Gears of War has set the standard for the way games look. When it was released back in November, it was certainly the best looking game at that time. Even now, it is probably still the best looking game on the 360 to date, with games trying to match it at every step. However it could get better, according to Cliff Bleszinski.

In a recent interview with EGM (posted on 1UP), Cliffy B reveals that Gears 2 will look better, and that there is still more in the 360 to unlock in terms of power and potential. Not only that, but he reveals other interesting details about possible DLC and more in the full interview below:

EGM: Gears of War is the bestlooking game for any console right now. Can you outshine it with Gears of War 2?

Cliff Bleszinski: Well, first off, we haven’t actually committed to saying that we’re doing a sequel yet. So I see what you’re doing there….

EGM: But Gears’ ending says there’s going to be a sequel.

CB: Well, I don’t know about you, but I want to kill more stuff. I think there’s a pretty good chance that we might be doing something after this.

EGM: Graphically speaking, is there room to improve?

CB: I think there’s more that we could squeeze out of the 360. You get used to the limitations and potential that this console has, and then you can really start exploring. I guarantee that, in the future, the technology of what we do here will squeeze every bit of coolness out of [the 360]. If there’s a follow-up, it’ll definitely look better than the first.

EGM: The “Mad World” trailer is pretty cool, but you never have that big encounter in the game, and you never really explore the human, emotional side of the story like the commercial hints at. False advertising?

CB: I think those themes are there in the game; they’re just very secondary as far as the sense of desperation that occurs with the war, massive displacement as far as these stranded guys that are cast off from humanity.

The thing is, we didn’t want to beat people over the f***ing head with the story elements in the game and have them sit there watching four hours of cut-scenes in a row before they can go down the next hallway. We believe that players can infer a lot about what’s going on in the universe, that it gives them reason to explore the ancillary marketing materials that we made available on the website [gearsofwar.com]. Ultimately you buy the game to play it and enjoy it and have fun, and if our biggest problem is that people want to know more about the universe, that’s a good problem to have in my opinion.

EGM: You’re a big fan of Resident Evil 4, but just how much influence did it have on Gears? Blind enemies, the camera, the mine-cart sequence, a boss that you kill by sinking him into “lava”…. Did we miss anything?

CB: There’s a fine line between what some people claim is paying homage and what some people claim is just a straight rip-off, right? When I go back and play RE4, its pacing was actually a bit more methodical than what we wound up with. Gears has a kind of crazy pacing…more of an action-movie feel–we wound up leaning on the action side more than the suspense side, whereas RE4 swung back and forth more quickly between the two.

Ultimately there’s definitely overlap between the two, but we’re not the [only other] game to have blind enemies or a third-person camera. It’s just a matter of evolving what things you think are cool and taking them to the next level, introducing them to a new generation that might not have seen these experiences.

EGM: Are artificial triggers unavoidable? Like when Locusts pour out after you take over a turret, or that box that blocks the train that magically disappears only after you clear out all the enemies in the area. How do you deal with these situations as a game designer so they don’t feel too fake?

CB: The key is misdirection. It’s like magic, right? Just like a magician uses a pretty girl. Any time the player sees something interesting in front of him, you can have all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes.

You have to have what are essentially “gates” to make sure a player doesn’t just sprint through the entire game, á la Quake done Quick. The areas where the players don’t notice this are the ones that have the most whiz-bang action, and everything just flows together seamlessly. As a designer, you use misdirection and make sure there’s all sorts of cool stuff with choppers and explosions so that the player is preoccupied and doesn’t realize that he’s carefully being “gated” along throughout the cinematic experience.

EGM: What’s up with Dom? He sure needs a lot of saving….

CB: In hindsight…Dom got a little eager in spots. We probably should have made him ease up on the caffeine a little bit.

EGM: Do you think assigning “solve puzzle” to the Y button underestimates the audience’s intelligence, where you make it too easy to track whatever they need to track at the time?

CB: It does and it doesn’t. We wound up having different timers on different difficulties for a lot of the Y-point adventures. So if you’re playing on casual, the tip on where to go would actually come up relatively quickly, whereas on hardcore it would appear later or not at all. We’re using the different difficulty methods to separate those who want a slightly more spoon-fed experience versus those who don’t.

A lot of gamers are so used to this arbitrary definition of what “challenge” is that they’re used to being beaten down as if they’re the most hardcore gamer, and they’re OK not knowing where to go and like spending hours just trying to figure out what the hell they’re supposed to do in a game. I’m OK with giving players tips. This is how we expand our audience. We’re a business. We want everybody to buy the game.

EGM: Is there a lot of concern over how violent the game is?

CB: Funny thing is, I’ve heard more complaints about the language than about the violence. Some people are OK with the fact that you’re shooting and chain-sawing them, but they don’t want to hear the words “s***” or “goddamn.” It’s such a funny standard of where your average American gamer is. Who am I to say what people want, though? I mean, the customer is always right. But I find it incredibly amusing. You can cut people’s heads off all day long as long as you don’t show a breast or say a dirty word. It’s a catch-22–it’s the fear of the language that makes that language powerful, so if nobody cared about the cusswords there wouldn’t be any cusswords, right?

