Gears of War 3: defining HD gaming

Yeah, but at the time it defined what HD was. It defined what your HD TV could do. People remember that.

Same thing happened to me when we were reviewing cinematics for Gears 3 recently. I was like, "These are good. I'm happy with them, but they feel like Gears 2." Then I went back and watched Gears 2 cinematics and I was like, "Holy crap!"

The stuff that was wrong with our facial animation and our lip-synch... In my memory, this stuff was jaw dropping. We're way better in Gears 3 than we were in Gears 2. I'm excited for people to see that.

We had enough on our plate. Gears 2 was about doing all the stuff we wanted to do in Gears 1. There was a lot left on the table after Gears 1, like crawling when you're down. In order to get Gears 1 out we left some stuff on the floor we felt should have been in the game.

Gears 2 was more about doing the game we wanted to do. But from Gears 2 to Gears 3 it wasn't about that anymore. There weren't any obvious gaps. It was about, where can we push now? Where can we take co-op even further?

It's become more of an industry standard. Gears set the standard for co-op, but we felt people would judge us poorly if we didn't have [four-player co-op]. Enough games have four-player co-op.

And it was a good time for us, because we were re-imagining combat bowls and trying to get back to that Gears 1 feel of Embry Square. Four-player co-op felt better in that space. Technologically we felt we could handle it. We wanted to push ourselves.

It was an early thing that was a sacrificial lamb. Early on there were conversations about how much work we would have to do to support four characters, and how big the levels had to be, and how much testing we'd have to do. There were plenty of discussions about whether we should go back to two or not because of the amount of effort.

We decided to suck it up. Co-op is our bread and butter. If we were going to own anything, we wanted to own the co-op experience. We felt the way to do that was to ensure we could deliver a solid four-player game.

We're very aware of the single-player experience. We're walking a fine line between making sure we don't skew it so far in four-player that single-player doesn't mean anything. We do a lot of single-player testing because not everybody's got four people online at the same time they want to play with. It's finding that balance.

We do things in the campaign. We're doing these breadcrumbs from objective to objective so it's hard to get lost along the way. Because you have these combat bowls, where they're much bigger environments to allow for four-player co-op, you can dictate how you want to fight this battle.

You can choose to flank left or flank right. It's not as directed as Gears 2. There's a lot more choice in terms of how you want to have the battle and how you want to play it out, and whether you will rush ahead or hang back.

What I like about Horde is five-player coordination and working as a squad. We're not perfectly leapfrogging ourselves in military standards and breaking doors like you would on a SWAT team, but just having that notion of working as a team and coordinating efforts and fire and, you two go left, we'll go right - it just adds to the experience and we really enjoy it.