While Gears of War 4 will be hitting the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs at the same time, and while the PC version actually looks to be pretty darn impressive this time, instead of the dumpster fire that some of Microsoft’s recent PC ports have been, and while there will even be some cross play functionality between the Xbox and PC versions of the game, lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven told IGN that the core of the game is still designed around the controller.
“We definitely work from the controller out,” he said. “We do play [with] mouse and keyboard, but the core of the game is around a controller. I don’t think that we…would say that we have like, one of the other as the priority; they’re both really important to us,” he continued. “But, we have to make sure that the controller experience, which has been the legacy of the game, is definitely perfect.”
The important bit here is that Xbox and PC players cannot play against each other competitively- so both versions of the game can be balanced relatively independently.
“We don’t really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they’re each kind of balanced independently,” Cleven said. “They’re all using the same core tuning; so, when we look at the PC players versus PC players, they can choose to use a mouse and keyboard or they can use a controller. That’s up to the PC players. On the Xbox, we tune the game internally with a controller, so everything is tuned to be balanced that way, and then we make sure that the two groups, when they’re playing competitively online, they aren’t actually playing with each other.”
Gears of War 4 will launch in September for Xbox One and for Windows 10 PCs.
