Gears of War 4 is a great game overall, but it's clearly sticking quite close to the tried and true formula that proved successful in the first trilogy.

In a post-launch interview with Eurogamer, The Coalition's Studio Head Rod Fergusson explained that's because the team wanted to prove themselves before pursuing some of the innovative ideas that they had been considering. The good news is that there's now room to use those in future content or sequels.

We came in a little bit tentative because we felt we needed to prove ourselves. When I started here there were lots of great innovative ideas that I felt were just too outside the box, for a studio that hasn't proven itself. There's a lot of room now to push the campaign further, mess with the formula a little bit, because people will just see it as the natural growth of our game, versus messing with it in order to mess with it.

The groundwork that has been laid out for Gears of War 4 may also help in getting work done more quickly in the future, according to Creative Director Chuck Osieja.

If everything went sideways tomorrow we could hand it off to somebody else and they would have a really good understanding of how to build a Gears game from the ground up. Deconstructing and archiving all this stuff - it was not only good for us, but every time we brought somebody in we could put all that documentation in front of them and say: 'OK, this is why cover is laid out the way it is, this is why these weapons exist and these are the roles they fill. When you think about enemies they need to fill one of these three roles, because that's what happens in a Gears game.' We haven't had the chance to reflect on all that yet, but now we're near the end, able to think about what we're doing next... I's how quickly [new hires] will be able to get up to speed because of all the groundwork we've done.

Gears of War 4 is officially out today on both Xbox One and PC, though owners of the Ultimate Edition have been able to play since October 7th. Check out our performance review for PC if you haven't already.