The studio hasn’t been able to stage Betas for its popular third-person shooter series in the past, and now it will have the chance to listen to its fans in more detail and apply feedback to the final game when it launches this September.
You can read my preview of the upcoming Beta here. Read on for a modern definition of ‘Betas’ (and why that’s bad), the state of modern shooters (and why it’s largely bad) and the future of the Gears of War franchise (and why it’s good).
SPOnG: You’ve said that this Beta has had to be presented in such a way as to come across as a ‘polished demo.’ It’s interesting that you mention that, because it seems the function of a Beta has changed somewhat over the years, to be more like a demo than a work-in-progress. Is that change better or worse for you guys?
Rod Fergusson: I think it’s worse, much worse (laughs). I think it comes back to the fact that PC gamers are very ‘do it yourself,’ hands-on kind of guys. They’re swapping out video cards and memory chips, opening the case and fiddling with the circuitry - so the idea of an unfinished product going out into the wild would be something those users would be fine with.
They’d know they were contributing something to make it better - they were the testers for it, in a way - and there’s a sense of pride in that. A sort of ‘I got to work on this before anybody else got to play it’ kind of thing. I think where we now have the console generation, things have become very different.
It’s a whole different set of expectations now. Games come in sealed boxes, and it’s a world of finished goods going into a market. When you look at it from that perspective, our Betas have to be ‘demos’ in that sense and I think we lose a lot of interactivity with the community because of it.
So the fact that we’re forced to polish it means we end up doing fewer Betas. Most studios are afraid to release a demo unless they’re certain it’s really good and can represent the game in the best possible way, and that usually means that development is largely done before you can even show the game to anyone.
SPOnG: You’ve put some twists on Team Deathmatch and King of the Hill modes - could you elaborate on your reasons for the changes to the classic style of play?
Rod Fergusson: Well for Team Deathmatch we always came into it with the question of how to add the Gears twist to it. We have modes such as Wingman and Annex with all these rules, but any time you ask the player to do more than just ‘kill the other person’ you start to lose them. It’s too complex. They don’t understand what the objective is.
So we have to have something that’s really simple like a Team Deathmatch mode, where you just have to shoot the other person as many times as possible. They don’t feel too intimidated by re-spawns - players understand that - so it was simply a case of using that to add some Gears drama.
We restricted the re-spawns to ensure that the end of each match reached a big climax. You know that when the last person dies everybody’s watching it, so when you do your big fancy execution everyone’s cheering. It’s not just people working randomly amongst all this chaos like a normal Deathmatch situation.
Rod Fergusson: Yeah, a lot of stuff came from our fanbase. The Sawed-Off Shotgun for example was an attempt to create a weapon for new players who wanted to be able to run with the guys who were really good shotgunners, but maybe didn’t have the skill to be able to turn as quickly to be able to be as accurate with it. And that’s why you don’t have to worry so much about accuracy, it’s just about proximity.
It was us recognising and embracing this idea that close-quarter combat is what people really wanted in Gears, and trying to implement that without having to do anything else crazy. Another thing we looked at was creating a specific purpose and use for all the weapons. We have so many starting weapons - we don’t want to make it feel like they’re all equivalent. The idea is that you’ll want to switch to a different gun to suit changing situations.