Xbox and The Coalition are making a big deal about Gears of War: E-Day’s campaign, ahead of its Xbox and PC launch on 1st October. The game goes back in time to study the origins of the Locust scourge, placing you in the big, stompy shoes of a younger and more ‘innocent’ Marcus Fenix as he navigates the beginning of the end of the world with erstwhile comrade, Dom Santiago. As I noted in my preview, it feels like a continuation of the original trilogy – somehow! – in its pacing, mechanics, and setup.
But one thing I remained curious about was how far The Coalition might push its difficulty. Gears, as a series, is infamous for being a tough shooter that relies on taking advantage of cover and weapon variety in order to progress. Traditionally, completing the game on the hardest Insane difficulty has been something of a badge of honour for players – similar to how nailing a LASO (Legendary, all skulls on) in Halo games was an achievement worthy of celebration.
So, does E-Day honour that legacy? “Luckily for us, we worked a lot on the various difficulty modes in Gears 4 and Gears 5, so I think we were able to follow a lot of those same patterns,” says Matt Searcy, creative director at The Coalition, when I ask him about balancing difficulty for fun and challenge.
“Because of the Gears formula – which is the layout of the spaces, the weapons you’re given, and the enemy combinations we put together – when you turn the difficulty dial up in Gears, the puzzle emerges more. I think that’s one of the things that makes Gears really cool, right? That makes you, as a player, think. It’s not just ‘How fast can I Whack-a-Mole?’ or ‘Can I find the strongest weapon?’ It’s more ‘What is the best strategy?’ And [the puzzle] also changes if you’re in co-op or if you’re a single player.”
Searcy goes on to say that The Coalition, essentially, breaks down the pillars of the Gears experience to its constituent parts in order to put it back together and assemble a campaign that is challenging, but fair. “If we build great spaces, good enemy combinations, and invest a lot more in the Locust and what they can do, then the difficulty balancing does take some time, but a lot of good comes out of it.
“And a kind of cool thing about Gears as well, I think, is that it’s very inviting to play how you want to play. You want to crank the difficulty? You want to play Hardcore? You want to play co-op, but you want it harder than your friends? We allow that; we have split difficulty. So if you want to play on Insane and your buddy isn’t as good as you, they can play on Normal and you can go through it together because everything is balanced off of [individual] damage and health. This is a really special thing for the franchise, I think.”
So, given that there are four difficulty modes in the Campaign – Casual, Normal, Hardcore, Insane – is there an intended difficulty for the overall experience? “Yeah, I can tell you right now,” laughs Searcy when I ask. “It’s Hardcore. So, the game defaults to Normal, but we play it on Hardcore. If you think about the world, brutality is one of our pillars. And like, Gears of War is meant to be a hard thing. The violence there is like a cathartic release, and when you chainsaw and you hear the character go ‘fuck yeah!’ we want you to be feeling that way too – because the way you got there should have been difficult and hard. And Hardcore is the best way for experiencing that. All the mechanics are firing kind of at the top of their game, but if you stick your head out of cover or make the wrong decision, you get knocked on your ass.”
By including a variety of mechanics – including ‘down but not out’ opportunities, limited to two per encounter – The Coalition demonstrates that it understands the push-and-pull necessary to make a difficult game fun: you need to be punished for taking risks that are slightly too egregious, but at the same time, you need to be rewarded for pushing back against the tide that is perpetually threatening to overwhelm you.
I note how much I enjoyed the ‘invisible hand’ of the developer guiding me during some tricky sections of the preview: you spawn in behind a car when you meet your first ‘Boomer’ (read: an oversized Locust with a one-hit-kill grenade launcher), and I charged him head-on only to end up as a wet pool of chunky meat on the floor.
“Did you think ‘Maybe I should go get behind that car over there?'” laughs Searcy. “Or ‘Maybe I should have stayed behind the car the devs put me behind in that cutscene’ [laughter]. You say ‘invisible hand’, but I think occasionally in our game it’s more that our hand is there, smacking you on your ass, saying ‘Get back in cover’!”
Your E-Days are numbered.
I enjoyed my preview of Gears of War: E-Day. It felt transportative, taking me back to many a misspent evening as a teenager, trying to complete Insane playthroughs in Gears 1 through 3 with an old friend, banging my head against the brutality and grinding difficulty of those three Epic-made campaigns. If the full game can live up to that sense of tension and achievement with its balance, then – for my money – The Coalition will have made a very successful prequel to one of gaming’s most infamous trilogies.
