The Techland Interview: Cliff Bleszinski, Part 1

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It was a long weekend for one Mr. Cliff Bleszinski. When the planned reveal of two major video games got bumped by the shifting sands of late night talk show booking, the design director for Epic Games found himself with a whole weekend in Manhattan. Over the weekend, he caught a Broadway show with his girlfriend Lauren, went to Morimoto and, y’know, helped to polish the trailer for Gears of War 3. By now, most time zones have gobbled up Blezsinski’s appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the Gears of War 3 trailer that debuted on Tuesday night.

But, before that, I had the chance to interview the Raleigh, NC resident about Gears 3, the newly announced Bulletstorm and a wide range of topics about the current video game landscape. What follows is Part 1 of a very long talk. (Part 2 will most likely be select cuts of the audio interview presented as a podcast.) This isn’t the first time I’d talked to the man sometimes known as CliffyB and I was reminded just how hyperactive his brain can be. Read on for and see if you can keep up.

How do you feel about the leaks that trickled out this weekend?

I would rather that there be leaks than have there be no interest. When people stop talking, that’s when you have a problem. The fact that there’s a desire, the fact that there’s an urge for leaks… it sucks when it happens but it’s actually an inadvertent press bomb. The rearranging on the schedule allowed us extra time to polish the trailer. It allowed me to enjoy the city and tease people on the Twitterverse. So it became telling people to come by the GameStop on Union Square on Saturday because I was going to be in New York a little longer. It’s not a big publicized event but when we show up there’s like 50 fans who’ve showed up with their schwag that they want signed. Technology seems to distance us so much, where people never actually talk on the phone instead of just texting. But at the same time it’s able to bring us together in certain ways.

And now, you’ve got everybody on the hook for another year…

Spring is the new fall for game publishers.

There’s hope yet that we might get decent releases all throughout the year?

Well, the business traditionally orients by look back at the past. “History has dictated [such and such] so therefore you can mitigate risk in the future…” That doesn’t lead to innovation. That leads to a cycle of me-too, or the kind of thinking that says “Oh, I haven’t seen that done before, so therefore you can’t do it.” That doesn’t make any sense.

So, you feel like innovation is better pegged to…?

I believe in a few things. I believe in trusting people over process, in putting your value in people’s guts and instincts. Then, mitigate risk as best you can but ultimately trust that if you put enough talented people on something and have them work hard enough.

I was going to save this for later but you’re providing me with a really nice segue. The whole Jason West/Vince Zampella thing with Activision and Infinity Ward. You talk about valuing people over process. What do you think happened there?

It’s a very, very sensitive topic and I know those guys and have a lot of respect for them but I also understand that this is very much a business. I’m going to have to be very careful with my wording right now. I do think you’re seeing fundamental shift where you’ll see creatives valued sometimes over the rubber stamp of a video game sequel brand. And people forget that those guys did it before [left to form their own studio] when they were working on Medal of Honor and then they went and made Call of Duty. There’s nothing to say that they can’t do it again.

What you see a lot of with the publishers, though, is there’s multiple types of creatives but you see different buckets. There’s one type of creative who can create what is essentially a new mold and David Jaffe’s one of those guys who I have a lot of respect for. He was able to do that with Twisted Metal, with God of War and the games that he makes. And once that mold’s established, the businesspeople who are responsible go, “Okay, well we have our mold now. Screw you. We’re not going to pay you what you’re worth.” Then they basically go “fa-foomf, fa-foomf” [which is an assembly line noise]. Once they have the formula, as long as they apply more and enough talented people, they can make a solid sequel. Look at Bioshock 2; they did not have Ken Levine involved. But, because the template was there with Bioshock 1, they could apply a few teams and make something that I believe was a worthy follow-up. Which is a perfectly fine business thing to do. But, you have to make sure the creators are being taken care of. Now, you’re seeing creators being represented by more by agencies and I think you’re seeing a shift in the business.

Do you feel like this is going to lead to more creative control on the part of the designers?

Um, maybe? I can only speak to my own personal experience within Epic, where I’ve got a tremendous amount of creative control and freedom, because Tim Sweeney’s a smart guy. He recognizes the need to take care of the creatives and those who really build the games. He’s not saying, “Screw you, you’re expendable. We’re going to get somebody else!” Which some publishers do with some developers. So, yeah, y’know, you have to be careful when you’re spending millions of dollars to make a product. You have to pick your creative bullets to fire very carefully. If you make something that’s too weird or too unique, you make something that’s heralded as a classic like Shadow of the Colossus but doesn’t sell as well. I prefer to operate in the space of something where it’s a shooter but we take a risk with cover, we take a risk with something like Horde [Mode, from Gears of War 2]. And then we innovate in a few areas but also give players something that’s familiar, right?

