arms into missile-firing cannons, or extending their torsos, becoming flame-spitting viper-like monstrosities (for extra fun, the snake-head wrenches lose if the body is destroyed, continuing its attack).
Throughout the act, we're also battling hulking Gunkers, infected Locust Boomers that can throw globs of explosive emulsion goo and use their blade-like mutated arms to swipe at close range targets. Diving behind cover is pretty useless against the emulsion balls so it's all about staying mobile and moving in fast to get a clear shot. Meanwhile, Lambent stalks burst out of the ground, spraying polyps over the battle arena.
Inside the mall, the team locate a supermarket that will be familiar to those who've been reading about or participating in the multiplayer beta test: it's the location of the Checkout map. This is a ruined food store, littered with collapsed shelving units and mangled trolleys. Cole hops into a loader mech and grabs the last crate of food supplies, which must now be navigate through a backlot swarming with Lambent. After meeting up with a well-armed survivor group (and wandering through their battered home base in a scene highly reminiscent of Reece's trek through the desolate post-apocalyptic shanty town in Terminator), he sets off on a journey to his own past, to the arena he once played in as a thrashball superstar.
As for the game's famed multiplayer and co-op components, Fergusson is pleased with how they've been evolved this time round – including the addition of the thrilling Horde mode, in which the players become the alien beats attempting to wipe out a human stronghold – the exact opposite of the highly successful Horde mode. Apparently, the recent beta attracted 1.3 million players, who engaged in over 20 million matches. The exercise – Epic's first beta testing endeavour with Gears – has proved very useful. "Everyone said all the weapons were over-powered," jokes Fergusson. "We tweaked some ranges, we tweaked some damage values… In terms of physical alterations, two of the maps – Thrashball and Trenches - had a problem with spawn-camping, so we changed the maps to have escape corridors. Now, if you spawn and get backed up, you can sneak out the side. Oh and we changed the number of points it took to win King of the Hill because the matches were taking too long…"
Fergusson is also amusingly dismissive of other co-op modes in the shooter genre. "We feel that we sort of own the co-op space. Adding Beast mode and taking the campaign and making it four-player, adding more depth to the Horde mode – that was us reinforcing that ownership. With Beast mode we were thinking, well, what can we create that none of our competitors can copy? Most of them are human-on-human – they don't offer any way to BE the monster." He also chances a sly dig at Modern Warfare 3, specifically its new Survival mode, essentially a version of Horde, in which two players must survive against wave after wave of incoming enemy soldiers. "You read about the stuff they're doing," he says. "Like, 'oh now we have exploding dogs'. Well, okay, you're trying to make a Ticker, but you don't have aliens so you have to put grenades on animals!"
You do wonder where Epic will go after Gears. The series has come to define the team and its approach to game design – part cinematic opus, part post-apocalyptic tragedy, part Nietzschean fantasy. It's doubtful they will leave this universe entirely after the third title. Fergusson for one genuinely still revels in its mythos. While chatting about the deathmatch mode, which puts five-man teams into comparatively small maps and gets them to fight until one side runs out of re-spawns, he says something rather telling: "in other games, you can sit back in support, but in Gears there's only five of you, so you have to be aggressive, you have to attack – there's a constant notion of pressure, you can't sit back. Penny Arcade had this cartoon where someone said playing Gears of War online is like role-playing being a Man. We liked that…"
• Gears of War 3 is released on 20 Septermber for Xbox 360
No comments:
Post a Comment