We speak exclusively with The Coalition’s Rod Fergusson and Chuck Osleja as the Gears Of War 4 beta rolls out on Xbox One
“When we first came in, we talked about the Tim Burton Batman and the Christopher Nolan Batman,” Rod Fergusson tells us as we talk ahead of the launch of the Gears Of War 4 beta. “When I first came in that was one of our things: ‘We’re going to be Christopher Nolan’s Batman’. But as we started doing it we realised ‘This just isn’t Gears. This is something else’. So we’re trying to find this middle ground when you hear the banter, even in our tease at E3, with Kait and JD talking to each other. I don’t want to make a humourless game.”
The Coalition’s studio head comes back to this again and again in our time with him: making sure Gears Of War 4 is evolving, but staying true to the core values of what a Gears game is. As the head of a relatively unknown team, albeit staffed by experienced developers and a smattering of former Epic-employees (just like himself), finding the right way to do a Gears game on Xbox One was the first and most important challenge. The Coalition, formerly Black Tusk Studios, has yet to release a game for Microsoft, so it’s understandable that it would want to make its mark with its first game, but when that game is a sequel to one of the biggest franchises in the industry you have to tread carefully.
“The focus of the studio was to do it right before we do it different,” explains Chuck Osieja, creative director at The Coalition. “Gears to me, when you really start to dissect it and understand it, it’s a deceptively simple experience. You just get into cover and you shoot, but the way cover is set up – engagement distances, the roles the enemies play, the roles that weapons play, the way those things work together, the synergy is so amazing – it makes this really compelling, really elegant experience. If you don’t understand how those things work you can screw it up. In fact that’s probably why we haven’t seen another cover-based shooter that’s of the same quality as Gears, because it’s really, really hard to do.”
And the effort to keep this new Gears experience as close to that of the original stands out when you play the game. We played through three new maps for Gears 4 that everyone will be enjoying as part of the beta on Xbox One and like slipping on a pair of old trainers, it was a perfect fit. Those small details that Osieja stresses, the speed of the running, the fire rates, the frames it takes to slam into cover, all add up to make this game feel like nothing else. It can leave you with the sense that not a huge amount has been done to update the game, but in actuality pulling this off has actually taken a lot of effort.
“We built technology that allowed us to take actual stuff like movement of the characters or the weapons and all the data that was coming from Gears 3 and Unreal Engine 3 and paste it on top of what we were building in Unreal Engine 4 and be able to do pixel-to-pixel comparisons,” he continues. “So what you’re seeing with the Lancer is exactly the way the Lancer behaved at the starting point of Gears 3. The way the characters moved in terms of distance and speed and the animations is all exactly the same. We started with Gears 3 as a basis in Unreal Engine 4, which was really critical for us to be able to get to where we’ve gotten to now because the changes we were able to make after that were done on a solid foundation versus us saying ‘It kind of feels right…’
It’s important to note at this point that the move onto Unreal Engine 4 didn’t exactly make producing Gears Of War 4 any easier. The code for Epic’s previous games wasn’t compatible with the new engine. AI scripts, for instance, could not be translated to the new platform and as Osieja has described, what almost seems like a ghosting process was used to match original animations with new content being generated for this generation. It was a meticulous process and one greatly assisted by having helped build the Gears Of War: Ultimate Edition.
“It was totally a training bootcamp for the team,” says Fergusson. “Having them go in and reverse engineer it and understand it became a huge learning experience for us as we began thinking about how to do Gears 4.” The team were digging into the original game and then recreating it, piece by piece. “For us it was like going to school on how to build a cover-based shooter. It was a really great experience,” adds Osieja. And it was an experience that lead to some interesting discoveries, even for Fergusson who had worked on the original Gears trilogy at Epic.
“One of the things that was interesting was that Gears 1, 2 and 3 really grew organically and I wasn’t as much a part of that as Lee Perry and Cliff Bleszinski,” he reveals. “Lee was really all about the creature design – and a lot of things at the time, at least from my perspective, naturally happened. The Ticker from Gears Of War 2 just naturally happened, the Mauler with the shield, one day Lee was like, ‘You know, if you give this guy a shield he looks really cool’. It didn’t feel at the time like there was a thorough process by which the designs were happening.”
But he credits The Coalition’s lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven with discovering one of those deceptively simple tricks Perry and Bleszinski used to make Gears what it is. “He explained that there are the mirrors, the guys who act like you do and who can do what you do like Drones. Then there’s the pinners; if you think of a turret or the Grinder with the chain gun, he’s pinning you into cover. Then you look at the Wretch and the Ticker, those are flushers who get you out of cover and make you vulnerable again. So, if you look at mirrors, pinners and flushers you can pretty much put every enemy in Gears Of War into one of those buckets and that’s the way we need to think about it. We thought that was really smart, because when we first started we think, ‘Oh, fictionally this is a really fun or interesting enemy’, but then we’d ask, that crazy idea for an enemy, is it a mirror, pinner or flusher? And then we would need to tailor the design to one of those. For me, thinking about it systematically like that instead or organically asking, ‘What’s a cool idea?’, that changed a lot about how we thought about Gears.”
