Today's portion of my interview with "Gears of War 2" chief creator Cliff Bleszinski doesn't veer into spoiler territory, unless you consider it a spoiler that Epic's new game has a water-based boss (oops!).
What this part of our chat is really about is the Rule of Threes.
Rule of Threes?
Yes, that's the video game law that must have been written by Shigeru Miyamoto or someone like him. It demands that we gamers must do many things in our games three times. Fighting a boss? There's a good chance you'll have to hit his weak spot three times. Or defeat his three forms.
"Gears of War 2" boss fights obey this Rule of Threes. Why, Cliff, why?
Read him try to defend it.
This interview was conducted by telephone a few days before the release of “Gears of War 2.” I finished playing the game’s campaign over online co-op with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal a day earlier, a session I referred to throughout the interview. N’Gai had played as “Gears” hero Marcus Fenix. I played as sidekick Dom.
Multiplayer: On the topic of fighting that water boss, why do we always have to do things three time in a row? Maybe this is something I don't like from the Miyamoto school of design.
Cliff Bleszinski, Epic Games: I don't know, man. That's always the case, isn't it? By the way, on casual, you just about have to give harsh language and he sinks. One thing we [worked on] with this game, and it's a tricky thing, is balancing...
"You don't want the player… to just stumble through something and not realize what he did "
[As for] the Rule of Threes, you play "Mario Galaxy" and there's that angry little beaver or hedgehog thing .. I haven't really thought this through but there's got to be some [theory, like] 'The first time is an exploratory thing where the player learns how to do it, the second time is when he does it with confidence, the third time is when it becomes really difficult. That comes out to the Rule of Three in video games. Because you don't want the player, in the normal difficulty level, to just stumble through something and not realize what he did and have no intent. That's not fun. You want him to stumble through it and then say, "Oh I think I figured it out, now let me try to do that with intent. Oh wait, it just got harder, right?"
Multiplayer: [laughs] Well, I'll tell you from the player's end. The first time on the water boss, N'Gai and I were figuring it out. The second time, we were very confident. The third time, we were probably cursing your name.
Bleszinski : What difficulty did you play it on?
Multiplayer: I think only the second difficulty. We just didn't want to do it a third time. Maybe we're lazy, I don't know.
Bleszinski : Maybe, honestly, the rule of threes exists just for padding, which is something a lot fo games do that we continue to push back… but we do very little of that.
Multiplayer: Yeah. You and I have talked for years about how a game doesn't have to be over 20 hours in order to be high quality. I've appreciated the many times you've expressed the ideal of trimming fat, making it svelte and keeping it moving. Maybe it's just a vestige of the old ways.
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Spoiler Interview: Bleszinski Talks ‘Gears of War 2′ Driving Sequences
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