EGM: Why so few modes in multiplayer versus? And the three that are available are essentially the same….

CB: It’s one part wanting to keep it simple and just one part time [constraints] and making sure…the game had to ship at some point. We’re talking about some possible extensions to the versus [via downloadable content], but nothing’s been officially announced yet.

EGM: Do you think melee attacks are too useful in multiplayer? They all stun on that initial hit.

CB: If the players mash A fast enough, they can actually dive away from the stun occurring. If you’re actually that good and can get that close to enemies, then you deserve to kill them. At that point you could have chain-sawed them, you could have grenade tagged them, you could have shotgun blasted them– you could have used any number of different attacks. If you keep the enemy at a distance, then it’s basically a nonissue. That’s where teamwork really comes in. If people are watching your back and checking your corners and everything, you’ll be OK. If you just start lone-wolfing it, well, good luck.

EGM: Grenade taggers often die in the act of tagging, but since taggers are awarded a kill and taggees aren’t, the game actually doesn’t discourage suicidal play too much.

CB: Well, the next step right now is to just make grenade tagging a lot harder to do. From my own experiences online, I’ve found grenade tagging to be very frustrating–people grabbing it and then just diving and the game devolving from there. So we’re nerfing that back a bit, but we still want it to be a viable tactic. You take the risk of getting that close and you get the reward. But keen players who really know how to aim, they can keep players with shotguns and grenades at a distance very, very easily, because they just aim for the head, have an active-reload clip, and take them down in a nanosecond.

EGM: Can you talk more about why Gears doesn’t support friends in ranked matches?

CB: It’s basically a rule from Microsoft. They wanted to prevent players teaming up and padding the ranked matches and getting on top of the leaderboards.

EGM: We talked to the Xbox Live team, and they told us it’s really up to developers–that if they really want to build it, they can. It seems like you guys are blaming Microsoft, and Microsoft is saying it’s really up to you guys. Their upcoming Shadowrun will support team ranked matches with friends. So what gives?

CB: There’s been enough of an uproar in the community. I’ve seen relentless amounts of comments on message boards about it. As far as I know, it was not allowed [by Microsoft]. It could just be a left hand not talking to the right hand type of situation, but gamers aren’t going to let the damn thing die. If it keeps coming up…you know how we are as far as supporting our community. We commit to our products; we don’t let it go.

EGM: Does that mean you will incorporate team rankings in Gears of War if you can?

CB: Those talks are ongoing.

EGM: Did you deliberately design Gears’ multiplayer to favor chance or chaos in order to make the game more accessible to a broader base? Like when two chain saws go head-to-head–it’s a coin toss as to who’s going to win that fight. Why not make the game more tactical, so a player knows exactly who’s supposed to win in that situation?

CB: For me a lot of those scenarios ultimately boil down to the X-factor. When you’re playing a real-time strategy game, and you have two evenly matched players, the one thing that can push it away from a stalemate is that random crate that appears on the battlefield and gives one player an advantage. I think it’s good for players who are generally better to be able to defeat other players, but if there’s a little bit of a random factor in there to allow the s***ty guy to occasionally beat the guy who’s really good, I think that, in the name of fun, it’s an occasional trade-off that’s OK to make.

EGM: Epic Games has a history of making competitive shooters like Unreal Tournament. Gears is fun to play with friends, but it probably won’t see major action with the pro leagues….

CB: The game was never designed to be Unreal Tournament. It was always designed as one-third singleplayer game, one-third co-op, and one-third versus multiplayer. The fact that versus has taken off as such a success is a pleasant surprise for us, but it was never something that we had planned to be CPL- [Cyberathlete Professional League] or World Cyber Games–worthy in that regard. It’s always been just a “jump in, kick around, and have fun with friends” game. It’s not really the kind of versus that we designed for people to play for six figures. That’s why we do Unreal Tournament.

EGM: Still, can’t you make a game that appeals to the casual audience and is precise enough for tournament-level play?

CB: I think that’s something we could potentially iterate on [for a sequel] and nail everything perfectly for extremely high-level competitive play, with high yield for players.

There are always ways around it. The superweapon in your classic shooter is that X-factor of chaos that allows the s***tiest of players to occasionally kill the best players. And what do they do for tournament play? They just disable the superweapon. You can always make small changes–this is the rule set for the hardcore, and this is the rule set for casual players…something that’ll maintain the hardcore but invite the more casual to play. But we try to keep them in separate pens whenever possible….

It’s a very interesting read, and leaves quite a few things unanswered. In particular, DLC that includes new multiplayer modes. It’s true that there should at least be an eight way deathmatch; hopefully they will come up with a few new modes to keep everyone happy.

The most controversial of all would have to be the ranked matches with friends problem. Originally it was pretty simple since the host name was displayed. Since the patch, people have been complaining that it has spoilt the game since all hosts are now called “host”, yet Epic and Microsoft say it was each others fault. Maybe another update will change it back.

Only time will tell, but I think it’s safe to assume that Gears of War 2 is still a fair way off yet, so keep enjoying the original. Or Crackdown, whatever you prefer!