The people above him at Epic never liked the idea of melee combat in first person shooters. But as the optional 3rd person camera in 1st person shooters started growing in popularity; they finally allowed him to include melee attacks in the last Unreal game for the Xbox.
Gears of War is Cliffy's own idea so he finally got the chance to combine the chocolate and the peanut butter of gaming in one. The rifle/chainsaw combo.... However he says that he still had to fight for that idea. Some of the folks over him didn't think it was a good idea in terms of gameplay....
Cliffy's got his own developer's blog at 1up (it's like video gaming's myspace)
There you can interact with other gamers and the good thing about that is that there's a lot of devs on there as well.
Cliffy's not the only one but he's one of the very few on there that actually talks to gamers.
He pitched the idea of melee combat for GOW on there to get everyone's input. He did hint on using chainsaw's a while back, the idea I gave him was to make the melee attaks over the top. You know, bloody as hell so that it never gets old.
As far as gameplay design, I threw the idea of making the melee attack so that once you land one, it's instant death. No chainsaw/blade swinging because then the game's going to feel like a hack & slasher since the game plays with in a 3rd person perspective.
As you can see, he at least took my instant kill advice.
I also asked for machetes, for cutthroat stealth kills.
No machetes in the game but Cliffy took the whole chainsaw thing a step further and included it as a secondary attack on the assualt rifle. Nobody saw that coming.
I've been looking at game design for a long time now.
And I've finally made up my mind to jump in the game.
We all hear that the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry now. And it's only going to get bigger. But that doesn't mean it's easy to find a job for starters. So talking to these cats is the best thing to do for now. I'm trying to get a hold of David Jaffe right now (the guy that brought us God of War). I work down the street from SCEA's headquarters.
And I have a friend who's a game tester there.
Jaffe openly said that he's desperately looking for ambitious game designers no matter what your experience is. He's looking for people that have a passion for video games.
The problem with the industry right now is that there isn't that many pure blooded game designers and developers.
Most of these cats are software engineers who get the jobs simply because they know how to program code.
They then transition themselves to game developers.
This explains why the industry is so saturated with shitty ass titles and very few hit titles.
The oppertunity is there folks.
At least for those looking to make a living in the video game industry.
If you live in the Bay, then you have it made.
There's so many publishers and devs stationed here.
