In a video published by Ars Technica, Lee Perry, gameplay and level designer of the first Gears of War, talked about the difficulties encountered by the development team in creating the multiplayer sector and how this was about to be cut, given that the preliminary version is it turned out to be “a disaster”.
Perry explains that from the beginning of the work on the first Gears of War the goal was to integrate a multiplayer component, but that nevertheless it was a real undertaking since at the time the Epic Games team was small and the fear was that of not being able to compete with giants of the genre, such as Halo.
The biggest obstacle for the developers was to integrate the slow pace of Gears of War battles into multiplayer, making it enjoyable and fun to play. In the beginning, maps similar to those of Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament were created, but the team realized that the preliminary versions of the maps “were a disaster” because “those games worked completely different” from Gears of War. as they are all based on mobility as opposed to Gears.
“It was early summer and the game would be out in the fall, there was a very specific moment where we were like, ‘Are we just going to cut it?’” Says Perry.
Fortunately, instead of getting discouraged and launching Gears of War without multiplayer, the team worked hard to readjust the maps based on the singleplayer gameplay, adding walls and other obstacles to use as cover and bottlenecks to “force enemies out of a single location” and avoid the frustration of being killed by a player who came out of nowhere.
“Just like in the single-player campaign, the point was that you had the opportunity to see what those people were doing,” explains Perry.