Gears of War Only Shipped Due to Amazing "Talent and Passion"
by Nicholas Taylor, posted on 06 March 2011 / 1,182 Views
Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, has said that the main reason for Gears of War actually launching and becoming the big-name IP it is today lies with the strong "talent and passion" of the game's development team.
Speaking during a session at this year's Game Developer's Conference, Capps spread some words of wisdom to developers by clarifying that inexperience can easily create an unnecessary and increased risk when trying to launch a new IP.
“Lack of maturity [in your studio] will cost you time,” he said. “I don’t mean an immature team as in making fart jokes, I mean that your team is not experienced or using technology that’s not finished. Gears 1 was the ultimate example of that.”
“We had a team who hadn’t shipped a story-based game as a group ever before – and individuals who hadn’t really shipped a story-based game since Unreal. We had technology that wasn’t finished yet on a platform that wasn’t finished yet. And we had a process where they basically didn’t really have a producer, or were under-served by a producer, because they had many different things going on in the company. That’s the reason I went there.” he continued.
He went on to say that “When you look at Gears 1 from a risk mitigation standpoint or a team perspective, you know, it should have failed – in terms of all the things that could have gone wrong. It’s only because of the amazing talent and passion of the team that we were actually able to ship when we did.”
He also mentioned the importance of sticking to a firm, non-competitive release date, and said that if Gears of War had been released as a new IP in 2010 instead, it would've had a much tougher time due to the genre's more crowded market.
He also referred to what he calls the “Iron Triangle” of release: scope, schedule and resource. He said that all three must be balanced, so that if the schedule of a developer's project is "cut back", then so must also the other two areas. He also said that extending the development time on a new IP should not be an option, saying that the team should instead focus on improving upon the series with sequels, using Grand Theft Auto III as an example.
Given this philosophy, Capps believes that Epic has continued to evolve the Gears franchise with each iteration, thus making Gears of War 3 the better game in the series.
“We at Epic believe it’s better to ship a very small thing that’s highly polished, than to ship a very large thing that’s mediocre,” he said. “We will cut scope purely to give us time at the end to polish what we have.”
