Gears of War 4 Release Date, News: Xbox One Game Will Return to the ‘Core Essence’ of Gears

The upcoming Gears of War game will return to what the series is about, according to Black Tusk producer Rod Fergusson.
Gears of War 4 Release Date, News: Xbox One Game Will Return to the ‘Core Essence’ of Gears
8/4/2014
Updated:
8/4/2014

The upcoming Gears of War game will return to what the series is about, according to Black Tusk producer Rod Fergusson.

Fergusson was one of the original developers at Epic Games who made Gears of War in 2006. He left in August 2012 after Gears of War 3, and returned to the franchise via Microsoft’s Black Tusk Studios. Microsoft bought the Gears of War franchise from Epic Games in January 2014.

In an interview with Polygon, Fergusson noted that the having the same studio and developers working on the game for an extended period of time can cause the game to deviate from what originally made it great.

“Regardless of how good the franchise is or how successful you are, I think people in the development team will tend to get tired or just want to express something differently,” said Fergusson.

“And so I think there was a little bit of frustration of ‘we’re doing more Gears.’ I imagine if you were to talk to Infinity Ward or those types of people, regardless of how much success they have, people want to branch out and do something different.

“And so, that was something that I think was really great about Black Tusk, because there’s such an energy about Gears, about getting to do Gears and just being able to embrace it.

“So, for me, it’s about staying true to Gears as opposed to how can we just fundamentally change it just to change it creatively.

“So it’s more about just hearkening back to what is the core essence of Gears,” Fergusson added.

Fergusson also sees plenty of Gears lore he can further expand on to drive forward the series.

“I think there’s a lot people that feel like they don’t know about our world, and we purposely did that,” he said.

“It’s a mixture of purposely leaving stuff out because we wanted mystery, and there’s just some stuff we just didn’t want to or need to explain in the game.

“That’s what I like about Gears of War games is, it tends to be a very constricted moment in time for the characters. It’s like an episode of 24 to me. We’re not ‘let’s go talk about three years in the life of this character.’ It’s about what happens over this two-day period, and so there’s things.

Fergusson added: “There’s lots of stuff, backstory from the E Day, Pendulum Wars all the way to Gears 3, there’s a lot of room in there. But I don’t know if that’s the place to go. I think there’s lots of other places to go as well.”

Microsoft has not announced an official launch date for the upcoming Gears of War game yet.

 

Larry Ong is a New York-based journalist with Epoch Times. He writes about China and Hong Kong. He is also a graduate of the National University of Singapore, where he read history.
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