Although Cliff Bleszinski gets most of the press when it comes to the Epic Studios team responsible for bringing Gears of War 2 to Xbox 360s everywhere, Senior Producer Rod Fergusson was the proverbial man behind the curtain. Fergusson cut his teeth at Microsoft, where he helped to produce the Xbox version of Counter-strike and a little game called Gears of War. After Gears shipped, Fergusson decided to move to North Carolina to take a production position at Epic, where he's since been heading up the development of the highly anticipated Gears of War 2. We had a chance to sit down with Fergusson at the game's review event a few weeks ago, asking him about everything from the game's story to the new characters to its achievement system. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our multiplayer interview!



GameSpy: How did you decide to tell the player how close they were to getting an achievement? I know The Orange Box did that a little while ago, with stuff like "You have X number of kills now, you need Y to get an achievement".
Rod Fergusson: Obviously we play a lot of games, and we looked at what we could be doing to help enhance the player's experience. I think Uncharted did a great job with that, as did The Orange Box. We felt bad, becuase you look at Gears 1 and you don't know how close you are to the 10,000 kills Achievement. I always look at the Achievements as nothing more than bait, a way to guide the player through certain experiences. Like, trying to bait them to go try to melee a Ticker or performing an active reload.. But if you don't know how close you are or where to go, it's not serving its purpose as a motivator. It's the same reason we never do secret Achievements, because they're not motivators, it just ends up being some random happenstance. You can't say, "I want to go seek this out."

So that's why we came up with those sort of "In Progress" toasts. We call them toasts because they pop up. I sat down with Rob McLaughlin, the programmer, and said "OK, here are the frequencies we want..." We wanted it on the first time because we want to show the player that we're paying attention to what they're doing, like "Hey, you just melee attacked a Ticker, we're paying attention. Then we want one at the halfway point, and right before you get it, so you know that you just need one more before you get it. So far the response has been really positive, and I'm hoping players really dig it too.
GameSpy: There was one that seemed pretty insane called Seriously 2.0 that's obtained by getting 100,000 kills. First of all, that's crazy. Second, are you going to be able to get those kills via the campaign and multiplayer and Horde?
Rod Fergusson: Yeah, you will, and that was part of the reason that we changed it. We did some math and figured out how long it would take someone to get Seriously it if they play pretty frequently. The we were going to release the title update with Annex, and we were reading the forums and saw people asking if this respawning game mode would count toward the Seriously achievement, and some people thought they could get it in three days. Knowing that and seeing that type of mentality, what we looked at for Seriously 2.0 was to make it more accessible. We didn't want it to be ranked, for one. Some of the guys in here have gotten over 2000 kills in the campaign alone, and you add that to Horde, where you're killing 15 or 20 a round, and the respawn gametypes and all that, we think it's going to go up pretty quickly.

In addition to broadening it, we wanted to increase the duration. It's amazing to look at the leaderboards today to see how many people have been playing and how many kills they have. I mean, we want it to be achievable, but we also still want it to be an exclusive club. However, because it's such a hardcore one, we wanted to reduce its value somewhat. For something that's going to take that long to get, 50 points may not be worth it for all the effort, but we also didn't want people to think, "I missed out on 300 points because I didn't want to spend time getting it." That's one of those ones that's more about just getting it, not the point value.