Joystiq sat down with Cliff Bleszinski, Epic games lead designer, at X08 too discuss Gears of War 2.

Cliff on co-op

“The thing about a campaign is, when you start getting over two players - it’s cool to have that, but - the narrative quality decreases exponentially with more players. Once you get a third or a fourth player in there then you’re in the middle of fighting a bad guy and somebody’s triggering a cutscene and people are flapping their gums and nobody knows what’s going on with the story. Whereas if you keep it two-players, keep it focused, grab a buddy and go through the blockbuster experience and then grab five players and fight against the Locust. That’s how we’re doing it.”

Cliff on achievements

“You can chip away at achievements (in Gears of War 2) essentially in every, single mode. So, if you’re playing by yourself you can start chipping away at the Seriously 2.0 achievement. If you’re playing in co-op, if you’re playing in ranked or private matches … all of it. Everything counts towards achievements this time around. We wanted to be a lot more forgiving with it. The nicest thing is we have a little achievement tracker that pops up in the bottom right occasionally so it’s our way of just letting you know, “Hey, we’re paying attention!” If you curb-stomp a guy we say, “Oh, you know if you do 10 more of those you might start getting towards an achievement. Kind of adds that kind of, psuedo-RPG grind element in the background.”

He also said that DLC will be available very soon after launch. Click here to listen to the full interview.