Gears of War 4: Lead Campaign Designer talks new characters and improving old mechanics

Gears of War 4 is ushering in a new generation in more ways than one. It’s the first new instalment in Microsoft’s iconic franchise on Xbox One, but also the first to come out of new studio The Coalition. Set 25 years after Gears of War 3, it features an ageing Marcus Fenix, but he takes a backseat to the new generation cast ready to take their turn to fight for humanity.

Earlier this month, we sat down with Gears of War 4 Lead Campaign Designer Matt Searcy to talk about moving the Gears narrative forward, when it seemingly already reached its conclusion.

Stevivor: Marcus and JD have been the face of Gears 4 prior to this event, where Kait and Del are getting more of the spotlight. How do you go about creating a new campaign that’s almost a new beginning for Gears of War, with a new generation of characters?

Matt Searcy, Lead Campaign Designer: When we started three years ago and we started talking about where we wanted to set the game and what type of story we wanted to tell, we knew we wanted new stories. We didn’t want to just do Gears of War 3.5 set the week after the Locust War. That was for a bunch of reasons; mainly, it was the right thing to do for the franchise, but also because we’re a new studio. A prequel would have been fairly limiting in what kinds of stories we could tell. If we put the game too far into the future, we would be spinning it into a different game; we could have slapped different name on the cover, potentially, as it would have been something different.

So 25 years after Gears 3 was a very important choice for us, going one generation later gave us the opportunity to create a new cast of characters. They have a different point of view, and have lived different lives to the characters you’ve seen in Gears of War before, but also let us have echoes from the past. Marcus is the most obvious one, but there are other characters, even new characters like Oscar, who is Kait’s uncle along with Reyna her mother, who lived through the Locust War. They have a different perspective on it, so we got to look at what happened when the COG rebuilt itself. It meant we can have echoes from the past resonating in actually important and meaningful ways, where they have relationships with the characters or we travel out to places that are ruins that have been left to rot, and they mean something to Marcus.

Stevivor: How has Marcus evolved as a character over those 25 years? It’s a long time between games, a lot must have happened, but we only have a single night to explore it all in Gears 4.

Matt Searcy: He’s grumpier, that’s for sure.

I think it’s more complex than we’re going to be able to tell in one story about 24 hours. There’s only a certain amount that can happen over a night. But what can change in that time is the characters’ relationship with the people around them. When you find Marcus in Gears of War 4, it’s clear he’s lived a life since the Locust War. He’s not just been paused in time, which is really cool. 25 years have gone on, where he’s had a son with Anya. Marcus has had a life and other sh*t has happened since then, too. He’s living in this hermit environment, where he’s secluded himself for a bunch of reasons. Some of that stuff we talk about directly in the game, but some of it you just feel based on how he and JD interact, and some of it is there for you to discover as a player in the environment as collectibles.

As far as evolution of Marcus, he’s still Marcus Fenix. At the core he’s got this gruff exterior and this way of talking that is iconic, but people are going to see different sides of him, for sure, in this game. They’re going to see the crusty old man Marcus and things about his relationship not just with JD but with the other characters. One of the cool things from a player’s perspective is you’ve been Marcus for all the previous games he was in. As a player, that gives you a specific relationship with a character. Even if he doesn’t embody you, you grow this attachment with him and see the world through his eyes and how he reacts to Dom and Baird. When Marcus shows up Gears of War 4, it’s the first time he’s not that. You’re JD, Kait or Del, and Marcus is this old dude bossing everyone around. It brings a different perspective on him; he has a different role to play. It’s a cool shift for the franchise, where Marcus is present and meaningful but you have a different relationship with him.

Stevivor: It’s a very different set of relationships across the whole squad. There’s the father-son pairing and the inexperience of Del and Kait, compared to the battle-hardened combat unit of the last games. What are you looking in the chemistry between these characters?

Matt Searcy: We wanted something that felt fresh with a little bit more youth in it. In the past, you dropped into a squad that had basically been in war for a decade. Whether they already knew each other or if you met them along the way, there’s this shorthand language between them through combat chatter and the way they deal with stuff. But that combat chatter, the way of talking and the banter, is one of the things that makes Gears awesome. It almost feels like the characters are having fun, despite being in these crazy situations, so it’s okay for you as a player to have fun with them. It’s okay for them to echo the thrill of getting a headshot or the frustration of missing an active reload, and hopefully the characters are well developed enough you feel that attachment to them through combat. When we created this unit, it was equal parts wanting a fresh feeling of these guys who haven’t been in war, who don’t talk like soldiers all the time, but we also want that combat banter; we want that feeling of fun and cheeky discussion during combat.

Stevivor: Couch co-op is a massive deal for Gears of War, as one of the few AAA games to really embrace it. The fact you’re both playing as a critical character, not just a cloned version of Player 1, is a big part of that. When you’re creating these characters, are they on a level playing field to the extent each player will connect with their own character? If I’m mostly playing as Kait and my mate is JD, will it feel more like Gears of War 4 is Kait’s story to me?

