[Mush xx]

Our insider at E3 managed to grab an interview with Cliffy B for Gears of War 3:

We managed to get some brief face-to-face time with Cliffy B, and put some searching questions to him regarding Gears of War 3. As always, Epic are keeping their cards close to their chest, saving up information so they can reveal it later for maximum impact, but he did let a few interesting tidbits slip. Here they are:

At the beginning of GOW3, Dom is farming. Why? No idea – Cliffy didn't go into detail, but we guess it's a sign of the post-apocalyptic society the characters now live in. This doesn't mean it's a wasteland – footage we've seen is a lot more colourful (there's some gorgeous textures too) and the environments are very varied. Expect to see forests – but not too many, since Cliffy says they're hard to do well, and not worth doing if you don't do them well – and towns “like in Spain, with Stucco roofs and so on – think of Seville.”

He talked a bit about the teaser trailer. The city/area in it is called Char, and was absolutely nailed by the Hammer of Dawn strike. Cliffy said the inspiration for the appearance of it was the excavations at Pompeii.

Girl Gears – the dark haired one is called Stroud, and looks pretty hardcore. The weapon you saw her using in the E3 demo is a Pendulum Wars era sword bayonet. Cliffy explained that the rationale behind the chainsaw bayonet is that to properly stick a locust with a traditional bayonet you need a ten foot run-up. However, weapons and ammo are so scarce in Gears 3 – since there are no factories left, this being 18 months since the end of Gears 2 – that they have to use whatever weapons they can find, including ones from museums, dumps and so on. He did confirm that this wouldn't be a game mechanic, so you won't need to scavenge (random fact: he hates it when games have food as a mechanic). Ammo will be limited in quantity but not ridiculously so.

The new bayonet has a variety of 'executions' – fatalities, basically – and the locust have new ones as well, including the one from the demo where it rips off someone's arm and then beats them to death with it, something Epic have wanted to do “since the first Gears of War”.

What next? This is the last game in this cycle he says, but the Gears universe is rich and deep enough for more games. They're concentrating on Bulletstorm for the moment though, and while he doesn't have any immediate plans for Kinect he said that as a developer, his “curiosity is piqued”.

At this point some French dude who was there – not one of our team – started slagging off Gears 2 multiplayer. That was not okay by Cliffy's rules; he mentioned the six Title Updates and multiple apologies Epic have made for the matchmaking issues, and pointed out that Gears 2 is consistently in the top ten most played Xbox LIVE games.

I actually felt quite embarrassed for the French guy since he got shown up quite badly, he obviously hadn't played the game since it first came out; it just goes to show how dangerous it is to talk about something you don't know about.

After Cliff had finished shredding the hapless journalist a Microsoft PR guy called time on the meeting and we left, picking up bits of French journalist on the way out. Overall, Gears 3 looks fantastic, and should deliver the 'bigger, better & more badass' experience we've come to know and love. Release day can't come soon enough!

[Mechanical R]

You sure the dark haired one is called Stroud? Anya (blonde one) has the last name of Stroud He mentioned a Sam in the E3 conference.