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Gears of War 4: The Coalition’s Chuck Osieja on its different style of gun porn

Ahead of EB Expo in Sydney last week, Stevivor has the chance to sit down with The Coalition’s Chuck Osieja to talk all things Gears of War 4. Naturally, the discussion turned to fantastical weaponry.

Read on to find out what Osieja thinks of standard in-game gun porn, and how Gears presents an alternative.

Steve Wright, Stevivor: This game’s really given you a chance to design a lot of new weaponry as well as new enemies. How does the new weaponry fit into the Gears DNA? Are there certain pillars that you have to kind of adhere to or have you gone outside the box to make this crazy weapon that we’ve never seen the likes of before?

Chuck Osieja, The Coalition: Yeah. I think we have weapons that you haven’t seen before, but they always have to fit inside the Gears‘ universe. For us, again, one of the things we talked about at the beginning is do we want to do gun porn? Do we want to be Call of Duty or The Division where you have one chassis and a hundred different things that you can add to it? Well, the problem with that is, it’s not Gears. Every weapon in Gears is iconic. They’re like characters in themselves.

For us, when you pick up a Boomshot. Jeez, the Lancer is in the science fiction hall of fame, right? It’s so iconic. When you have those weapons you want to maintain that. You get away from the gun porn part of it and you go, ‘okay, we need stuff that feels iconic, that feels special, that when the player picks it up they understand what they’re getting.’ The second part of that is, just like we look at the enemies, we look at the weapons and go, ‘okay, what role does this weapon fill and where are the holes in the universe that need to be filled with it?’

For example, two of the weapons that we had to replace were the ink grenade and the Digger, because they were both Locust creatures that were in those weapons. Literally — they were live creatures. So when the Locust went away, we lost those. No more Digger, right? Because you shoot those and they crawl underneath and they explode.

The hard thing for us was twenty-five years of peace [between Gears 3 and Gears 4]. You don’t have weapons factories, so what do you do? In the DeeBees it was easy — those are combatants. If you notice, with the DeeBee weapon, we’ve built them modularly, so they all have a large paddle because they’re less dexterous. We sort of built them on a chassis where they all have a similar chassis and the idea is let’s block on pieces to create different types of…

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Stevivor: Well, there’s your gun porn.

Osieja: That is kind of a gun porn. But they’re not customisable, right?

They still have their own personality. When you get to things like [new weapons] the Dropshot or the Buzzkill, we needed new weapons for the swarm and we wanted them to feel like they fit inside the world. With twenty-five years of peace, we had a lot of construction going and you’ll see that, the nods to it in the game. We said, “what if we took these things like a remote’ — it’s craziness — “a remote mining device that shoots out a remote mine when you let go of the trigger it drills into the ground and it explodes.’ That’s how they mine. Everything in Gears is ridiculous. Gears is turning it up to eleven. We don’t have hail, we have razor hail. We don’t have a bayonet, we have a Chainsaw Lancer.

Everything has to be to the absurd and that’s what we did with the Dropshot and the Buzzkill. We said, ‘hey, here’s this cool concrete saw. What if somebody flips and switches on it and now made it something where you took the safety off and now you can shoot these things across the world?’

You try to make things that are really fun. You try to make things that are iconic and that people can grab onto right away and that are characters in themselves.

Stevivor: There’s kind of a gun porn element or a Tim ‘The Tool Man’ Taylor-type grunt with that too, eh?

Osieja: Oh yeah, for sure.

Stevivor: If there was just a weapon part on the ground and you picked it up, you’d then have to figure out how it all fits. You don’t want that, eh? You want to kick a gun up from the ground, catch it in one hand and feel like a bad-ass.

Osieja: And all of our stuff has great executions, right? The best part of the Dropshot is its execution, to be honest with you. The absurdity in that stuff is just — it’s fun.

Stevivor: Sounds it!

We’ll have more with Chuck ahead of — and following — Gears 4‘s release. The title is available from 11 October on Xbox One and Windows PC.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.