Gears Tactics
I was moved to Gears Tactics in the months leading up to Alpha to cover for a Lead Designer on paternity. My primary responsibility was to oversee the core design team over this period and increase KPIs for all missions (and gameplay) in the 1st Act.
These responsibilities grew as I realized the work required to improve the game wasn’t isolated to the missions. There were issues with enemies and our core design falling short.
My work to resolve these problems was so successful that when the Lead Designer returned, I was retained as the owner of the design team and they were moved to handle another feature team.
Rapid Iterative Playtesting
This is the process I applied in achieving the outcomes with Executions and Enemies below.
The goal behind this process is simple, rapidly iterate a feature or element towards an objective (usually to improve it or resolve an issue it’s facing). As we were midway through production, we often had to work with what we had rather than starting from scratch so it worked well.
This process can be done solo or in a group and proceeds as follows:
Deconstruct and Identify Issues.
What do we think is going wrong?
Formulate/Adjust Hypothesis for Resolution.
How do we think we can fix it?
Agree on upcoming Actions.
What are we doing to try and fix it?
Implement Actions.
Try to fix it.
Observe Outcome.
Did we fix it?
We had this down to an art on Tactics. We were usually able to get two cycles in per day, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.
Execution Mechanic
I cannot take credit for the concept of rewarding Action Points for Executions, but I was responsible for the emphasis placed on it in the final product.
For context, in both Gears of War and Gears Tactics, when a character’s health hits 0 they are placed into a down-but-not-out (DBNO) state where they can be Revived (returned to play) or Executed (removed from play).
When I arrived on the project we were experiencing issues with gameplay not feeling like Gears (one of the KPIs called out above). A large component of this observed via testing was passive or reactionary decision-making in players. This made sense as the dominant strategy was to minimize damage to your characters, moving them forward a step at a time and overwatching. This directly opposed the bombastic tone of Gears, which actively encouraged players to push forward, identify enemies and flank them. You should feel like a team of battering rams, not a surgical strike team. We had not correctly translated the 3rd person shooter experience to the Tactics experience.
There were some easy wins here to emphasize flanking through the application of attractors and repulsors (balancing enemy cover bonuses and abilities). But the biggest win came from (re) introducing executions. At this stage, the execution mechanic existed but it was mostly a novelty and not a focus.
My goal was to expand tactical decision-making and improve the Gears feel by encouraging players to risk moving forward to gain appropriate rewards.
We did this by improving the player options from:
Players attack enemies to remove them from play.
To:
Players can leave a DBNO enemy and take another action but risk that they might be revived.
Players can overkill/kill a DBNO enemy at range to prevent them from being revived.
Players can move to a DBNO enemy to execute them, positively impacting their action economy.
We knew it was the right choice from the first test. Not only did it have the positive impact of pulling players forward, but it also provided a way for players to dig themselves out of bad situations. It became a positive loop where, because players moved forward more to execute they found themselves in difficult situations more often. But by having the ability to gain and use more actions, they were able to pull themselves out of those situations. As a result, players became more comfortable playing aggressively because they knew they could get themselves out of trouble.
- GameSpot
We had brought the feel of Gears to the Tactics genre.
Enemy Redesigns
…but they weren’t always like that.
A number of enemies lacked an identity or any clear way of placing a meaningful decision in front of the player.
The Wretch
The primary issue we were facing with the Wretch was that they were failing in their role as a flusher (to push players out of position).
Wretches needed to be weak to reflect the IP and fill their role as a Smasher/Swarm enemy, but they needed something to ensure players didn’t just stand still, let themselves be hit then shoot the Wretches in their turn.
The solution I ended up with here was an attack of opportunity (classics never die) where the Wretch would attack and interrupt any character taking action near them. Therefore players were incentivized to use overwatch or positioning to stop the Wretches from closing, or using other characters to shoot them before acting.
This approach also synergized well with the Execution system. As players were moving around enemies more in order to execute them, Wretches now posed a completely new problem as they prevented players from moving freely.
The Grenadier
The role of the Grenadier was that of a high health, damage/flusher, to close with and deal a large amount of damage to a character or make them reposition.
To achieve this goal they couldn’t move too far in one turn, the player needed to know they were coming to make a decision. But as they needed to get close to deal full damage they were incredibly vulnerable to short-range instant kill abilities like Chainsaw & Bayonet Charge.
These abilities were key elements of the Gears fantasy and had tested incredibly well up to this point so we felt it unwise to remove or rework them for the sake of a single enemy. Instead, we borrowed from our learnings with the Wretch and added an attack of opportunity if a player moved too close to the Grenadier (to chainsaw them).
While this certainly helped them fulfill their role, it was met with rather negative feedback during testing. Players never like having powerful options taken away from them so we did additional iteration to see if we could have the best of both worlds, chainsawing a high-health enemy did feel good after all.
