The Coalition and Splash Damage established games of this type to transfer the mechanics to the video game.
The attack of the Locust and other evil creatures continued in Gears 5 and will return in the new installment of the saga, which abandons the unbridled action to offer gameplay based on turn-based strategy. Gears Tactics, developed by Splash Damage, was not created as a video game, but its embryo was a board game. This is stated by Steve Venezia, associate creative director of the title, who in statements to Polygon, acknowledges that they first designed the board game and then transferred those mechanics to the language of the video game.
"We didn't want to do a Battle Chess with the Gears logo," says Venezia. "We wanted to move Gears of Wars into the tactical genre" and move the genre forward. This process began with the help of Tyler Belman of The Coalition, who worked on both the fourth and fifth installments of the saga. “Tyler was very effective as a guide. He told us about things like 'horizontal platforms', which is basically how units move from cover to cover. ”
Tyler Bielman and Steve Venezia with the Gears Tactics prototype.
This was the prototype
To design the product, Venezia built a prototype and used a die and a large map. Instead of creating an entire campaign, he used a single scenario as a testing ground. Cooperative missions require a squad of four players to repair the vehicle while defending against the Locust, which are brought in from one side of the board. These enemies were controlled by AI cards with rules similar to that of the bosses in the Kingdom Death: Monster board game. The miniatures they used were rescued from Gears of War: The Board Game, released in 2011.
The team played this prototype countless times. “We soon began to learn things like offering the player objectives that could provide them with space to play,” but that is, with the intention that the experience would be very different each time. “We realized that different players did different things. That was very encouraging, because we discovered that with the same mechanics and with the same type of mission, ”the replay value was very high. "It was a great advantage to be able to follow that process, and a lot of fun too."
Gears Tactics will be released on PC and Xbox Game Pass on April 28. The Xbox One version will take longer. At the moment, it does not have a date.
