One Way 'Gears of War' Topped Its Sequel [GDC 2009]

Once in a while a game developer says something that makes me want to rush to my console and try something out. That has happened during the still-ongoing "Gears of War 2" artificial intelligence post-mortem when Epic Games' Matt Tonks mentioned one way in which he thinks the first game still has an advantage: Despite the many AI improvements in the second Marcus Fenix action game, the grander scale of levels in "Gears of War 2" forced the designers to create more narrow funnels of enemy attacks -- "cover crawls," The result, said Tonks, was that the AI-controlled enemies sometimes didn't have as much room to demonstrate their full range of intelligent techniques. The first game is often better in that regard, he said: "The encounters were smaller and more open, so the encounters were more fluid than in in 'Gears of War 2.'"