war never ends

Q: How did you tackle the creation of the Gears 4 story?

Creative director Chuck Osieja: The amazing thing about this one is: Rod started, and we probably took about a week or so to get to know each other and understand how everybody was going to work. Then we sat down in a room and we banged out a framework for the story in about a week. We came to it really quickly.

Q: How on earth did you manage that?

Creative director Chuck Osieja: You make a lot of progress when you have tough discussions. We thought we could go back and do the Pendulum Wars. No-one has done the Pendulum Wars – it's in the lore, but no-one has ever seen it. But Gears isn't really about human versus human, it's about human versus monsters.

Studio head Rod Fergusson: A Gears game without a monster doesn't feel like a Gears game. I also wanted to avoid that whole 'how do you come up with technology that's cooler technology, but it's retro?' So a prologue didn't fit very well.

Creative director Chuck Osieja: That's been established: we need monsters. Well, the Locust are dead, could we take the cheap way out and do another origin story? Does that feel right? There really hasn't been enough time between games. Do we really wanna retell the Marcus going to prison story? Does that feel respectful to the franchise? Ehh, probably not. Okay, we could do Emergence Day! No-one has seen Emergence Day. That's kind of interesting! But where do you go after Emergence Day? We know where it's going to end up – it's going to end up with Marcus in prison.

Studio head Rod Fergusson: So then we talked about an alternate planet with a new cast and a new location. The problem I had with that was it wasn't grounded in the past, so it took away a bunch of opportunities to revisit places and people I wanted to touch base with.

Creative director Chuck Osieja: But we knew Emergence Day was something we really liked, so it was: let's go 25 years into the future on the same planet. We get to draw from things we know, and if we wanna bring back legacy characters we can. But how do we create a new Emergence Day and give that experience to the player? As soon as we settled on the son of Marcus Fenix, we knew we probably wanted Marcus to come back. It just clicked. And from there it was: who is the Dom character, the partner to JD? We came up with Del.

Once we had the framework it was fast. What makes JD JD? What's his personality? What does he care about? What is the player going to care about when they are controlling him? What's Del's personality? What does he care about? How does he conflict and contrast with JD? Who is Kait? Is Kait a love interest? Do we want it to be mushy that way? Is that a Gears thing? Do we want it to be unspoken? Do we even care about that aspect? And what's her motivation?

So everybody has gotta have their own arc. But once you figure out those three key pieces – Marcus coming back, JD is the new hero, and here's this father/son tension… and one of the inspirations for us was a comic book called Old Man Logan. We had all five acts figured out fairly quickly.

Q: Why are family ties so popular in pop culture? Sequels always seem to include someone's son, or some familial connection.

Lead campaign designer Matt Searcy: Good sci-fi resonates in a bunch of ways – there's reflections of our world and the things that are going on. One of the cool things about storytelling is taking a bunch of people that have either loyalty or tension and putting them into different situations and exploring how those relationships change. Our game is about more than just JD and Marcus. They're one example of exploring the dynamic where one generation has lived through this horrific series of wars, and another has grown up in this more idealistic and peaceful time. But we also have Kait, her mother, and her uncle in the story, and their relationships to JD and Del, not just Kait. And then there's the family you choose: Kait and Del and JD having this connection that is obviously about a shared idealism. We look at the bonds that they have where Del and JD grew up together and Kait is a bit newer. It's about looking at the tensions and loyalties that evolve over this crazy night where everything goes to hell.

Creative director Chuck Osieja: Family is a Gears staple, too. Especially Gears 3, which was about Marcus and his Dad. In Gears 3 it was Marcus trying to save his Dad, and now Marcus is a dad trying to save his son. I think what we're exploring here is something not a lot of games have dealt with. JD's problem is he's the son of the greatest war hero in Sera history. How do you make your own way? How do you become your own man and make your mark on the world when your dad casts such a long shadow over you? And for Marcus, how does he protect his son now he's being threatened? The original was born out of the fact that a bunch of the guys out at Epic had lost their fathers at a very young age. That's why the original was sort of a father/son thing – they were dealing with their own situation. I'm a guy with a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, so this speaks to me in a way that it probably wouldn't have had I been a 15-year-old guy picking up this game for the first time.

Q: The oil-like substance emulsion has been depleted on Sera, and now we have extreme weather and nature reclaiming the land in the absence of humans. Is the Gears series stealthing in an environmental message?

Lead campaign designer Matt Searcy: Sure it is! The perspective I think is we're not necessarily trying to make a bold statement or commentary on anything, but good sci-fi reflects things that are relevant inside our society and on our planet. So there's lots of stuff in our game I think you can look at and it has some bearing or recognisable elements. Like the idea that the weather is changing on Sera as a result of emulsion being taken from the planet – the planet itself is becoming a threat. There's also the idea of exploring this over-protective well-intentioned government that is willing to go to extremes for the quality of life it wants. And what that does to people that don't wanna live in that? Whether they should be free to live the way they want. Then there's the automation… there's lots of stuff in there.

Q: What can you tell us about the game's enemy design?

Lead campaign designer Matt Searcy: They are so critical to Gears of War, the way it feels and how it plays. You can come up with crazy enemies, and easily we could have broken the core mechanics – we could have unbalanced something in one direction or another by adding a weapon that wasn't balanced, or a weird enemy type. I worked with Ryan Cleven and he had this cool approach of analysing the enemy's role, what they did to the player. So we knew we had to have a mirror – a guy who does what you do – so that's the drone. He's similar to the Locust, but we've improved his AI a bunch. Then we wanted spiritual successors to other enemies that were either flushers or pinners – they either move you out of cover, or they pin you in cover. Because the combination of those things is what drives the combat.

But we wanted to do new twists. So you look at the Juvie. We went: we want a guy that flushes you out of cover, we want him to be smaller than a drone, we want him to be weaker than a drone, but we want him to move really fast, and we started exploring wall-bouncing, jumping off walls up high and bouncing off cover – stuff that enemies hadn't done before, but multiplayer players do all the time. We ended up with this enemy that behaves in a unique way, but feels right and almost trains people for multiplayer players that are really good at wall bouncing. And we went crazy too: the Pouncer is an enemy that moves through all of those roles. He can pin you from far away, but once you've been in cover too long he can move you out. He jumps across the map and knocks you out of cover, and if you don't move around and reset your strategy, he'll jump on top of you.

Q: Rod has referred to this game as 'the start of a new saga'. How far ahead do you plan?

Lead campaign designer Matt Searcy: We didn't go 'that looks like something we'll save for the future'. That said, along the way there is editing all the time. A good campaign has been edited: that enemy didn't work out, or that mission was really fun but didn't pull us in the right direction. So we have opportunities to do that stuff in the future. And at the same time we knew we were building a foundation to grow from.