On this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast, we’re at gamescom and sitting down with the team behind Gears of War: E-Day! We’re digging deep into the recently released story trailer, talking about the hope and brotherhood of E-Day’s story, and getting our hands on a pair of custom controllers made for the game.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M. [ XBOX sound ]
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Hello and welcome to “The Official XBOX Podcast”, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX, or inside the XBOX booth. We are here in Cologne at gamescom, and I’m pleased to be joined by members of the coalition who are here showing off “Gears of War: E-Day” to everybody. Matt Searcy, Creative Director for “Gears of War: E-Day”. Thanks for joining us here today. And Raul Figueroa, the Campaign Design Director. It’s great to have you on the show here for the first time.
RAUL FIGUEROA: Thank you very much for having me.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And I think actually I kind of want to start off with the trailer that you all debuted during Opening Night Live with Geoff Keighley. That’s sort of the kickoff for gamescom. People often talk about “Gears” as being brutal, but this is almost like, I would say, a new standard.
MATT SEARCY: I think the brutality and that “Gears” edges on horror sometimes. We wanted to bring a bunch of that into “E-Day” obviously, and really connect to it. Whenever we make a trailer, it’s sort of a labor of love for us to try to pull out what’s awesome about our game and about “Gears”, and there’s no better way to start than introducing our new big, bad Vraahk in the most brutal way possible.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: What do we need to know about Vraahk?
RAUL FIGUEROA: I mean he’s a blight commander, he was injured in the Lambent War.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah.
RAUL FIGUEROA: And he came up here to destroy humanity. That’s his goal. And so that’s why we went so brutal with him. We wanted to really show that they just want to go up there, eliminate humanity completely.
MATT SEARCY: He basically embodies the brutality of the Locust. And what’s cool about the trailer, too, is you can see around him these other elite units, the Scorched Legion, that’s his legion. They kind of have spikes sticking out of them, the self-mutilation, so that brutality is embodied in them as well. So in the game, even when you’re not facing him, when you’re facing his elite troops, you’ve got all the vibes of Vraahk coming through in the brutality that you face. The other awesome thing we get to do with our story trailer is peek into not only the story moments themselves, but “E-Day” has a ton of characters in it. It’s the story of Bravo Squad, but there’s so many more soldiers in the city that you’re crossing paths with. They all have their own stories, their own history. And what’s really cool about “E-Day” is you’re part of this larger brotherhood that’s facing this impossible threat. So we’re getting to see new characters in here, just a fraction of the people you’re going to meet. We get to see the mayor and the colonel who are two figureheads in the city at odds with each other while we’re fighting the Locust. And I think the story trailer just does an awesome job of weaving just glimpses of the amount of tension and stress you’re going to see in this game.
RAUL FIGUEROA: And you can see that we really made a lot of effort into making it feel like there’s that feeling of camaraderie and brotherhood, where people are helping each other to figure out what is happening here. This is a completely new threat. They’ve never seen anything like it.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It feels like there’s still some little semblance of hope. People don’t know at this point just how bad things are going.
MATT SEARCY: We know how hopeless it is.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah. An interesting thing about “E-Day” is setting it, well, we set it all in Kalona, and the reason was to make this very intimate battle inside the larger event. It’s such a huge event on Sera. Two-thirds of the population are wiped out. It’d be easy to look at this and be like, well, we know what happens. We know most of the population dies. We know all this stuff. But by placing it in a single city and following these people, we do get to play with what does it mean to try to pull out some sort of victory on the first two days, to have some sort of hope. Obviously, there’s so much loss in this game. But to do it in a way that touches on themes about loss and brotherhood and loyalty was really important to us.
RAUL FIGUEROA: And one of the things that we really managed to do here is that you get a chance to see a little bit of the before, the during, and a little bit of the aftermath. So as the campaign progresses, we’re going to see a little bit more of that and it’s going to be really interesting.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And because “Gears” 1 through 5, the world’s already destroyed, you don’t necessarily feel the loss. But because you see the world as it was and things that are familiar to us in society, then maybe it’s just a little bit more poignant.
RAUL FIGUEROA: That’s exactly it. Yeah.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Did I take your line? I’m sorry.
MATT SEARCY: No, that’s great. Somebody else can say our line. That means we’ve done our job, right?
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Exactly. We also, just throughout this trailer, we see the biggest of the big bad of the Locust that we’ve seen throughout the years.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah, I think for us, without getting into spoilers too much, I think it’s kind of obvious the cool thing we get to do with “E-Day” is every time an enemy shows up, it’s the first time, right? It’s the first time Marcus and Dom have seen them. It’s the first time these people have seen them. So, we get to go from seeing the first wretch in the game to the first drone, and up and up and up, until you’re seeing Brumaks with armor. And you’re getting a little bit of that scale here of just, as we go through the few days of “E-Day”, it goes from this block-by-block monster attack to this overwhelming, holy shit there’s an army underground coming to get us. And really, goes from an invasion to it’s gears, it’s a war, it’s “Gears of War”. Takes us into what the franchise is.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So as we’ve been seeing a ton of coverage, a lot of the conversation is about the city where this takes place, in Kalona. So, what do you want people to get out of and take away from their experience in this environment?
