14 DAY TRIAL // Gears of War: Judgment was presented to the world last week, during Microsoft’s E3 2012 presentation, and now the game’s two developers, Epic and People Can Fly, have talked about one of its major innovations – the Smart Spawn System (S3).
Gears of War games have delivered intense experiences with impressive gameplay that made them very popular on the Xbox 360 platform.
With the upcoming Judgment, Epic and People Can Fly want to make it much more challenging thanks to the addition of a Smart Spawn System, abbreviated S3, which is similar to the AI Director from the Left 4 Dead series.
"Previously in Gears, if you wanted a greater challenge, you went for the higher difficulty mode. It basically meant less health for you and more health for them. It worked perfectly fine, but we tried to attack this from a different angle," People Can Fly's Adrian Chmielarz told Joystiq. "S3 constantly monitors your performance, from simple stuff like accuracy and your skills, but also like your location in the combat zone."
Chmielarz exemplified by saying that if players got through a mission and died right before a checkpoint, they would be treated with a different experience once they respawned, with enemies coming from new directions and in different ways.
The creator of the Gears of War series, Cliff Bleszinski, also revealed that cutscenes would be a welcome reprieve from the constant challenge in the game, as players could finally relax and not worry about death.
"I play a lot of games where I just get into the flow of combat and it's getting good then, boom, cutscene. I'm like, ‘Get back to the gameplay.' In this game, the pacing has gotten to the point where when you get past a protracted battle, and you finally get a cutscene, yeah you're happy to see the story progress but you're really just happy to have a break. You're going to die, you're going to die a fair amount, but hopefully you like it," he said.
Gears of War: Judgment will have plenty of new features and many will be revealed as we get closer to its early 2013 release date.