Rod Fergusson: Basically, there's ten unique waves with some variability, and we have this notion of squads. Like, we have this Ticker squad that's eight Tickers, and instead of spawning a single guy, we might spawn the Ticker squad. It changes over the course of the ten waves, but basically you have five sets of these ten waves, so when you hit that ten you see that "The Horde Grows Stronger." You can set the difficulty from Casual to Insane, but no matter what, from 1-10 they're normal. Then waves 11-20 are double health, 21-30 are double health and double accuracy, 31-40 are double health, accuracy, and damage, then for the last waves it's 2.5 times everything. So the Horde keeps getting stronger and stronger.
We did a Casual one yesterday, and I think the first time we failed was on Wave 47. The Grinders on 2.5 damage will just tear you up. The thing that's interesting about Horde is that it really plays differently depending on the map, and what's nice about it is that it plays on all of the multiplayer maps. So, any map that comes in the box or any of the DLC maps will support Horde. Whatever it is, you can play on it. That's one of the things we're really proud of, that there are no map-specific game modes. Each of the 15 maps will support all eight multiplayer modes.
GameSpy: You mentioned that there will be 15 maps. There's 10 that will ship in the box, and five available in the Flashback Pack?
Rod Fergusson: The Flashback Map Pack, just because it rhymes. [Laughs]GameSpy: In Tyro Station, one of the maps from the first Gears of War, there was a train that rumbled through every so often and killed anyone standing on the tracks. Are there more environmental hazards in Gears 2's maps?
Basically, we just wanted to reward Gears fans. Two years is a pretty quick turnaround for a game company, and we know there's still hundreds of thousands of people still playing the multiplayer. We didn't want it to be a case where these maps that people are still playing just go away forever. So what we looked at was making this free reward for people who buy the game. There's a voucher, and you just go online and download the five maps that we really loved from Gears 1. They've been reimagined a bit, like Canals is now frozen over. Hopefully the fans will dig it. It's also not available for download on Marketplace, you can only get it from a new copy of the game.
Rod Fergusson: That was one of the other things we learned from Gears 1, that it's good to have a hook for a map. We wanted people to be able to talk about maps like, "It's the one with...", like the way that "Friends" used to name their episodes. It's like, "Tyro Station, I don't remember that one." then they'll say "Oh, it's the one with the train." Or, "Oh, Avalanche is the one with the avalanche running through it that kills everyone." and "Hail is the one with the razorhail that cuts you to pieces." So, we went out of our way to create specific hooks to put on maps so people could recognize it.
I think for the most part, except maybe for the original Gridlock and Mansion that don't have those environmental hooks, we tried to have that in Gears 2. Even if it's a map like Pavilion, where you've got this beautiful fall setting, you always remember that in the gazebo is the mortar. [Laughs] Or in Jacinto there's the mortar down by the helicopter, and you can look out over the ocean and see sort of outside the map. To me, none of the Gears 2 maps feel like arenas, they feel like actual places in the world. Even those visual beauty hooks are important.
