You're watching Advertisements

We had a chat with Gears of War co-creator and studio head of The Coalition Rod Fergusson about the new campaign, Horde 3.0, Marcus Fenix and much more.

"If you look at Gears 1 it was an incursion behind enemy lines," says Fergusson. "Gears 2 was a war, then Gears 3 was for the whole planet, survival of the species. And for Gears 4 to be even bigger we'd have to go into space, solar system and stuff. We wanted instead to bring it back down, since we're introducing new characters, and a new story, and a new monster, we wanted to go back to being personal and having this sort of make you scared again, make you tense. So we even went down to two player co-op."

"I love 4 player co-op, but we you play 4 player co-op you lose the story really quickly. Like you're 'oh, they've moved on I was picking up some ammo, what's going on? Oh you triggered a cinematic, what are you doing?', and they're talking over the cinematic all the time and so it felt like going down to that two person experience allowed for that intimacy to get back to that tension and darkness."

"Moving forward about 25 years what it does is allows us to kind of start again, but not lose the past," explains Fergusson. "We looked at another planet. We looked at a prequel. We looked at all these different things, we just felt like they weren't giving us what we needed or even just a direct sequel. But what we wanted to do was start fresh and have new characters with new monsters, but in a familiar setting."

"So you can have things like Marcus can still show up, so you have these touchstones to the past. It allows us to do that, it allows to now have a thing that gives us a foundation for the future. Cause eventually Marcus would get old or we'd bang our heads if we were a prequel we'd have a stop when Marcus goes to prison. You knew when you were stopping. Here we've got these 20 something kids who can then go on to do whatever we want them to do. So it's a great starting place. It's a great place for people who haven't played the previous Gears games too. If you go in maybe you won't get a couple of the jokes or a couple of the references, but from a new characters, new monsters, new story [perspective] this is the time to start playing Gears."

We tried to pry more information on Marcus Fenix's appereance out of Fergusson:

"Well, he's in the game," said Fergusson. "But we like to tease the old man Marcus tease so it's something that players can look forward to in the future."