Although the first Gears of War came out almost two years ago, the game is still near the top of the Xbox Live multiplayer charts, with hundreds of thousands of people playing it every day. With tomorrow's release of Gears of War 2, there's a good chance that Marcus Fenix and friends will be back on top, as the game has a much greater variety of maps and gametypes, as well as an addictive new mode called Horde. We recently had a chance to sit down for a chat with Rod Fergusson, the game's Senior Producer, to talk about the game's multiplayer and cooperative offerings. If you missed it, be sure to check out yesterday's interview that touched on the single-player campaign, achievements, and why we won't be seeing a PC version.



GameSpy: Let's talk about multiplayer for a bit. Why don't you tell us about some of the new modes that people can expect to see?
Rod Fergusson, Senior Producer: We've done a bunch of stuff. We've both enhanced existing modes and added new modes as well. One of the enhancements is Guardian, which is kind of like Assassination 2.0. In the original Gears of War's lifetime we introduced Annex, which was a new mode that didn't ship in the box and introduced the notion of respawns to the world of Gears multiplayer. So, when we originally developed Assassination, we weren't thinking about it with respawning in mind.

When we wanted to make Assassination more compelling, one of the things that we came up with was the idea that you have a leader, and your leader is the thing that's enabling you to respawn. You lose your leader, you can't respawn. So it actually encourages people to use teamwork quite a bit more. What's really cool is when you take that element and add on the strategic elements we've added to the multiplayer gameplay, like the ability to create proximity mines and plant shields and all that stuff. It's like, "Okay, you hold up in this house and I'll lay defenses," it's really cool the way that Guardian has been changed with that strategy. If someone played Assassination and was like, "Meh." they might want to give it another shot. It's basically my favorite new mode in Gears of War 2.
Some more new stuff we have is Submission, which we called internally Meatflag. When people played Gears, they wanted to know where the standards like Capture the Flag were, and while we looked at it, Capture the Flag just doesn't resonate in the Gears universe. What's cool is that in Gears 2 you have the ability to capture people and hold them as what we call a meat shield, so in Submission the flag is a person instead of a flag and they're armed with a shotgun and they're trying to kill you. So you've got to go out and try to capture this person and try to drag them back to your objective, but the whole time they're trying to shoot you. It was funny, we played yesterday and the meatflag got 31 kills during our match. He just owned us! So that's sort of our twist on Capture the Flag.

Deathmatch is another one that people wanted, but again, it just doesn't really fit into the universe. That's why we came up with Wingman, which we jokingly used to call 2v2v2v2v2, and it's this idea of five teams of two, rather than two teams of five. Basically, you and your partner play as the same character, and basically you have eight targets to shoot at instead of just five. It's pretty chaotic, and it's a lot of fun. You definitely have to keep your buddy around to revive you and stuff like that, there's a lot of strategies that come into that.

We're also bringing King of the Hill into the game, which was an exclusive to the Gears of War PC game. It's sort of a variant on Annex, but we sort of changed that one up too. In King of the Hill now, if you capture the point you won't respawn, so you can take your enemies down then take the point. That was one of the changes we made from Gears 1 to Gears 2. Then Annex is back, and Warzone and Execution are back. Then, of course, there's our new co-op mode Horde, which is a way to allow for five-player co-op.