A 9/10 is acceptable.

A 9/10 is acceptable.

Wow, that dude at the beginning and end needs to fix his tie and learn how to not be so obvious when reading a teleprompter.

So, I just listened to Rod Ferguson's final live online interview before the launch tonight and found out a few other pieces of information.

• You start the game with 5 unlocked characters for the COG and 5 for the Locust
• Through leveling up and other means, you unlock many more characters. There are currently 16 total playable characters in MP for both factions. Anthony Carmine will be unlocked at lvl74 for example
• Weapons skins can be unlocked through game play and many more can be purchased. There will be a launch skin pack that contains 105 skins (21 different skins * 5 applicable weapons). This will cost 3600 MS points and will be a 38% savings from buying them individually <--I will be buying this at launch
• All skins and characters are already present on the disc, the reason for this is so that everybody else can see them if you have it unlocked and choose to use it
• Fortification skills are carried over to new games of Horde, but money does not
• XP in Horde is dependent on a few factors: 1) Difficulty setting 2) Number of consecutive waves completed without dying 3) Wave number (since the Horde's strength increases starting at Wave 11 and continues to increase every 10th wave after that, extra XP is rewarded for completing those waves). Of course, ribbons and medals also contribute to bonus XP numbers

Those are the biggest pieces of information that were revealed tonight during his interview.

For those that don't know, Beast Mode has 12 waves in total and the goal is to kill all the humans before the timer runs out. This is a very strategic game mode, so you can just walk around with a Boomer class as they are VERY slow characters. Small character classes such as Tickers and Wretches are good for getting through defenses undetected. Also, this mode is supposed to be VERY difficult to do solo, so it's designed to be a co-op mode, more so than even Horde, as you can play that easily on your own because the game scales the enemies based on number of human players. Now, on that note, you will have the option to team up with AI Bot characters in Horde, which is kinda nice.

very nice would make leveling up and gaining more characters more essential than just a rank #

certainly pulling all the stops for this one

the AI bots will be essential for solo Horde, seeing doing Horde on Gears 2 solo would get you stomped on higher waves, although can never substitute for human players

seeing AI bots are known to be fucking dumbasses and get into line of fire or more of a inconvenience