Matt Searcy: Yeah for sure. We’d hope you’d feel more of an attachment to Kait [in that scenario], or maybe more of an attachment to the characters around her because of her relationship with them. Everyone has their favourites based on how they talk or how they look. Part of developing the new characters – all of them, not just the three in the squad – is ensuring there’s a diverse range you’ll either like or dislike for a variety of reasons. So when you go to Horde Mode and MP, you’ll choose a character you think is fun or relevant to you.

Stevivor: Gears of War 4 is going back to two-player co-op. It might be hard to choose, but is that more for narrative or gameplay reasons?

Matt Searcy: Gameplay reasons! Definitely, without a doubt.

Gears of War 4 is driven by narrative. So it’s driven by the desire to have an intense, mysterious behind enemy lines atmosphere that goes back to the nostalgia of Gears of War 1. But it would not be possible to do that story with 4-player co-op. With four players, you have these combat encounters that are huge. The arenas are really big and you have four players with you all the time.

There are some complexities to the story telling, but the bigger problem is you end up with a story and gameplay that are pulling in two different directions, and that doesn’t make for a good campaign. You need a campaign where the gameplay and story are layered together; where even when one takes over from the other, they’re still heading in the same direction – the characters’ motivations, the pacing, the player’s goal are all going to the same place. If we had the sprawling arenas and bigger enemy counts required for 4-player co-op, we wouldn’t have had the same feeling.

Stevivor: So the desire to return to the tone of Gears 1 is what drove that direction?

Matt Searcy: Yeah, it felt like the right thing to do, to return to something more intimate. It felt like the start of a new story rather than the continuation of an old story and you need somewhere to be able to grow in the future, which this allows us to do.

Stevivor: Picking up the controller, this really feels like Gears of War.

Matt Searcy: Yay! Pillar number one checked off.

Stevivor: Speaking of checked off, there are a lot of familiar elements with new twists, like emergence holes becoming nests. Is that something that organically occurs, or is there a checklist to ensure the mechanics feel like a Gears of War game?

Matt Searcy: It’s something that arrives organically. We actually didn’t have nests for quite a bit of our development. We didn’t think: “we have to have emergence holes”. The enemies are intentionally not burrowing out from underground because they’re a different thing. But we’re always looking for dynamic ways to bring in enemies and dynamic uses of cover, so the pods were an exploration around that, where it’s both cover and en enemy spawner.

The nests were added because when I was working with the level designers we realised e-holes were such a cool mechanic and no other games have something like them; this thing where you can manage the battlefield, giving you the ability to close a spawn closet and change the way an encounter will play out, if you have the right tools and don’t miss the skill shot. It felt, as a franchise, we had this really cool thing in the past that we didn’t have anymore. It was a tool we wanted to use, but we didn’t want to just have e-holes again. We wanted to play with the idea of being able to add and remove cover from the battlefield, so the nests were our answer to that.

Stevivor: I’m not sure if you personally worked on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, but as a studio, getting to work on a game that’s almost a decade old must reveal how much has changed in game development during that time. Was their anything you stumbled across in the remaster that’s definitively an element of Gears of War that just felt too dated by modern standards that needed to be overhauled for Gears of War 4?

Matt Searcy: Ultimate Edition has a pillar that even though some of it feels out-dated and old, we wanted to keep it intact to keep it true to what it was and not turn it into what Gears of War later became. That said, there are some things in Ultimate Edition based on mechanics from Gears 3 and put it back in Ultimate Edition because it was just so much better. For Gears of War 4, we intentionally started with Gears of War 3 as the foundation, and not Ultimate Edition, because Epic had done so much to improve the core mechanics by Gears of War 3. We sniped a few things from Judgment as well that we thought were cool.

Then, because Gears of War has this feeling that’s hard to describe sometimes, it’s basically the sum of these tiny little things nobody else has quite emulated, we built a tool during the first year that would show us down to the pixel if I land in the same spot in Gears of War 4 as I would have in Gears of War 3 with the same input. That was so when we made improvement and added new mechanics like the close cover combat system and new weapons we knew the base we were working around was really strong.

So the short answer is yes, there were definitely things we looked at in past Gears of War games that needed to be improved for Gears of War 4. We felt Gears of War 3 was the best version and that Epic had improved a lot of it by then. By Gears of War 4, we could focus on new things like updating the roadie run, which are very, very minor. Then we looked at new opportunities, like the close cover combat system, where we identified a gap in the core mechanics. It’s a situation you could get into which kind of sucked, so we used that as an opportunity to make something cool instead of ignoring it or trying to find a way to de-emphasis it.

Stevivor: Thanks for your time!

Gears of War 4 will be released on October 11 for Xbox One and Windows PC.