During an interview granted by Lee Perry to the microphones of Arstechnica, the Lead Level Designer of the original Gears of War recalled the difficulties he had to face together with the Epic Games team to develop the multiplayer sector of the iconic shooter in third person.
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The former Epic exponent explains that “The thing at Epic back then was it was a very small studio. So while the development team knew from a very early point that they wanted multiplayer in the game, they also felt they were dramatically losing the battle with games like Halo in terms of sheer workforce.” .
In recalling the delicate stages of development of the first adventure of Marcus Fenix and his companions, Perry points out that he postponed the design of multiplayer maps until the last in order not to distract the precious development resources needed by the team that was working on the main campaign. The preliminary version of the online maps, Perry recalls, ” were a real disaster because we were based on the most popular shooters of the time, such as Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament. It’s just too bad that those games worked fundamentally different from Gears of War . “
Recalling these difficulties, the Lead Level Designer distinctly recalls the moment in which he turned to his team to ask them if the time had not come to completely cut the multiplayer sector: at that point, Perry and his collaborators decided to redesign the multiplayer experience based on the gameplay of the main campaign of Gears of War, the first true killer app on Xbox 360.
As the former developer of Epic Games remembers, “we decided to base everything on the mechanics of cover, with maps full of forced passages and walls from which to look out to keep the battlefield under control. Because in every Gears it has always been important to see what the enemy is doing, rather than throwing himself headlong and shooting wildly jumping out of who knows where “ .
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