Gears of War 4: The Coalition’s Chuck Osieja on a lack of dude-bro

Our chat with Gears of War 4‘s Chuck Osieja wouldn’t be complete without talking about dude-bro.

You know dude-bro, right? Gears’ protagonists oozed testosterone right from the get-go, with necks larger than both of Chris Redfield’s dude-bro biceps put together and more shouts of “whooooo!” than you could count. Osieja says that’s been toned down in The Coalition’s upcoming sequel.

“The way that we think about it is, people always talk about the dude-bro aspect of the original three Gears, but you have to think about it in the context of what they were building as well, right? When you start Gears 1 you’re fourteen years into a war that’s already been going on so you know all the characters, you know all the enemies, you know all the weapons,” he said. “These guys, every single day, they don’t know if the next step they’re going to take is their last. That’s the Carmine boys, right? They have a hard time with it.”

Now you feel a bit bad for throwing dude-bro out there, don’t you?

“The way that they act and react and deal with each other is much rougher, it’s much different than what you get in the new game, because these guys are just friends,” Osieja said, tying things into the new game. “JD, Kait and Del are all friends. They’ve never been in war before. Their relationship and the way they talk to each other is much different.

“Now, does it evolve over time as the combat goes on? Yeah and Marcus brings a really interesting contrast to that, because he’s used to reacting a certain way and now he’s got these three younger kids who are trying to deal with the situation. I’ve seen a couple things written about him that he comes off as being quite funny, because he grew up rough and he’s used to communicating one way with these guys that he went through this war with. Now he’s dealing with these young kids who kind of don’t understand the way he’s acting about these things.

“It was dude-bro for a reason, because it was more of a war scenario. Part of the original inspiration for Gears was Band of Brothers, right? When you watch shows like that and you see the way that the characters in those fox holes communicate with each other and act with each other, they’re much cruder and much more like guys in the locker room are.

“It’s different, because the situation is different. It was nice to be able to get away from that and be able to bring a different sensibility from the characters.”

Osieja did concede that the design of J.D. Fenix is intentionally more realistic than that of his father, original Gears protagonist Marcus.

“It’s a case of updating with the times,” he said. “I think you see [the original characters] were very stylistic for their time and I don’t know if it feels appropriate anymore. For us, we wanted to streamline them which we did. We actually went too far the other way — they had the big moon boots and everything and they were basically like big blocks running around the environment. We wanted to go the opposite way and go more realistic. The very first versions of J.D. and Kait, when you put them in the game next to the classic Marcus, they didn’t feel like they fit. We actually had to go back and broaden them up and make them a bit thicker.

“What we did was we tried to streamline and still make them fit within the context of the universe. You’ll notice they don’t have any lower body armor which makes them a bit thinner. One of the things we had to do was we had to go back in and put the packs around their waste, because they needed to have some bulk that, when in multi-player, they felt like they were still substantial.

“They just felt so odd without that stuff standing next to classic Gears characters that just felt like it was too, again, felt like it was 180 degrees as opposed to 120 degrees in terms of the change.”

Gears of War 4 heads to Windows PC and Xbox One next week. Check back at 6.00 pm AEDST for our full review.