The Gears 5 campaign will feature some changes to the enemy A.I. and the combat system will be influenced massively by it. The new system’s name is “player-initiated combat” and it’s inspired by Bioshock Infinite.
With the “player-initiated combat”, enemies will attack the player only when they actively see him. Instead of what happens in previous chapters of the series where enemies attack as soon as we enter the area.
About this change to the game, Matt Searcy, Campaign Design Director, talked to Stevivor.
“There’s lots of games that have done pure stealth, but pure stealth is a whole beast unto itself. It didn’t feel right for Gears. Our characters are not tiptoeing around in Ninja costumes, they’re stomping around in armor.”
“You look at games like BioShock Infinite and it’s all about that choice. They show the situation or part of the situation and you have a bunch of tools loaded up and then you get to decide what to do. This wouldn’t have worked as well in Gears 4 or in past games because we would show you the situation.”
Also, in Gears 5, The Coalition introduced new melee kills and new stealth kills.
“We’ve got a cloak ability, we’ve got a steal ability. We have a marking system — it’s mainly used for multiplayer…but the AI respects it too. We’ve got the hijack where you can take over an enemy. Before the encounter even starts, you could pick the sniper on the other end of the field, flip them to your team and then mark an enemy on the field and that sniper will shoot at that enemy and ideally kill him.”
Gears 5 launches on Steam as well
Gears 5 will also arrive on PC through Windows Store and Steam. This is part of Microsoft’s initiative to bring more Xbox games to PC. As previously happened with the Halo: Master Chief Collection that arrived on Steam months ago.
