Gears of War 4 is het grote parade paardje van Microsoft en zal wederom een ongelofelijk vette titel worden. De website Worthplaying had een interview met Rod Fergusson over deze game en daar van kan je hier onder alvast een stukje lezen.

WorthPlaying: So, let's just jump right in and talk about multiplayer. Obviously, you're running the beta, but what is The Coalition going for with the multiplayer design? For example, 343 and the Halo 5 team seemed to have an eSports focus with the multiplayer there. Is that something The Coalition is going for with Gears of War 4? Something more casual? Somewhere in the middle?

Rod Fergusson: It's a mystery. I mean the highest level mission was to create the best Gears of War multiplayer experience ever. And then from within that, we had sort of three main goals. First we had "stay true to Gears while still innovating," so we don't lose the success that's been there in the past and don't lose the identity of Gears.

Our second goal was around making sure we reached basically the best versus for everyone. We looked at our kind of pyramid of who are our constituents; what is the audience for Gears 4 multiplayer and you look at it as sort of being sort of four tiers. There's the new player, the social player, the competitive player, and then the e-sports audience. When we look at e-sports, we recognize that there are sort of three pieces to that puzzle as well, which is not only other players but there's also casters and viewers.

The third big goal for us was maximizing engagement, which was, "Hey, you come for the campaign, you stay for the multiplayer." Now that you're staying for the multiplayer, how do we maximize that time?

Now, I can go into each one of those three goals, but going into your e-sports thing I mean, what was really our target? It's really to look at the sports players that bring the social and competitive elements to e-sports and say, "how can we create the best versus experience for all of those?" So a lot of our investment in terms of features and how we thought about it was, "how do we make the best for each?"

We have a new way to play called Co-op Versus, which is the ability to match-make onto a human team so that it is five humans taking on five bots all of the time. It's sort of a safer place to learn how to play, to learn the maps, to learn the weapons and learn different strategies. Then we have a new mode called Dodgeball which is a little more social. It's like Warzone where it is one life, but like dodgeball, you can bring your teammates back in. In dodgeball, you catch the ball [to bring back a teammate], but in our version if you kill one of the enemies that brings back one of the people that's been eliminated from your side.

Then we said, "OK, let's look at competitive and how can we service that better?" We focused on symmetrical maps that can be played at a highly competitive level. We created a new mode called Escalation. We looked at how competitive players play today and they're playing a mode called Execution. Execution came with the original [Gears of War] back in 2006 and really hasn't changed. They play it because it's simplicity in terms of one life and you're out, and it has to be a close-quarter-kill final, but it has a lot of problems. You get stalemates a lot and it can drag on, and it's not very deep from a strategy perspective. It's all very tactical and twitch-based.

We looked at Escalation from, "Hey, how do we create a meta-game so we have something that is more strategic?" One of the things that changes is the power weapons. The team that loses the round gets to pick what power weapon gets put onto the map. Instead of it being "oh, it's just five of us playing the same way every time because nothing changes," now every round the weapon placement changes and there are three rings that go off at the same time instead of one. You actually have to have strategy rather than just tactics, so it gives something for the commentators to talk about, it creates interest for the viewers and then it creates ever changing strategies for the players.

The last thing is we really focused on the spectating. One of the big questions we asked was, "How do you make Gears of War more watchable?"