The Coalition’s Gears of War 4 will be continuing the story laid out by the original trilogy while exploring a whole new universe and while it won’t exactly be the best story ever, the development team wants to create a cast of compelling characters.
Speaking to Game Informer, creative director Chuck Osieja said, “For us it was ‘ok, moving forward, how do we setup a foundation for not just a trilogy, but for a much larger universe.”
Studio head Rod Fergusson said, “We talked about things like alternate planets and things like that [but] we wanted to stay on Sera because we wanted to have the opportunity revisit old places and use specific weapons, to have these touchstones to the past. That’s when we decided ‘let’s go all the way forward, let’s put enough time in and have a new generation of heroes and create JD Fenix, Marcus’s son.”
As the beginning of a new trilogy of sorts, Fergusson said Gears 4 wasn’t trying to be too lofty with its story aspirations. “When you’re dealing with a game type where the one interaction you have with the world is with what you shoot, it makes it really hard to tell the heartfelt story. Probably The Last of Us is the closest we’ve come to accomplishing that.
“I’m not sitting here saying we’re trying to be the be all and end all of storytelling. For us it’s about creating compelling characters, world, and doing cool shit that we can go back to again and again.”
Gears of War 4 is out later this year but its multiplayer beta begins on April 18th.