Gears of War 3: Horde 2.0 shown off in Cologne at MS Play Day - video inside
We shot some videos last week at the Microsoft Play Day. Here's the first of them, it's Horde 2.0 from Gears of War 3 being shown at the event in Cologne.
It was filmed right after we spoke to Microsoft producer Chris Kimmel on how Epic and Microsoft has improved Horde in the trilogy ender.
"We looked at how Horde was played in Gears 2, and one of the things we saw is that people naturally are finding the best place on the map to bunker down and create a good defence, so they can withstand the wave and waves of Locust enemies," Kimmel told VG247 at the event on Horde.
"Epic built gameplay on top of that, we created these things called fortifications, so while you play waves like you did in the original Horde, once you kill Locust, you actually earn cash. And in between waves, we actually create the ability to buy fortification or defensive positions, so we have gun turrets, decoys, sentries and the ultimate is the silverback mech you can purchase.
"Each one of these things have different levels - the fences start just as a strip of spikes on the ground. Once you buy those, you can upgrade those to barbed wire. After that, you actually get laser beams. So each one of these things have different things you can upgrade."
But not just Horde mode has improved. After various complaints from the Gears 2 multiplayer, Microsoft launched a multiplayer beta earlier this year, which seen 1.3 million users. It seems to be that the beta has helped improved multiplayer this time round. Clearly.
"We really looked hard at what we did well and what we didn't well with multiplayer in Gears 2. The first thing we did is, through the life of Gears 2, we created a bunch of title updates where we actually fixed a lot of the issues with Gears 2," said Kimmel.
"But that was a big challenge because a lot of people left, and that's totally understandable. So with Gears 3, we did a multiplayer beta in the spring. Part of that was to show fans, 'hey. we've really fixed a lot of these multiplayer issues.' We did things like adding dedicated servers in the backend so we could have less cheating going on and so we could have better multiplayer performance.
"So we had to test out that system with these hundreds and hundreds of servers worldwide for the multiplayer beta. We had over 1.3 million fans play the beta, they all really loved it quite a bit, so we think we're doing a great job by showing that Gears 3 competitive multiplayer is the best multiplayer we've had."
We filmed a video of Horde 2.0 being played in Cologne below. Gears 3 launches on September 20.
