Gears 5’s Combat Was Inspired By BioShock Infinite

Gears 5 is almost upon us. Reviews for the game will be coming shortly, but in the meantime, we’ve got some juicy information about the game. Not too long ago we had a blowout of stuff about the game’s campaign, map size and influences. One influence that we also found about it is one from a source you almost certainly wouldn’t expect: Bioshock Infinite.

In an interview with Gamespot, Rod Fergusson revealed that the game’s combat took a good deal of influence from Infinite. Specifically, he mentions the idea of ” player-initiated combat.” The idea of allowing players a multitude of ways to tackle a situation while challenging the player to have to change strategies from what they’re use to with these variety of choices.

“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. And then with some enemies having health bars, it allows for a different style of play because it means that if I know that Carrier is down to one-twentieth of its health, I know I can rush it and maybe kill it before it crushes me. But in previous games, you’d be like, ‘It’s a bullet sponge and I don’t know when it’s going to die so I don’t know when to make my play.’ And even things like Stim, where I can go into overhealth and be super aggressive because it’s my get-out-of-jail card.

“It allows me to play it differently. Normally, I’m back of the room sniping, and now I kind of go a little bit more on the frontline and use Jack to save my ass whenever I make a mistake. And with the RPG elements [Jack’s upgrades], we mix it up. 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.'”

Gears 5 is definitely shaping up to be quite the departure for the series, but hopefully it manages to retains what people loved about the series. It’s also not the only surprising influence the game has had. It’s a tight rope to walk, but we’ll see if The Coalition can pull it off come September 10th when the game will release for Xbox One and PC.