In our final version, we added a Berserk state to the Grenadier, allowing it to perform its role and also be eliminated with instant-kill abilities. Grenadiers now started with the attack of opportunity but lost it when they went berserk (when damaged).
The Sniper Drone
The role of the Sniper Drone was damage/support, sitting in the Locust backline and punishing any units out of cover with high damage.
It did perform this role but it wasn’t a particularly interesting enemy to fight. They didn’t enrich the combat experience by placing unique problems in front of the player. We effectively had a long-range Hammerburst Drone (our basic ranged enemy).
To answer this I went back to the drawing board and deconstructed the experience of what we wanted fighting a sniper to feel like and sought to marry that up with its intended role of damage/support:
A Sniper watches its prey and waits for the perfect shot.
A Sniper’s presence can be just as deadly as their bullets.
If their target steps out of cover they’re dead.
Snipers tend to get tunnel-visioned when focussing on a target.
Snipers do not fight in close quarters.
Taking these points, I redesigned the behavior of the Sniper around a new ability, Pin.
If there was a player character out of cover, shoot them for high damage.
If all player characters are in cover, choose one to Pin.
If a Pinned character takes action, shoot them for high damage.
When Pinning a target, do not move or take any other action.
This gave the Snipers a much clearer identity on the battlefield. Now they weren’t just a threat to characters out of cover, they could lock down characters who were in cover and from a great distance away. The Sniper wouldn’t fire unless their target took action so you were able to sneak up on them over multiple turns if required. But it was exactly this that made them shine in their support role, the Pin ability synergized incredibly well with flusher enemies like the Wretch, Grenadier, and Ticker where a character that is pinned also needed to move away from an incoming attacker. Could the player clear the pin and escape? Could they use other characters to eliminate the incoming enemies? Did they just take the damage from the Pin shot to escape and heal afterward? The choices were varied and the players to make.
The Ticker
The Ticker was probably our lowest-performing enemy at the time of my arrival. As per the enemies above, it wasn’t particularly interesting to fight against as it didn’t add to the combat ecology in any meaningful way. It ran at the player and exploded if it got close enough, pure and simple. Additionally, players were often able to shoot them immediately after they spawned, causing them to detonate and damage/kill many of the enemies they spawned in with drastically reducing the difficulty of the encounter.
I went back and deconstructed the key elements of what made this enemy engaging in mainline Gears. In 3rd person, Tickers could be hard to spot/shoot as they scuttled towards players, presenting the player with a target acquisition/aim skill test. Their ticking also created a rising sense of dread as they got closer and closer to the player. It was obvious to me then why this enemy was suffering, these traits posed several issues in their transition from action-shooter to tactics game.
Hard to spot.
The top-down, perfect sight of Tactics meant players always knew where the Tickers were.
Hard to shoot.
Missing a shot wasn’t a punishment in Tactics as time was standing still.
Impending sense of doom.
With time standing still between turns there was no sense of danger as Tickers got closer and closer between shots.
Through iteration, we resolved this by giving the Ticker the unique ability to move during the player’s turn. When shot at, the Ticker would now move towards the attacker, creating that sense of increasing tension. We also scaled their evasion over distance as well so that even though players could see them early, it was rare for them to eliminate them with their first shot. We still wanted that chance as blowing up a Ticker inside a group of enemies was enjoyable after all, but we wanted it to be a surprise rather than an expectation. As an added axis of skill, astute players were also able to use this system to manipulate Tickers. Pulling them in certain directions by deliberately missing shots.
Overwatch Stagger
Something else I tackled in my time on Gears Tactics was the role of the Overwatch system. We were facing an issue where players often chose to overwatch rather than shoot their opponents.
Overwatch shot at moving targets that were often out of cover (higher hit chances) and did the same amount of damage as a standard attack. Ergo, the average damage dealt per action point spent on overwatch when compared to shooting made it the optimal choice in almost all scenarios.
Our initial iterations involved simply scaling down the damage of Overwatch and although this did have the positive impact of placing the focus on shooting, Overwatch became almost unused by players.
Given how far through Production we were at this stage, I wanted to avoid any major rework to such a core ability so I started to look for other options. Here I found a stagger value for enemies, if they received enough damage in a short period of time they would stumble and their current action would be interrupted.
Viewing this through the lens of Overwatch, I could see how clear roles for shooting and overwatch could be defined:
Players Shoot to Kill enemies.
Players Overwatch to Control enemies.
We increased the stagger dealt by Overwatch attacks and players began to use overwatch to close off space; if they wanted to prevent a Grenadier from advancing on their position, or a Hammerburst Done ducking into cover nearby, they could overwatch the location to ensure enemies would likely be staggered if they tried. This left the enemy vulnerable to a follow-up shot in the player’s turn. Making the player feel like they’re the ones pulling the trigger, rather than waiting for their characters to.
