Apparently Cliff Bleszinski is not going to allow players to easily complete the next entry into the Gears of War franchise without dying – unless you actually play the game on Casual Mode which will be there “if you just want to see graphics and you don’t want to die”. All other modes “will be hard in this game, and you will die.”
Belszinski is concerned that games are becoming too easy and wants to buck the trend in (some) modern games and make progress more difficult.
“It feels like in this current console generation that we’ve taken a lot of steps to grow the audience and what I think’s happened is that the games have become more linear and easier, so it feels like a lot of quick-time-events.”
The idea is to really rely on your co-op partners to get through the game:
“When I played this in 4-player co-op… I mean, I’ve been playing Gears since the beginning of the course and I really have to hunker down and focus, and if my buddies aren’t reviving me, and we aren’t working as a team, you’re going to die, and it’s okay to die a few times in a game to try some different strategies, the S3 respawn system provides unique challenges.”
This desire to cause excruciating pain on the gamer is born out of his fondness of the ultimate pain-bringers in gaming… Demon Souls and Dark Souls.
“The more I play games like that the more I turned off to them and just want to get back to systems interacting with systems, and get back to a game that, you know, when was the last time a game really challenged you and asked something of you, right? There’s a reason why Demon Souls and Dark Souls have taken off lately. It’s because they really require you actually try.”
So we guess you should prepare to die. A lot. But maybe not as much as Dark Souls.
