Grave Gamer News & Views — people can fly

“New ideas and some slight refining tweaks skirt around Epic’s established formula, but People Can Fly’s unwillingness to stray off the beaten path, paired with a relatively inconsequential story, ensures Judgment is the weakest entry in the series to date.  Ah, don’t make that face.  ‘The Bad One’ was bound to happen sometime.”

Could There Ever Be a Gears of War FPS?

“I’m a big believer in ‘never say never.'  It’s all about what’s interesting in the industry at the time and where fans want us to take it.  We don’t want to say never but it’s not on the top of my mind either.  We look at what makes sense and move in that direction.”

-Rod Fergusson, executive producer at Epic Games, in an interview with OXM.

While next year’s Gears of War: Judgement, under the guiding hand of People Can Fly, certainly cuts its own swath with its focus on real time action and adaptive enemy AI over scripted thrills, the game doesn’t stray far from Epic’s third-person formula.  But if you want it and if you’re vocal about it, the collective fanbase could order up a very different kind of Gears experience.

We’re all well aware that there’s no shortage of first-person shooters on the market.  Here’s a hard number: if you take every FPS off store shelves, there’d be a total of twelve games to choose from and half empty pack of Tic-Tacs (Hey, hey!  Stay away from Google.  How dare you fact check my lies?), but I’m all for expansion in a franchise.  Risk breeds innovation; innovation in gaming often begets fun.  Switching perspectives in Gears isn’t too wildly off base, yet the change to game mechanics needed would probably agitate the ever loving shit out of series diehards grown accustomed to the cover hopping, blind-firing action of the original trilogy.

So, the question stands: anybody out there interested in seeing a first-person Gears of War?

Gears of War: Judgement Officially Dated

No more of this “sometime in March” hogwash, folks. Developer People Can Fly, under the guiding eye of Epic Games, are bringing the Locust slaughtering prequel to our Xbox 360’s on March 19th, 2013.

Just as 343 Industries is injecting fresh blood into Halo, PCF is tossing new ideas into Judgement like grenades, hoping to transform the terrain. A character class system, a varying narrative dependent on your difficulty, a quicker pace to the action, and the mash-up of Beast Mode and Horde Mode into one out of control offering called OverRun all go towards setting Judgement apart from the main series and giving it an identity unto itself.

First quarter next year is filled to the brim with AAA releases, but I think it’s safe to say Gears of War: Judgement will stand tall in 2013.

Today’s hubbub is centered on a rumor published in OXM centering on the future of the Gears of War franchise – or rather, the past of the franchise.

People Can Fly, the dev behind the underrated (and truthfully underwhelming) Bulletstorm, are apparently being contracted by parent company Epic to fulfill a trilogy of prequels centering on the Pendulum Wars.  There have been GoW novels focusing on this event but details have only been mentioned in conversations and files in the actual games.

Should we expect to see Marcus, Dom, and rest of the COG crew return?  Perhaps, but it should be noted the Pendulum Wars covers a 79-year span of time which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.