It’s funny, the median age of a gamer’s almost always been my age. Every year they’d announce it and now it’s, like, 35-ish. The perception is that it’s the pimply 12-year-olds in the basement but the reality is that a lot f them are dads right now and they’re raising the next generation of gamers. And the worm has turned in Hollywood. A lot of producers and directors are that age; they grew up playing video games and they get it now, whereas the old guard is fading away.

[After ordering lunch, the topic turns to the iPad…]

I know enough about technology to know to wait for the next generation but we were flying in and looking at everybody with their magazines and I’m, like, thinking that a year from now most of these people are going to be on tablets. I don’t have to lug all these books on these business trips. I went to the Sony store the other day and saw all their e-readers and, really, these already look like a Betamax, man.

Look at Susan Boyle and her success, right? I love studying media and the more I learn about other media the more I apply it to games. Studying why she was successful… my mom sees herself in her. Everybody’s mom sees herself in this YouTube phenomenon. It’s funny; she used YouTube to become a phenomenon but then just sells CDs because my mom doesn’t have a digital music player and still buys CDs. So she sold a million CDs.

So do you have the formula cracked for Justin Bieber, then?

I didn’t even know who Justin Bieber was until all that shit went down, by the way. Never underestimate the power of the 12-year-old female army, man. They’re a driving force from Twilight even back to the Harry Potter stuff.

So back to video games, how do you get them? Where do you get them?

I’m not gonna get them anytime soon. I’ll get them when they become teenagers because a lot of them will realize that maybe they want more of a power fantasy. There’s things we put in the Gears franchise that deliberately try and attach to women. I had a girl tweet that she got a tattoo on her lower back of the Crimson Omen [the Gears series’ signature skull icon]. So, in Gears 2 we had the themes of Dom and Maria and in Gears 3, you’ll learn more about Marcus’ relationship with his father and Dom dealing with the aftermath of what he’s done [in Gears 2]. And female Gears will finally be in the game. That’s one of the most common requests. Whenever I do a signing, girls always come up and ask, “Oh my god, are we going to get female Gears?” I’m always like, “Maybe, maybe…”

You hear excuses a lot from other development studios ast to why they can’t put female characters in these kinds of games. Most recently, it was with Ruffian and Crackdown 2….

Why? What was their logic?

They said they’d have to devote resources to animating another model, a female model…

Well, we do have custom animations for the female characters that we’re putting in Gears 3. But we actually found that there could be a fair amount of overlap [in the animation sets] because when we put them in bulky enough armor, it actually works just fine. So, it’s something that just looks cool now, to see that kind of iconic Gears armor but with a girl in it. We’ve hit a really good balance of our female Gears being attractive but not slutty and bad-ass but not ugly. I’m really proud of them. It’s been 18 months since the last game [in the Gears universe] and Anya the dispatcher has had to put on armor and fight. She has no choice and that’s an evolution of that character, which is really cool. Instead, “Oooooh, no, no… I’m gonna run away.”

So, now that it’s all out there… Gears 3. What’s in store?

It’s been 18 months after the events of Gears 2. When we last left Delta [Squad, the soldier protagonists of the series], they’d just sunk Jacinto, which was humanity’s last safe location to flood the Hollow [the Locust enemies’ underground stronghold]. As we open, the COG military’s largely fallen into disarray and we have pockets of humanity that are all stranded now. You can see this reflected in the characters and their armor. The armor’s a lot less heavy and tank-like. It’s a lot more rag-tag. And a new threat has arisen called the Lambent. We teased this in Gears 1 with the [Locust] wretches that were infected with emulsion and who exploded upon death. Then, at the end of Gears 2, we saw the Brumak [monster] mutate and you’re going to see the full realization of the adverse effects that this energy source has on the world of Sera. This horrific nightmarish mutated beasts are relentlessly chasing after Marcus and the remaining members of Delta Squad. Delta’s trying to find a way to stop this and no one’s seen any Locusts in months at the beginning of the game, by the way. Nobody’s really sure where they’ve gone or what’s really happened with them. As far as what’s going on with Marcus and his dad, was that a recording that he heard or was that a new broadcast at the end of Gears 2? Nobody’s sure. You’re going to get to know a bit more about Cole Train; instead of him just hooting and hollering all the time, he’s s going to have a bit more of a story.

From a gameplay perspective, it’s not a broken formula by any means…

No. But the key is to keep it fresh.

How do you plan on doing that?

