On the other hand, Capps says that this results in an odd problem: An employee who is unhappy with the work or the location may choose to stay because the benefits are so good - "Tarydium Handcuffs," he called them, referring to the Unreal mineral. If there's a perception that being fired is the only way to leave Epic, that fosters an environment of "hey, keep your head down," but that isn't a good thing. "You want people to take risks," affirmed Capps. "If you succeed at everything, every time, you're aiming too low."
Competing With Yourself
If Capps and Epic know about anything, they know about not wanting to set their sights too low - especially when given a high bar to clear. The original Gears of War won thirty Game of the Year awards from various sites - the marketing won awards, too. Capps played the famous commercial with Gary Jules' "Mad World," and then admitted that he'd originally hated the advertisement the first time he'd seen it. "That's why I have smart and creative people around me," he laughed.
Beating Gears of War was difficult because of what gamers expected, and what the media propagated. "Gamers want your sequel to be twice as long, twice as good, and they want it for free." Still, Capps doesn't see that as a bad thing - beyond being game developers, the Epic team is made of gamers themselves, with their own expectations. "They want God of War 3 to be three times as long, three times as cool, and have three times as much full frontal nudity."
To best the first Gears, said Capps, the team looked at three categories: "New, Better, and More." New - features that simply weren't in Gears of War that they wanted to be in the sequel, like Horde mode. Better - taking things that didn't work as well as they'd have liked in the first game and bringing them up to where the developers wanted them to be. More - hey, it was great in the first game, we just need to have more of it in Gears of War 2! "I think we had a really cool ladder-climbing animation, but it came too late in the development of the first Gears to use more than once ... so we used it about a thousand times in Gears 2," laughed Capps. "It doesn't all have to be new - just emphasize what was good about the first game."
But even that doesn't assure greatness. Capps pointed out that even though Gears 2 had a campaign mode that was approximately 50% longer, shipped with 50% more multiplayer maps than the first, and had been completed in half the time ... its reception was almost identical to that of Gears of War. "That kind of hurts," Capps admitted, but then said that it wasn't unexpected, either, in the industry - you need to move ahead to stay where you are, reflecting the theme of the Triangle Game Conference: "Innovate or Die."
Capps said he was excited to see the gaming scene in North Carolina's Triangle area growing as it was, swelling to five times the size that it had been only a few years ago. With some of the country's most prestigious universities supplying no shortage of bright and talented young minds, Capps took a minute to speak to the students who would be game developers, who might someday dream of getting a job with one of the Triangle's gaming companies like Epic, Insomniac, or Red Storm: "There's no better way to get started than by modding. Make something Unreal," he laughed, referring to the Unreal Engine's thriving mod community.
"Prove that you love games by making mods."
