never fight alone

Q: Why did you go with a class system for Horde?

Multiplayer producer Jonathan Taylor: We saw that people were naturally going towards certain weapons in Horde and Horde 2.0. For example, if you wanna be a sniper, you pick up a sniper rifle when it gets dropped, and try to play that role. Same thing, people would pick up a Boomshot and be a Boomshot guy, right? But because we didn't lean into that, you wouldn't be able to play like that the entire time, eventually you reach a spot later in the flow of the waves and you'd be stuck. You couldn't play with the weapon you liked to play with anymore because enemies were too hard to kill. So you fell back into the same roles: Lancer and active reload.

So with classes there was an opportunity to say hey, if you like heavy weapons and the Boomshot, you can play this class where we're gonna give you skills and abilities that you can use and remain effective the whole time. Its not locking you in, it's just a loadout it gives you at the very beginning, so you might trade that out for a weapon you like that happens to drop. It just gives you the opportunity to tailor the way you wanna play. And it gives you more to do, you get more options. For example, you can be a sniper and get a headshot ability where the guy explodes and damages guys around him. Now you're way more effective than a guy who just happens to have a sniper rifle.

Studio head Rod Fergusson: The other thing is it creates a great sense of progression. If you look at the Gears 2 Horde, you had the same experience over and over again. In Gears 3 we added progression in the fortifications, but it wasn't really on the character or the player. So now we have the ability to level up the class itself to unlock more skills, and the skills themselves. We have the ability to become a lot stronger. Every time you come back to Horde now that experience is slightly different. So it's a combination of letting the player play the way the want to play, and then giving them a sense of progression.

Q: Did you ever consider any different business models for the game, like making the multiplayer free to play?

Studio head Rod Fergusson: Yeah we talked about all that stuff. Even though we haven't cut it off and made it its own thing, I always thought of the multiplayer as a service. That's one thing that's really changed about game making. When I was making games in the '90s and 2000s, when you shipped it, when you went gold, you were done and went on vacation – unless there was a security problem. Now your game is preloaded and at 12:01 people fire it up and your Twitter starts to light up because of whatever.

It never turns off – you're never done. It's that kind of service. Cliff used to say people come for the campaign and stay for the multiplayer, and that's kinda true given the thousands of hours people put into multiplayer. And what I like about it is it means you can evolve multiplayer over time, you don't have to put everything in the box. That's kinda the thing I talked about with e-sports being in our 'walk' phase. I don't know if our 'run' phase is Gears 5 or when we add more stuff to multiplayer after Gears 4.

Q: What's your e-sports strategy this time out? I've always felt Gears should be more popular as an e-sport, and I've never really understood why it's struggled to catch on.

Studio head Rod Fergusson: We partnered with MLG in 2006, but it waned a lot. It was just regional groups doing tournaments and it kinda faded into the background. When we brought out Ultimate Edition we thought, 'We're going to use this to learn – let's find a partner and see what happens'. And that's what we did with the ESL. What we learned was there's a lot of interest: the numbers and excitement around it told us this was a thing that people want. But we also learned that the pro league was elitist in a way. It wasn't aspirational, because it was like watching professional hockey: there's eight teams and they play each other. I like watching it but there's nothing I can do.

So we really tried to turn it on its head to create an open series that we're going to do almost every month, around the world, where anybody who has earned enough Pro Points (through playing the game) can go to these events. Amateurs and pros can come together and each of these eight events will feel like a world tournament. We're going to fly the best teams to each place so you'll always have that international competition. For us it's about going in with a growth mindset, because at the end of the day you don't buy your way into e-sports, it just doesn't work. The reason an arena gets filled for League of Legends and Counter-Strike and Dota is they have such a passionate fan bases who care about their game, so they wanna see it played at the highest level and participate in that experience. We're still earning that trust and respect and hopefully that passion, so when we continue post-Gears 4 or Gears 5, hopefully we can make it as big as it can be.

Q: Why is Escalation getting a push as one of the preferred e-sports modes?

Multiplayer producer Jonathan Taylor: With Escalation, we're trying to make sure it's something that captures the ability to tell stories about what's going on on the battlefield. We want people watching to understand what's going on even if they don't understand the nuances of the gameplay. They can see the scores go up and understand something dramatic is about to happen when the three-cap is about to occur. So it eases them into the experience: it's sports-style gameplay. There's complexity to it, but on the surface if you are watching it without context, you can still watch it and understand it.

Studio head Rod Fergusson: You get 200 points versus 100 rather than 'hey how many people are alive on that team versus how many people are alive on that team?' That's just harder to understand.

Q: Can you tell me a bit more about this 'industry leading' matchmaking featured in the game?

Lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven: It means we've partnered with Microsoft to make enhancements to the True Skill algorithm. It's a Microsoft technology that's been used since Xbox 360, and there's been incremental improvements made to it over the years, but we've been working in partnership with Microsoft Research and developed a new application of it that does a much better job of judging people's skill levels. So we have integrated in with our matchmaking system, and that'll make its debut when Gears 4 launches.

Q: How do you approach weapon balancing for the competitive modes? Is there tension between what you guys and what the campaign team want in a gun?

Lead multiplayer producer Otto Ottosson: Anyone can come up with an idea, and then we can try and implement it and see if it's viable or not. Like the Buzzkill, a gun that has ricocheting sawblades, which seems crazy. It's up to us to take it and make it so its functionality is balanced. I think at one point you could run around with it as a normal weapon, but then we made it heavy.

Lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven: Yeah, the Buzzkill went though about five or six iterations before we finally landed where it was. Every weapon we put in the game we have to make sure doesn't break the skill cap or the skill gap, however you wanna look at it. So the heavy weapons area bit of an exception, because you have low mobility, so we get away with a bit more novelty when you're using them. But things like the Overkill or the Embar and Enforcer – all of them we wanted to make sure had a high skill potential. We had to make sure anything that was in multiplayer still kept the high skill play, while being a fun and accessible glorious weapon to use in campaign.

Lead multiplayer producer Otto Ottosson: These guys also did something really cool where they looked at all the weapons that we had and graphed them out in terms of what their role was. I feel like the Gears weapons are characters and have characteristics that fit a role. So they graphed that and looked at that when they were making new ones. We wanted to bridge any gap in our graph, and if there's no gap, let's come up with a new mechanic for how people use it.

Q: The strength of the Gnasher shotgun always seems to be a point of contention.

Lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven: We had to make sure it felt like the previous Gears of War shotgun, that's number one. Every little detail about exact ranges, exact firing positions, exact trajectories, bullet spread pattern randomness – all of that had to be first. And how we made changes to it came through beta testing. Actually the Gnasher in the beta was a little weaker than the Gears 3 Gnasher, but what came out was how much more powerful it felt, which is a little weird [laughs]. Then we brought a bunch of pro players in and they wanted all the weapons to be brought down in terms of lethality. So ultimately we wound up with a shotgun that works almost identically as the Gears 3 one from a mechanical point of view, but the lethality is lower and we brought the range in on it. For competitive tuning we brought the range in even further.