Question: Why did you opt to do a 3rd person game as opposed to 1st person?
I like to refer to it as 2nd person I know it sounds a little weird but its like I love FPS’s but I wanted to show more a sense of character and also showing the character interacting in the environment. Like seeing his hands plant or seeing him climb over or seeing him grab onto things without having to worry about the weird hand (does strange gesture) and all that kind of stuff. The short version of it; I’ve been making FPS’s for like 8 years and now I want to try something a little bit different. You know it’s like I think this has the best of both worlds. It’s very tight view on the character; it’s kind of like knees to waist up; it’s not like he’s very small. I want to show the character, I want to get a sense of who the character is and kind of offset him from the crosshair so he’s not in the way and then you have a target button for aiming; so it’s almost first person. You can see down the barrel of the gun but you also see the side of his head, so you can see like the light transmission when he shoots the gun coming through here. You can see him like grimacing or holding up his hand to give orders to his squad, things like that. So it’s kind of like reminds me of the best of both worlds.
A lot of people have been comparing this to Dynasty Warriors. What do you think separates this game from the Dynasty-games?
Mr Lee: They look very similar to the basic action. Speaking of action, in Ninety Nine Nights you fight against massive units compared to Dynasty Warriors. Compared to any other games. Including Dynast Warriors. So the goal of this game is to give some very dynamic feelings to the user who plays this game cause it deals with massive units.
In this build we didn't show a feature, the guardian system. The guardian system is to control the troops, not just the character. By using such kind of guardian system, we can give more versatility to the gamers because we can show more various game styles. So each thing, each object, so we have this physics system too. We didn't show the feature properly in this build because we are still working on the physics engine right now. We can show it, you will see some examples when using the old spark feature. Every element, every object - they move according to the physics, it's just not an animation.
Each element affects each other. For example, when the tree falls, the enemy under the trees gets killed.
The goal of using a physics engine is to describe more reality, just like a real battlefield. When the player gets used to play this game, he can give more various strategies to... (Stops).
So, that's why it's different from Dynasty Warrior. The character are fighting against the enemy in wide fields, that's way they are pretty similar, but when you look more deep inside, the games gets totally different.
Acert93 said:Xboxyde really has been doing a good job on content.
Be nice to see a FPS withing much hopping! Sounds like they have big goals for the cover idea. PDZ has similar goals it seems. Hopefully this works out and is not a flop! Cover and Conceal are important real world tactics.Cliff B: So we have a lot, as far as the cover deck its like the core of the game we have this whole thing where were doing cover and we want to change the paradigm of how people play shooters. Because I played most shooters right now and you’re the alien; by the way there’s no aliens (points to TV screen) and I’m the bad guy I mean the good guy and you’re running at me and were just shooting at each other and to me it just feels silly to me now. Because if you are actually getting shot at you get behind cover; you are going to get your butt behind a wall! There’s a couple of instances where this game will be context sensitive; jump across like a little gap or whatever but for the most part there’s no jumping in war. You don’t see video guys in Iraq hopping around like Mario right because there are bullet whizzing at their heads and they want to live and that’s the key difference as far as the Locusts; they are savages but they are intelligent savage. They use the same cover system that you use and they want to survive. So they are going to get their head down and they are going to try and move to another cover spot. And you re going to continue to play this game of where you’re trying to flank the guy, get the drop on him and take him out before he takes you out. That is a far more interesting combat method than just running in and gunning like crazy. I’m hoping it will continue to establish the cover shooter as its own genre, much like the stealth game was with Splinter Cell and Metal Gear.
Frame Rate. 1 CPU and basically no optimizations and running "well" 2 weeks after port. So at this point any discussions on final framerate are premature.Question: How easy or hard do you find it to program for the 360 platform?
We got it up and running two weeks ago like really really nicely on the 360 and we were pleasantly surprised. I ran through the office grabbing all of our designers, and artists going “come check this out, come check this out!†and we really had this watershed moment where we were looking at the game, running at a good frame rate not even as optimised as it’s going to be on the 360 on a HD TV and we’re like “okay!†because in the past coming off we’re making Unreal making out of the PC it’s like the PC is always the apex platform to work in. A PC developer generally tends to have a bad perception of a consoles as far as thinking you have to scale down all of your attach rates and goal overheads but in this instance were running high res textures , were running in HD resolution were using post processing effects, the lighting looks tight, the visuals look perfect and it’s like a breath of fresh air really!
Question: What’s your goal regarding the frame rate?
Cliff: As high as possible (laughs)
Mark: well we’ll be at least double where we are here I mean were definitely over 30 all the time. Our goal for Gears of War isn’t so much a particular frame rate. This isn’t a fast paced run and gun game like Unreal Tournament where we want 60 frames per second all the time. This is really about using a high degree of visual acuity, lots of great graphics, lots of detail to help tell the story. I don’t know if you noticed but I walked around back behind the room, an area where you don’t have to go as part of this demo so it was fully modelled out, looked beautiful everything is normal mapped. Our goals were to provide this cool believable world; so we’ll be over 30 but we don’t need to be 60. If we find were hitting 60 then were going to throw more visual effects in, throw more things going on, more post effects.
Cliff: It’s like a military budget if you don’t spend your budget every year you’ve got enough money.
Mark: we’ve done only, what we like to say is the most low hanging food optimisations thus far. Very low optimisations were only running on one core, so we know we can get a lot more power out of this system than just what were showing here and that’s exciting for us.
They seem to have high goals for animation, so hopefully it all works out. Right now it kind of looks stiff.Question: Can you switch your stance from left to right a la splinter cell?
Yes were working on the click, right now you can do it when you are in cover as far as you pop up and kind of swap over.
Mark: There’s going to be a lot of character animation in this game its just incredible. There’s a lot of detail just in characters; there’s multiple ways to charge doors, there’s all the different cover animations, there’s reloading. Making the characters feel real through animation is a very important goal for us.
Cliff: For instance if you look at Dom’s arm right there (points at action on the screen) there’s a tattoo on his arm and it says Maria. That’s his wife which he made reference once or twice in the game; but the fact that its there is kind of a little detail there. Well that’s the kind of stuff that makes you really believe that these are living breathing characters.
I hope someone makes a good destructible engine or a UE3 addon.Question: A question about the environments, in the trailer we see a rocket hit a building and the building stayed the same afterwards. Will there be more destructible environments?
There’s going to be physics based destroyable environments as far as everything being set up in certain instances like a house of cards. The demos you have seen previously haven’t really leveraged physics much beyond rag doll physics, some debris going around. We’re working on scenarios where the enemies are in cover and you can kind of knock down a pillar and collapse the building behind them on them. For the game there will be a clear visual language as far as like I mentioned wood is destructible. If the pillar is of wood then you can destroy it, or if it’s stone or concrete it will generally tend to hold up. The engine is being built primarily for visual effects as far as animations and post effects, going down that kind of geo-mod route is not a route we plan on with this generation of technology.
Alstrong said:er...new KUF for the 360? I certainly missed that announcement... anyone have a link for that?
