Following the Gears of War E-Day reveal, I had the chance to sit down with Creative Director Matt Searcy and Brand Director Nicole Fawcette to hear a little bit more about the game’s inspirations and fire a few questions at them.
E-Day explores the 14 year gap between E-Day and Gears of War 1, allowing the team to bring back series favourites such as Marcus and Dom. The game will definitely feature the iconic Chainsaw Lancer, and we’ll get to see the origin story of that too.
Naturally, a lot of people were surprised to see the team going back to the beginning, and seemingly leaving the continuation of Gears 5 open, so I wanted to know if the main reason for going back to the start was to maybe bring players in who had felt overwhelmed by how many mainline entries and spinoffs had hit the Gears franchise.
“I wouldn’t say that was our main motivation, we really focus on creating a great Gears experience, again by learning through what our fan base likes, and if you like all the things that are there, or great story telling, we feel like we have something for you, so it’s not necessarily that we’re going and trying to find a new audience, we’re kind of growing through ourselves. said Fawcette.
“I think we went, this is the game we wanted to make, and we’re really sure that a bunch of Gears fans are going to fucking love this game. If you’re somebody who should like Gears, and this is a good entry point for you, that’s also awesome, but it wasn’t our primary motivator for it. I think if the game is awesome, for all the reasons that makes Gears more awesome, we will hopefully get some folks who should already be Gears fans, frankly.” added Searcy.
The reveal trailer had nods to the original, but was much darker than what we’ve seen from the franchise before, with both team saying that this trailer is a great representation of the visual tone that they team are striving to hit.
Everything has been created on Unreal Engine 5, which allows these more believable locusts to be created, and the darker, grittier tone to come to life. I wanted to know if this is the thematically game that the team has made yet, almost leaning into horror.
“It probably will end up being that because, early on in the story, like monsters coming out of the ground is scary, before you realise they’re an army and also recapturing some of that vibe.” said Searcy.
“But it’s also just when you make a game nowadays, and you go to revisit that tone, like the world has moved on. Our cinematic references aren’t the ones they had when they built the first Gears of War. There are much more nuances to how you tell a story that is about soldiers, but also scary things coming out of the shadows. It’s not as simple as it’ll be the darkest game, I think it’s also just when you build the game now, with those same kind of pillars, it’s going to look a little different than it did back in the beginning.” continued Searcy.
As unexpected as it is, I’m so glad that the team is returning to the OG Gears of War characters to tell a story that I think could take the franchise to a whole new level.
The author of this article was flown to the Xbox Games Showcase as a guest of Xbox.
