Gears 5 doesn’t want to become another Red Dead or Far Cry title.

„We just knew that we weren’t trying to be another Red Dead or Far Cry or Ghost Recon. We were just saying, ‘How can we take Gears and make it feel more open and expansive without trying to go toe-to-toe with Ubisoft?’ Because that’s not really what this game is. We just wanted to take inspiration from genres we love to give a bit more freedom and that idea of player choice. The unfortunate part is once you figure something out, you have to go down to where you truly understand it. So we had a team that didn’t make Gears before, so we made Gears 4. We were feeling pretty confident. ‘Okay, we know how to to make a Gears game, we know to do all this stuff,’ and then this little thing called ambition gets in the way and you start creating new ideas that nobody has a clue how to do necessarily. And it makes an interesting challenge again. I have trouble imagining a bigger game than Gears 5. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to some of the changes. I don’t know how people will react to the RPG-ness, how people will react to the larger levels,” Rod Fergusson, the head of The Coalition, the developers of Gears (of War 4 and) 5, said.

He also explained how 2013’s BioShock Infinite has inspired their work: „We were saying we want to challenge expectations of player choice. What are ways that we can give the player more choice? And so one way is player-initiated combat. I learned that lesson from Bioshock Infinite. And so, the idea that there are battles that the swarm are just kind of meandering around and whatever, and you get to look around and see that there’s a weapon over there or there’s a flank point there or a sniper over there, and then what are the tools I have in Jack that I can sort of use to overcome the situation? We wanted to allow you that moment to take it in and decide how you wanted to play it out.

What are the ways that people are going to play? We didn’t want there to be one where you would just fill up all the upgrades, and at the end, everybody plays the same – that’s why we didn’t do the tech tree thing. We wanted people to be like, ‘Oh, I want to invest in this thing’ or ‘This is the way that I like to play. I like stealth, so I want to do this,’ or ‘I don’t like stealth, I like this.’,” Fergusson added.

Gears 5 is out on September 10 on Xbox One and Windows 10.

Source: GameSpot, GameSpot