OXM
With a flashback frame narrative, Left 4 Dead-style adaptive spawning, class-based multiplayer and new tactical trappings, you could be forgiven for calling Gears of War: Judgment a brand new IP. Providing you steer clear of screenshots, anyway.
The visuals clearly share DNA with the numbered Gears of War games, but even here there have been sly modifications to support the story, which takes the franchise back to the day the Locust first set foot on Sera. We spoke to art director Chris Perna for more.
Damon Baird has always been the sarcastic background character. How did you shape him into more of a frontman?
We took a look at Baird's history. Before Emergence Day he was a lieutenant: he held a higher rank, he was more well-to-do and more respected. Through the course of Emergence Day he got bumped down to Private and that's how we know him in the Gears franchise. Before that he was a charismatic leader and, he would put it, the best lieutenant the COG army has ever had.
We explored his uniform and his look: we made him cleaner than in Gears of War. He was more prim, his hair a bit better cut, his skin a little nicer - not as many spots or blemishes, things like that. His uniform has certain things on his lapels and shoulders that designate him as superior.
What's your view on how successfully Gears has incorporated female playable characters? Bringing Anya to the squad was classed as a shift for a very macho franchise. Is Sofia Hendricks an evolution of that?
Yeah. It's always been hard for us to do the female characters. One of the challenges is that we share an animation system between the males and the females. Locust share the same animation system as well, which is why everybody is kind of the same size and kind of has the same skeleton - it makes it a lot easier for our 600 animators to produce a game. That's always been a hurdle.
Getting a female animation swagger, the way they walk and certain nuances didn't come easy for us. We found along the way that whereas with a lot of other aspects guys can be hired to model creatures and brutal humans and stuff, they're used to that, but they're not so used to the subtleties of the female form. There have been a lot of challenges.
A lot of girls play Gears, so that drove us to overcome these challenges and create these females that weren't 'pretty' females. There's some of the backstory in the comics - there's an issue called 'Barren' and it's about what the COG do to women to get them into the military. They've gone through these horrible procedures to get them more masculine and ready to fight on the frontlines with the Locust and stuff.
All that fiction kind of wraps up in the design of the females, as well as the challenges we've had to overcome with the animation system and things like that. I think they've worked. They're a little butch on the surface, but we try and make their faces pretty and overcome some of that to make their form a little more pleasing to the eye.
Do you think that female characters have to butch up to appear in these sorts of very action-driven games, or is that just something specific to Gears?
Yeah, I mean, in Gears I think you need dirt. If you want to create this attractive, stereotypical, sexy female - a lot of games do that and it's kind of cliché at this point. You see the implants and the blonde hair and pants and you roll your eyes - it's almost like the game geek's idealisation of what a woman should be. I think because we didn't go that route we have more believability... we've got more butch characters. They're still feminine - Anya in Gears 3 comes across as being very feminine and I think it works.
What has been the response from female players to Anya and other playable female characters? Have you found people really getting behind her?
Yeah I think so. When we go to conventions there's cosplay and stuff like that. They feel empowered - they put on that armour and they walk around with these massive weapons and I think they get a kick out of it - I get a kick out of seeing it. From what we've heard, when they play the game they feel empowered and they feel good. Some of the feedback I've heard from women that I talk to is if we'd made these women more feminine and more stereotypical it wouldn't have been so nice. I think it's pretty positive.
Do you think you'd ever make a Gears game with a female lead?
That's certainly interesting but I don't know. If you look at what sells, it's tough to justify something like that.
It's been said that Judgment would make the Locust scary again. From an art point of view, how have you achieved that?
We set out to do exactly that. Looking at the original Gears of War and how things evolved throughout the trilogy - we added more game-isms. If you go back to the original it's very raw. It was a much more visceral experience to a lot of people. We looked at that and said, "hey, how can we bring this back a little bit and what can we do to the Locust to make them scary again?"
We've darkened Judgment's tone a little bit, we have more characters on screen. Their AI patterns and behaviours are very different now, a lot more aggressive, and some of the sound and movement tweaks that we did to the animations are all there. They'll all be combined to give you more of a sweaty palm experience - these monsters are really bringing it.
Do the Locust look fresher and less battle-scarred as a result of being this close to Emergence Day?
Yeah. We went over all the skins and upgraded to a higher resolution, things like that... made them a little bit darker and meaner looking. There's a Rager that's kind of a Locust that hulks out: he starts out as this little thin guy with a weapon, and as he takes more damage he just throws his weapon away, turns red, blows up with spikes and all kinds of crazy stuff and starts charging at you to tear you apart. I think things like that really lend themselves to a more fearsome looking Locust.
Will there be a similar sequence to the first meeting with the Berserker?
We'll just have to wait and see. But, you know, there's the Locust general right? I mean, Karn is the Locust general now and he's the first: he was the general who orchestrated Emergence Day, right? He's kind of Raam's precursor, so he's a scary guy: he rides on this huge beast called Shibboleth. He's a pretty intense character.
There was a time when the Gears aesthetic was seen as generic. Then Gears 3 brought a lot more colour back into it. Will you change the palette again with Judgment?
I think a lot of that stereotyping was done by copycats. When Gears came out it was fresh, it was dark - that's what it's meant to be, right? No apologies there. It was a brutal game - it was meant to be. Then everybody copied us and copied our look, and the market was flooded with Gears clones, which hurts the original. So we evolved the colour palette, and the engine and the lighting and the technology and stuff through Gears 2 and then on to Gears 3.
Gears 3 was so colourful because we upgraded the renderer and global illumination lighting, which just worked better with more colour, brighter lights and things like that. With Judgment we've evolved even further. We've enhanced the bloom in the renderer so fires will bloom better and won't be a blown out, ghostly type of thing where it looks like Vaseline is smeared on the lens. I think it's really, really soft looking.
We've evolved the colour palette even more, to make a lot more colour yet still keep a more sombre tone. We've done things with post-processing to really enhance the visuals and our cinematics, too. I think visually, it's the best looking Gears so far.
Do you integrate the design and the colour of the environments with the campaign? Or do you apply more of an overall aesthetic and let designers carve their way through it?
We take a look at the story and what's happening in certain environments. One of the things we were very conscious of with this game was giving the player more storied environments, so pretty much everywhere you look there will be remnants of events that happened in that area. You'll see bloody handprints on the walls, dead bodies, things that'll tell a story of wherever you are in that environment. You should be able to look around and say, "wow, this kind of thing happened here or this kind of thing happened there".
And on top of that, where there's an intense firefight or where we want you to feel scared we do tend to manipulate the mood of the scene; it's more atmospheric, it's darker, it's more claustrophobic when we want you to feel that way, when we want you to feel creeped out and scared a little bit, you know? Sound goes a long way with these kind of things too.
Have you ever tried doing more environmental storytelling like audio diaries and the like?
We like to make the environments feel tangible. Things like that stop the flow of the game. I'm in the game to play it - I don't care for stuff like that, unless I'm playing an RPG where I want to find everything, treasure and the like. In a game like this you just have to move people along but give them that richness so the environments are believable and there's a sense of place everywhere you go. I think it keeps it from being generic.
