When speaking to The Coalition’s Creative Director, Chuck Osieja, one of the questions that we put to him was just how much the original trilogy inspired the story in Gears of War 4. The answer that we received was a lot more loaded than we expected with four other story arcs that didn’t end up making the cut.

“We looked to the original trilogy a lot. From a story perspective, we were a little bit stumped at first because Gears 3 ended so definitively. It’s not like we could have just said, the emulsion counter weapon went off but it didn’t quite get all the locusts. So hey, here’s a pocket that didn’t get killed and now they’re back.” Osieja said when talking about the initial plans for Gears of War 4.

“We explored a tonne of options. One of the potential options was going back and retelling the first Gears of War and giving it the Christopher Nolan ‘Batman’ treatment, which would have been really cool,” Osieja revealed about one of the early ideas behind the now Gears of War 4.

“Another option which we heavily considered was going back to the Pendulum Wars, which has been talked about but never been shown, so COG VS UIR. The reason we ended up not doing this was because it would have been humans VS humans and Gears is more about humans vs monsters. We also talked about going back to emergence day, but the problem with that is that we knew that we’d end up in the exact same spot with Marcus going to prison. We also talked about going off planet and essentially starting the whole thing over again.” Osieja continued as he ran through a number of other ideas that the team were initially worked through.

“But in the end, we decided that the best thing for the franchise going forward is moving the franchise 25 years in the future. This allowed us to create a whole new set of characters, one of which was named JD Fenix, which allows us to have a nice connection to the past and allows us to bring Marcus back in as a member of the squad. It also allows us to get a completely different perspective of Marcus because he isn’t the main character so he’s not reflecting things as if you are the player. Now as an AI character, he gets a different personality because he’s not directly responsible for everything happening in all game.” Osieja said about the final story direction in Gears of War 4.

Gears of war 4 will release on Xbox One and Windows 10th on Friday, October 7th for Ultimate Edition owners and Tuesday, October 11th for regular edition owners.

Stay tuned for our full interview with The Coalition’s Chuck Osieja.