Speaking with Stevivor, The Coalition’s Chuck Osieja explained the work the new development house had to put in to define Gears of War‘s DNA ahead of Gears of War 4.

“It was interesting taking over the franchise,” he began. “One thing that was interesting is that there was 10 years of tribal knowledge built up at Epic. The hand-off was really interesting because we spent time with them, and they spent time with us — but what we realized is, even though we got all the documentation that they had, there wasn’t much documentation on how to make a Gears game.

“We actually had to go through and spend a lot of time with Rod [Fergusson, formerly of Epic] saying, ‘Okay, why don’t the characters do this?’ We had to do a lot of deconstruction. Now, if we were to hand off the franchise to somebody else, they would be able to pick it up tomorrow and have a great starting spot, because we kind of went through said, ‘okay what are the pillars of a Gears encounter?'”

Osieja explained that this was a many layered affair.

“What is an environment supposed to have? What is an enemy supposed to have? What is an encounter supposed to have and how do those things work together?

“We know why the cover layout works the way it does. You’ve seen plenty of third-person shooters but none of them really feel like Gears, because the whole concept of cover-based shooters is deceptively simple. It’s like, ‘oh just set up cover where ever you want.’ Gears cover is set up really, really deliberately to allow for flow through the environment. There’s a specific distance that you use to be able to swap turn from one piece of cover to another so you’re not exposed too far so when you have to get exposed, it’s a conscious choice for the player to say, “‘kay I need to move to this piece of coverage, so I need to wait for the right time to expose myself so that I can make it to the next spot.'”

The Coalition then had to figure out enemy pillars before introducing entirely new factions into the sequel.

“We then had to figure out the enemy types,” he explained. “It’s interesting when you talk about the Swarm; they fall into three specific enemy types. There are Mirrors, which are basically like the Locust drones. They do and act just like the player does. They carry weapons, they take cover, they flank you. Their whole job is to act like the player.

“Then you have two other categories; one is called Pinner. The Pinner’s job is to sit back at the end of the battlefield and just throw rounds at you and keep you in cover. The whole idea behind that is too now allow the Mirrors to come up and flank you and put you in a bad situation.

“The other one is the Flusher,” he continued. “The Flusher’s whole job is to get you to come out of cover and expose you and it’s how those sets of enemies work together that make the encounters in Gears so interesting. Same thing with weapons. Every single weapon has a role and what we did was evaluated — ‘okay, why do these weapons work this way and what is their role inside the game? Why does this enemy have it versus this enemy?’

“For us, the first year was all about deconstruction of Gears and really understanding what makes a Gears game a Gears game. If you were to say to me, this felt like Gears, that’s the highest compliment I think you could give us, because that’s what we had to go for.”

Osieja stressed that Gears 4 isn’t just a straight up copy.

“The feedback we’ve gotten so far is people pick it up and go, “okay, this feels like Gears’ — and then what they realize, as they’re playing, we’ve made something smoother,” he said. “We sand off the rough edges on stuff that you don’t notice are there. The way you move into cover is different than it used to be. The roadie run, for years, was always a placeholder animation that never got changed because we couldn’t make it feel any better, so we deliberately went in there and made that feel better without changing the pacing or the speed or the reaction time that Gears has always had.”

You’ll be able to react to Gears of War 4 yourself next week — the title is available from 11 October on Xbox One and Windows PC.