The Coalition needed to learn lessons like this fast. It was only back in January 2014 that Microsoft bought the rights to Gears Of War from Epic Games and the Vancouver, Canada team was immediately put to work on a sequel and a remaster of the original Xbox 360 release. While this tandem production has clearly had its benefits, it also put the team under a lot of time pressure and just as it didn’t want to upset fans by changing too much, The Coalition was also limited in what it could achieve in the window it’s been given. “One of the things that you realise, you only really have time to make one really big tech investment,” Fergusson tells us. “So, we were like, ‘What’s it going to be? Do we want to focus on water? Do we want to focus on all these different things?’. We were talking about different ideas and we hadn’t landed on it, but I kept going back to the wind.
“There was a brief mission in Judgment that had a huge windstorm, but it was really more about obscuring your vision than it was about gameplay mechanics. There was something about that that really resonated, though, so we started to build on that and finally I said, ‘I think wind is the right thing for us, so let’s go and prototype it’. To my mind there were certain ways we could do it, but the team just took it on and turned it into a full-blown system now where in any environment we can go and say ‘There’s a wind flare, that’s a category three coming from the right’, and all the foliage will move in the right way, your character will animate to it, you hear it differently depending on how you face the wind or whether you’re in a ‘wind shadow’ and a piece of cover is blocking the wind. All of that stuff is built into the campaign so that it’s not just one scripted moment. It’s a full-on system.”
If you’ve seen any of the single-player gameplay revealed so far then some of what Gears Of War 4’s Wind Flares can do will already be clear to you. They’re a result of the Imulsion Countermeasure weapon in Gears 3 and will have a massive impact on your surrounding environment in the game. It’s a stunning addition to the franchise visually and is a great example of The Coalition’s evolutionary approach to the series.
“It changes how you play the game, but doesn’t change the gameplay,” adds Osieja. “Rod’s got a great saying, he says ‘Gears doesn’t do anything regularly, it turns everything to 11’. We don’t have a bayonet, we have a chainsaw bayonet. We don’t have hail, we have razor hail. We don’t have bats, we have bats that kill you. Having all of that stuff and that history we had to ask, what are we bringing to the table that doesn’t change the essence of what Gears is, but also feels that it’s a appropriate for a next-gen experience? When people see the Wind Flares and the Wind Flurries and things like that I think it’s going to be really exciting”
There are a few other new elements, of course, many of which have been dictated by the choice of setting. With the years that have passed and the death of the Locust, some of the biological weapons that helped to vary the gameplay in the later part of the series have been lost (the Digger Launcher for instance). These have been replaced with more industrial-looking devices, reminiscent of some classic Unreal Tournament armaments or even Dead Space. The Dropshot for instance was a favourite pick-up weapon in our multiplayer tests of Gears 4, firing a laser-guided drill that flies through the air and bores into the ground when you let go of the right trigger, then explodes.
It’s a nice variation on a grenade or mine launcher that’s perfect for getting around cover and a lot of fun to catch the enemy out with. It’s a great example of all the things that make Gears what it is: meaty, almost cumbersome-looking weaponry, visceral and cartoonish violence and gorgeously layered, mechanical and industrial sound effects. The whirr of the chainsaw blades on a Lancer or the crunch of the Boomshot reloading are classic examples too and those live on in Gears 4. There’s a visual and audio footprint to every element of this series that The Coalition has managed to capture brilliantly from what we’ve seen so far.
The same can be said of the new cast of characters we’ll be following in Gears 4, already looking like a far more robust and three-dimensional bunch than the enjoyable but meatheaded team we were introduced to a decade ago. Marcus, Dom and co. matured and tackled difficult themes as the series progressed, but JD, Kait and Del will be have them from the start, albeit with the intention to not lose that important sense of humour as Ferguson already alluded to. Perhaps just as importantly, it was a concept that had already been talked about at Epic.
“We were coming in hot,” Fergusson insists. “I walked into a team that had already staffed up for another game. This was a really big team and I was like, ‘How can I shorten the pre-production on this?’. We can start from scratch and have all the conversations again, but I said, ‘I’ve had all of these conversations before, so if we want to shortcut this, why don’t we just start accepting some of the things that we had talked about or that I had talked about back at Epic?’. Things that went around like JD Fenix and Kait and the Swarm are things that we had already talked through. That allowed us to go from a blank page to within two weeks having a story. We changed it from what it would have been at Epic, but at least we had some foundation of a new generation with JD Fenix, Kait and Del, where they are going, and within two weeks we had a skeleton we could start hanging things on top of. So, it was a good shorthand.”
And so a new group of characters get to lead off Gears Of War into a new era for a new generation of players (according to Fergusson, 45 per cent of Ultimate Edition players were new to the Gears series) without the fear that the team could bump up against the last timeline. Emergence Day, The Pendulum Wars, another planet and even ‘doing a Spider-Man’ and rebooting the franchise were all discussed, but this approach just made more sense and allowed for a greater feeling of discovery this time out.
