Gears of War designer wants next-gen consoles to melt your face

And also impress your mom

Chris KempApril 15, 2012

Epic Games design director, or “Gears of War guy”, Cliff Bleszinski won’t be satisfied with next-gen console graphics that don’t disfigure your face. Failing that, they at the very least have to impress your mother.

“Face-melting graphics,” he said. “I really want our next-generation consoles to pass what I call the ‘Mom Test.’ So that if you were to show this console and games to your mom, she would be like, ‘Wow, that clearly looks better than your last console,’ and it’s an essential step that needs to be taken by both Sony and Microsoft.”

I’m not sure this would work on my Dad, who referred to any FPS I played as “that walking gun game” (as if they were all the same game). On top of these requirements, Cliff (a man who’s clearly never spent any time in Africa) is also in favour of consoles that are always connected to the internet.

“Always-connected consoles that basically require an Internet connection. So that I can just wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh a new demo has been downloaded on my hard drive, so I can check it out’,” he said, adding. “As well as considering streaming gaming from the cloud, which would be very nice.”

Bleszinski also discussed motion controls, ignoring the “Gears-of-War-Kinect-was-cancelled” elephant in the room.

“The other things I want to see are gesture-based controls,” he said. “I think Kinect is quite cool, and I’m a big fan of using Kinect to control movies with Netflix. Maybe it will be built-in [to a future generation Xbox], maybe it won’t. We’ll have to see what actually comes out of that.”