Gears of War: Judgment Will Make Palms Sweat, Include a Smart Spawn System

In the latest issue of OXM, former Gears of War producer Rod Fergusson gives one of his last interviews before moving on to Irrational Games to work on BioShock Infinite.

In the interview, Fergusson states that one of their design principles was "sweaty palms" and how it factors in their playtests.

One of our design principles was the idea of sweaty palms; when you play you've got to have sweaty palms or we're not doing it right. So far in all of our playtests we've all got sweaty palms so that's good!

Aside from that, Fergusson also talked about Judgment's Smart Spawn System or otherwise known as "S3." This mechanic will make the gameplay feel different every time and not rely on heavily-scripted scenes.

So we started talking and they had some ideas that we thought that were kind of interesting, and so the campaign is a very different type of campaign. It's not the sort of cinematic, heavily scripted campaign – they have something called a Smart Spawn System that we call S3, that'll change the game every time you play it.

So if you die and reload, it'll actually have guys who spawn differently – different types of guys in different locations – and it'll watch where you're going and respond and change it around. It's a lot more about the action than scripted cinematics.

This is certainly good news, right? Hopefully, Judgment will offer the same level of polish and tightness as its predecessors. 

Gears of War: Judgment will hit store shelves next year for the Xbox 360.