We’re committing to four-player co-op. We hadn’t had that in the campaign before and the thing that makes it special here is the only way to play as Cole and Baird is to play as Players Three and Four. We want to find out ways to make players re-use the campaign and play through again, so if you’ve only played through with two players, you’ll want to play with more players. I can’t reveal more about that yet. One of the things were doing is switching up the story focus. There’s a part of  the game where you’re not even playing as Marcus and Dom. You’re playing as another squad and the storylines start interweaving and overlapping Pulp Fiction-style before they sort of merge. It’s a fun way to play with the timeline that we haven’t done much of yet. There’ll be new weaponry, new executions. I can’t get too much into the multiplayer yet. It’s important to note that we’ve added a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. One of the mantras has been “Give the fans what they want.” They certainly love the shotgun so we’re gonna give them a shotgun where if you’re close enough you can gib all three at the same time. We’re also giving then the Pendulum Wars-era Lancer [a historical predecessor to Gears’ signature chainsaw/assault rifle], which you may have seen on one of the novels. It’s kind of a classic assault rifle with a giant blade on the front, which our animators are finding out all sorts of fun ways to execute enemies with. Also, Karen Travis is the writer of Gears of War 3. She wrote the last two novels so she understands the characters and the universe very, very well. She’s able to breathe a lot more life and a lot more humanity into them. You get to see a lot more emotional range in Marcus and who he is. He’s not just this stoic guy. It’s the dead of summer; the situation’s getting worse. Humanity’s on its last legs and people are getting frustrated now.

So, is this the endgame for Sera, for the franchise?

If you take Gears 1 through Gears 3 and you put them together in one big bucket, it’s its own satisfying entity. This is the end of the trilogy. Moving forward, if there’s anything else after that, I’d hope it’d be in a little bit of a different vein. I’d hate for it to be “Oh, snap! More Locusts!” or “More Lambent!”

Spell Lambent for me…

L-A-M-B-E-N-T. It means glowy. It all ties back into the energy source that was the cause of the war in the first place.

At what stage of development are you for G3?

We’re a year out. At this point, the campaign is fully playable. A lot of the co-op and multiplayer features are coming online. Previously, for Gears 2, our tagline was “Bigger, Better, More Bad-Ass,” which got played out very quickly. The key messages for Gears 3 are that it will be the best-looking, most fun Gears to date but it’ll also be the most polished. And that’s the beauty of holding it off until April. Holiday [timeframe for releases] is still so jammed so it’s, like, let’s carve out our own window like Will Smith used to do with July 4th. Let’s call out our date and take the next year and just make a great game and polish it. Because the bar continues to be raised. There’s some amazing games out there, from Uncharted 2 to Modern Warfare, and we need to exceed that bar [from where they raised it].

What was the last thing that wowed you?

Heavy Rain.

Do you feel like it lived up to the hype, in terms of being a new evolution of storytelling in this industry?

I do. But, I say this as a huge fan of the game, I don’t think they solved the uncanny valley. I think Avatar got close but even then Avatar used blue people. I think, with the sheer amount of animation in that game, they did a great job of what they were going for. Every ounce of me wanted to dislike that game. I was, like, what is this emotional quick-time event, Dragon’s Lair type game? But, within the first 20, 30 minutes, I was, like, this is a whole new genre as far as I’m concerned. I really thinking five years you’re going to see interactive dramas with Natal that have guys like George Clooney in them.

So, on to the other game you’re announcing, Bulletstorm.

Bulletstorm is this kind of great, over-the-top first-person-shooter. Imagine a Call of Duty meets Firefly/Serenity with a little bit of Duke Nuke’Em in it. People Could Fly are some crazy Polish developers who we work with and fundamentally what they’re trying to do is re-invent the core shooter gameplay, which is what Gears did with cover. So, how they’re doing that is with body movements of kicking and sliding and leashing. You have this energy whip, which is kind of like a grapple, and when you start combining these moves with the very unique weapons these guys create, the possibilities start getting really crazy. I can’t describe it. When you see the video, you slide into a guy, kick him up into the air, it goes into slow-motion, you surgically pick off which part of him you want to hit. You get rewards for shooting that different part and then you tie an explosive to him and use that to blow up other guys. And then it flies into a cactus. It’s very kinetic.

What’s the development relationship been, with them in Poland? Does Epic have any kind of regular oversight?

Yeah, I review builds two to three times a week in multiple meetings. My job right now is to sit down with each project and sprinkle a little bit of the special sauce to make sure it’s fun. And also to particpate in the marketing and the PR of how the product is evangelized to the public and make sure PCF delivers something that’s Epic quality.

Want more? Check out Part 2 of Techland’s interview with Cliff Bleszinski to hear more about the games he’s working on and what he thinks of motion control and the hardcore gamer fanbase.

More on Techland:

Gears of War 3 Trailer: Ashes to Ashes

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