GS AU: Back in July an incomplete version of the Gears 3 campaign leaked. What impact did that have on studio staff morale?

CB: It sucks and it breaks your heart, but you've got to roll with the punches and dust off your shoulders and keep moving. Keep in mind that anyone who's a true fan would ignore that build or those YouTube videos. We're doing what we can to track down anyone who still has it and ban them from the game, because it's not only theft, but you're also spoiling the game for everyone else. But, that's the world we live in, things just seem to want to be leaked, and all you can do is prevent it from ever happening. Stuff gets out there and cutscenes don't have facial animation and there's debug text. You want the product to be polished, and you never get a second chance to make that first impression, and that's heartbreaking when that happens.
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GS AU: Looking back there has to be a lot of 20/20 vision hindsight after you ship a game. Tell us about the lessons learned between each iteration of the Gears of War franchise.

CB: The lesson I learned I like to call "I did not sign up for this". A recent example of a game I had played was, well, they didn't do it in Dead Space 2, but in Dead Space, was that asteroid sequence. I signed up to kill Necromorphs and be scared, I didn't sign up to play Asteroids [laughs]. The same thing applied to Gears 2 with the damn tank on the lake. Most Gears fans signed up to hear the story of Marcus, Dom, Cole, Locust, and chainsawing and cool weapons, and awesome set-pieces. They didn't sign up to drive a tank over slippery ice that breaks [laugh]. That's one of the very important lessons we learned, so there are sequences in Gears 3 where you are on the back of a truck or in a submarine, but they're not ones where you're piloting the darn things, because we realised we should put the vehicles on ice [Ed note: metaphorically speaking] for a while, and let those sequences be their own co-op rail-shooter sections.