In terms of animation, Gears of War 2 can be used as a standard of balance between animation and motion capture. 'I think all this combined with the hard work of the team helped create the richness and increase the visual fidelity ,' adds Perna. That's the kind of subtle improvement that goes unnoticed but is appreciated as a whole as you play through the game. You won't see a rainbow splash across the screen, but you will notice new colors being used for shrubbery, buildings and the many different species of Locust.

Gears of War 2 has also been given a much broader range of colors this time around, according to Perna. Most of the weapons were tweaked to add more polygons and adjust the shaders as well.' Marcus was redone and given a higher polygon count, better shaders, new animations, etc. 'On the art side, we revisited many of the characters and creatures from Gears 1. 'Environments and characters have been designed to feel heavy and weighted with lots of worn pieces to complement the theme of destroyed beauty.' says Perna. Also, even though Gears 2 retains the same 'feel' of Gears 1, there is, graphically, more richness and significance in Gears 2. For example, even though everything in the world looks like nothing you've ever seen, you can still recognize destructible object or cover points. The environments are sophisticated and unique but not so unique that the player would be unable to relate to it. The first thing you notice about Gears 2 is that Epic definitely intended to stick with the 'Destroyed Beauty' theme from the first Gears of War after all, this is the sequel. Now that Gears 2 is out and millions of hours are being spent playing it on Xbox LIVE, I got to sit down with Chris Perna, the lead artist at Epic Games, to talk about the development of Gears 2. Meanwhile, the hype following Gears of War 2 has been huge and Epic has definitely kept the fans appetites whet by constantly revealing new aspects of Gears 2 even before it was released. The only problem with the first Gears is that it would be really tough to top it. A good example of the kind of game I'm talking about would be the first Gears of War great gameplay, it looked beautiful and it created a fan following from nothing. Why do you love that game? Because it's a great game it keeps you coming back to play it over and over again. Name a game right now that you love to play. The question is: Can this sequel top the first with its great gameplay, beauty and solid fan base? All images courtesy of Microsoft Game Studios. The hype following Gears of War 2 has been huge.

Gears of war 2 characters