14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games has shed some light on the actual development process for Gears of War, one of its most important franchises, and how it was initially set to be a multiplayer-only shooter in the vein of the Battlefield games from DICE.
Gears of War is one of the biggest franchises of the last console generation, establishing Epic Games as a developer that can do more than just fast-paced first-person shooters like the Unreal Tournament titles.
Even if the franchise has been sold to Microsoft, which now has its Black Tusk studio working on an Xbox One iteration, Epic Games fondly remembers the actual creation process of the game and how it started life back in 2001 as a multiplayer shooter idea.
Unreal Engine Lead Programmer James Golding has taken a stroll down memory lane with GamesTM and revealed that the first Gears of War project was named Unreal Warfare and was set to be a multiplayer-only experience with classes and other mechanics, just like the Battlefield games.
"Gears started as a class-based Battlefield kind-of game," Golding says. "It had classes, mechs and it was going to be multiplayer focused… that was until [Cliff Bleszinski] played Medal Of Honor and he was like 'no, single-player campaign is where it’s at!'"
"So we were working on this multiplayer focused class-based game, which I think started off being called Unreal Warfare, and the idea was that you could play it in a big multiplayer arena or against bots, and we came up with this mech that you could deploy and use to suppress the battlefield," explains Golding.
However, due to other projects taking precedence, like the Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 iterations, the team didn't work all that much on the Gears of War project in the following years.
When the studio returned, quite a lot of things no longer worked all that well, so the sci-fi setting was introduced, the traditional four-player squad appeared, and the first version of the alien Locust enemies was imagined, in the form of the Geist.
"We redid a whole bunch of the characters at this point, too: we went from the traditional-looking soldiers to a more sci-fi looking thing and certain precepts like 'no laser guns' came along a little bit later, and it slowly became more in line with the Gears of War we know now."
"The team at Unreal was working on the first draft of the game in 2001, as a multiplayer game, and Gears shipped in 2006 – so it took five years for the whole project to become this very different, whole other thing. Back in 2006, there was a real crunch to get the game done; a month before release [it didn’t feel anywhere near finished]."
However, the end result was quite impressive and went on to define the third-person shooter genre and make the Xbox 360 a really popular console.