“There were a bunch of different ways we could go, but at the end of the day we said this is really about man versus monster. It’s about fighting what goes bump in the night,” Osieja tells us. “If you remember Gears 1 started 14 years into the war, so everything was known. The guys all knew each other and everybody had a name, they knew what the Locust was and they knew what a Berserker was. They knew what everything was. But now we’re going to get that sense of discovery. You’re the first people to see these new enemies and as a group we get to discover it together to create our bonds and our relationships that are going to take place over this one night in the wilds of Sera.”
And just as those original games were gradually able to introduce ideas long talked about from the beginning of Gears Of War, so Gears 4 is still filling in those gaps that Bleszinski, Perry and the others didn’t quite manage to squeeze in, such as the new Yank move over cover. “We’d gotten to a position in Gears 3 where we had created both the Mantle Kick and the Yank,” reveals Fergusson. “We had both features implemented in Unreal Engine 3 and we decided it was just too much for us to manage, so we had to pick just one. So we picked the one that was aggressive and picked the Mantle Kick.”
The idea was to bring in some melee attacks that would stop the blind-fire duels that inevitably took place when two players or a player versus the AI were either side of the same piece of cover. The Yank pulls the opponent over the cover, leaving them in a stun state for a quick combat knife kill or blast from your gun. “I remembered the Yank actually being pretty good, it’s just that there were a lot of challenges around it from a production standpoint, so that’s when we prototyped it again and saw that it was really working,” Fergusson continues. “So then we looked at the Mantle Kick and how we could take the slowness out of it and we created the Vault Kick [a fluid leap over cover from a Roadie Run]. So with those kinds of things it was just taking an idea that had been started and blowing it out, smoothing it down.”
Once again, this all speaks to a team trying to maintain continuity with the past while evolving. “We see 1, 2 and 3 as an evolution and a maturation of cover over time and I think we’re taking the next evolutionary step in that,” explains Fergusson. “We were afraid that if we tried to do things that were too revolutionary we would be judged harshly for taking something good and potentially breaking it.”
And the same was true of harking back to the atmosphere of the very first game, calling on some classic horror game mechanics and moments. “I like to use the word ‘tense’,” Fergusson points out. “I think that’s the word that really underscores things, because when we talk horror people start to go off to survival horror land and we’re not that. It’s hard to disempower a guy with a chainsaw gun. He’s not walking down a hallway backwards in the dark afraid for his life. But at the same time there’s this tenseness.” With the Swarm enemies being introduced, the Wind Flares causing chaos and the world falling apart around you, there should be no shortage of tension in this new campaign. Online, however, it’s all about gruesome fun and working as a team.
There’s a renewed focus on eSports and making sure ranking and matchmaking is properly managed, a new card system adds purely cosmetic items to your experience that can be earned with in-game cash or purchased separately and a rotating roster of maps that will be updated monthly and build on the ten locations you’ll get to enjoy at launch. Fergusson also promises the game will be locked at 60 frames per second and 1080p by launch just as the Ultimate Edition was, although he warns that won’t be the case for the beta as optimisation is still being worked on. Most importantly of all, this is a proper beta test, not just a glorified demo. With around six months to launch, The Coalition is far from finished with this game and is keen to get feedback.
“The message we have to get out there is that somehow the industry has mutated the word beta to mean demo, so I’m really trying to highlight to people, ‘Look you really need to come to this with certain expectations’,” Fergusson implores with intensity. “We need actual feedback and there will be things that will be wrong that we will fix because of their feedback, that’s super important.”
From our time with the online content, it doesn’t graphically impress as much as the single-player footage that’s out there so far, but it feels like classic Gears through and through. It’s meaty, explosive and satisfying again and again. The maps in the beta are relatively flat in terms of verticality, which is pretty traditional for the series, but offer some great choke points and possibilities for flanking. Good team play really appears to be getting rewarded in the game too, as our leaderboards showed players will relatively low kill/death ratios still ranking well after a match.
“One of the things we’re doing, behind the covers a little bit, is working out how we can lift the support player,” Fergusson reveals. “I consider myself a support player. When I play any other game I’ll play as the engineer, I’m the guy placing turrets or repairing stuff. I’m a support player at heart. One of the things that we’ve been doing a lot of design around is looking at not just the frontliner who’s got a shotgun and is wall-bouncing [high-level move of bouncing between walls/cover to make yourself hard to shoot], but the guy who is off to the side who’s suppressing with the Lancer. How do you give points to the guy that’s spotting? How do you give assist points? Things that existed, but we’re looking at ways to embrace that even more.”
For the most part this takes a little of the emphasis off the K/D scores of players, but that’s not the case for what is likely to be the highlight of the beta: a new mode called Dodgeball. This sees Team Death Match enhanced with a mechanic that has a team member respawn for every enemy killed. It’s a style of team game that can see amazing swings in fortune from just one player getting a kill streak going and is frantic fun to play in a tight map. Along with all the other classic modes we’re expecting to see in the final game, including Horde mode, it’s just one of many evolutionary pieces that is making Gears 4 feel fresh and yet still familiar.