Gears of War 4 Balanced for Controller First

Gears of War 4 will be balanced on controller. The game is slated to come to both Xbox One and PC, but the priority is clearly Xbox One.

Speaking to IGN, Ryan Cleven, Gears of War multiplayer lead designer said:

“We definitely work from the controller out. We do play [with] mouse and keyboard, but the core of the game is around a controller.”

The game was originally announced for Xbox One and then announced for PC when the Xbox Play Anywhere program was implemented this year.

But when talking about how the games are balanced he explained that both systems are handled independently.

“We don’t really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they’re each kind of balanced independently. They’re all using the same core tuning; so, when we look at the 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. ”

Controller and mouse and keyboard both function quite differently. Controllers are not as precise as a mouse when aiming. But the series has been on console since its inception, this doesn’t signal any radical change; quite the opposite actually.

Despite nearly all of Microsoft’s exclusives also moving to PC, this is a move that Xbox is still at the front of their minds. But development teams are still giving Gears of War players a chance to choose how they want to play on PC.

Gears of War 4 follows a new generation of COGs. Most notably J.D. Fenix, the son of the previous protagonist, Marcus Fenix. A new enemy has arisen, forcing the war-torn inhabitants of Sera to pick up their battered Lancers once more.

Gears of War 4 releases on Xbox One and PC October 11, 2016.