It’s a tactical shooter in a lot of ways, so we had to make sure that enemies had the same role they have in Gears.įor example, a Wretch is what we call a ‘flusher’ its job is to push through and shove you out of cover so that the drones, which we call ‘mirrors’, can shoot you. You can take an enemy and just dump it into the tactics space and see what happens, but for us Gears combat is very well-defined. Were there any other Gears cornerstones that you really felt you needed to realise in this genre before you felt confident it would work?
We had a big map and we had cover, and that was also a proving point for us: could we make it feel like Gears on a table, with just paper and pencil and stuff? That was also a really cool moment for us early in development. TB: We also put together a tabletop board game version of it first. That was the first point where we realised there’s probably some magic in here that we should explore. The cover-based nature of really stood out even from that first test of the camera angle. We had to prove along the way that we were interpreting Gears into tactics in a way that aligned with Gears, but that was when we kind of got rolling.Īlex Grimbley: One of the first moments where I realised we’d got it was we actually just took existing Gears and just moved the camera up. If you look at it, kind of from a 50,000-foot perspective, a lot of things just line up. So I wrote a pitch document which said, ‘Hey, the turn-based tactics genre aligns well with the kind of game we are already: cover-based combat, squad-focused, tactical.’ That really resonated with everyone. TB: Alex and I are the publishing team within The Coalition, and our mandate is to expand the Gears brand in ways that make sense and bring it to as many people as possible. I realised we’d got it when we just took existing Gears and moved the camera up
Their answers indicate why translating a heart-thumping console cover shooter to the more considered turn-based tactics genre makes a great deal of sense, why it’ll still feel like Gears anyway, and why Gears Tactics has what it takes to stand tall not just among an increasingly crowded genre, but in comparison with the modern classic that revived it eight years ago. I spoke with Tyler Bielman and Alex Grimbley, publishing design director and executive producer respectively at The Coalition, about why that’s not such a difficult balancing act as it first sounds. The PC-friendly spin-off from what was once one of the Xbox’s leading console exclusives is out in a month, and making a number of carefully judged, if incremental, changes to the XCOM formula while staying true to Gears’ spirit. One that may not, based on my first impression, is Gears Tactics. Ever since 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the formerly anaemic squad tactics genre has exploded, and most of its new entrants have wilted beneath XCOM’s shadow to some degree.
0 kommentar(er)