RAUL FIGUEROA: Well, from the get-go, one of the most important things for us was that Kalona was a city that people were going to connect with and it was going to be a character. So, we spent a lot of time actually building it from the ground up as a real city. We want people to feel for it. We want people to understand what it is to live in that city. What it was to live in that city, the loss, as you’re progressing through the campaign, and nothing better than actually allow people to connect to it by exploring it and as the game progresses and you see that city fall apart, the people in it dying, being able to save whoever you can save. It actually makes a big impact. We have some really awesome set pieces and landmarks that you will remember, and those landmarks change as the game progresses.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Some of the folks were talking about some side activities where they’ve run into other groups who were scattered and just doing the best they can. Can you talk about some of the types of things you might, if you seek it out, you might be able to find as a player?
MATT SEARCY: The game is a linear game overall, and it weaves back and forth between sections like the bridge, which is what people are playing here, and places where we give you access to a few city blocks at a time. You’re still on mission, but as you go to your mission, it’s kind of up to you how you get there. And when you look around the corners, you can come across another squad trying to fend off the Locusts, maybe a family that’s trapped in a building. And each of those gives you a little narrative reward. If you decide to help them, it’s up to you. We also expand our gameplay sandbox, so for the first time in a campaign game, you can mod your weapons. Some of the things people have seen in Horde, they come into the campaign as well, and so it really pays to explore. There’s tons of narrative storytelling. There’s tons of environmental storytelling. We have these side objectives you can do if you choose. We have hard cases you can find that kind of give you additional gameplay progression and stuff. And I think what Raul was talking about, about exploring the city and feeling the loss, it’s all tied together with our gameplay mechanics, our level building. And also, “Gears” plays great in the city. Cars, buildings, debris everywhere. When what you do is build a cover shooter, it’s the best. There’s just cover options all over the place, tons of variety. It’s great.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: The team has come way beyond waist-high cover.
MATT SEARCY: That’s right, yeah.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You’ve got a lot more ability.
MATT SEARCY: I mean, it exists. It’s just not all boxes.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, exactly. The players, and this is something that’s been talked about quite a bit, have much more agency, much more ability to climb. There’s a jump button. It also seems in a lot of what I’ve been reading and viewing is the intelligence of the Locust has been way ramped up. Is that sort of like two sides of the coin? You made the player, gave the player much more ability, now we’ve got to make the enemies have more ability as well?
RAUL FIGUEROA: Yeah, absolutely. You can do these things, now they can do it as well. And one of our goals from the beginning was that we really wanted to make the Locust feel dangerous. We wanted them to feel smart and threatening. So, you feel smart by climbing on top of a truck to outflank one of them? Well, they can do the same thing to you. And sometimes you get surprised by a grenadier coming on top of one of those vehicles and then jumping behind you, and just hitting you with a Gnasher. And it feels great because you really understand that, hey, I have to be careful, cover his life. And yeah, I have to adapt.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: One of our writers was even talking about one of the Locusts using smoke to cover up some of their moves.
MATT SEARCY: I think that’s one of the moments that’s caught people out in the demo a bunch is the grenadiers that Raul was talking about, the shotgunners, they’ll drop a smoke between you and them. And then they will walk through the smoke so that you can’t see them come in until they’re in close range. That kind of, the “Gears” formula is your cover position, the weapons that you have available to you, and the enemy combinations that we put together. That’s what makes that “Gears” magic. And then when the enemies have a few more tactics each, those combinations just expand like crazy, and that’s where we get a bunch of our gameplay challenge, our weapon variety, or sorry, our encounter variety. And I think it’s also why when you turn the difficulty up on “Gears”, it turns into this really cool puzzle. It’s not just can you play whack-a-mole faster. It’s like, you have to think. You have to be good at it, but you also get to use your brain, which makes it feel a little bit different from other games.
RAUL FIGUEROA: Look around and see your options.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah.
RAUL FIGUEROA: There’s so many options, but maybe if you’re playing casual, you might not see them, but as you’re starting ramping that up, you have to see them.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This feels like a game where if you don’t have a surround sound, you’re going to want to wear headphones, so you’re going to need all your —
MATT SEARCY: Audio design in this game is awesome. It was so great to see people in our beta start to call out the audio design. Because I think our team is exceptionally talented, rebuilding it all from scratch, let them really push into what makes “Gears” sound special, and it’s, yeah, it’s top tier.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: You don’t have to take these guys’ word for it, although you should, because there’s tons of media out there, things you can read. Creators’ content you can watch about all of these things and about the chapters we’ve talked about, a lot of video out there as well. One thing you do have to take our word for right now is how cool these controllers are. These were just announced this week. There’s two different versions. This is the Special Edition “Gears: E-Day” controller. And then this will be going into Design Lab, so you’ll be able to customize various elements of it. Can you just talk about some of the partnerships and the art and the things that went into this?
MATT SEARCY: Yeah, when we get to work with the team at XBOX that creates controllers, it’s so cool. They come with all these amazing ideas, and this one especially, that’s got these etched E-hole breaking out, like concrete texture on it. The transparency, the omen inside of it. And then we were able to really, like even the textures on this thing. I think as people pick it up, they realize it feels amazing because it’s got these rubberized textures in the back. And we tucked all sorts of little secrets in in here as well. So this, I think, people, this looks awesome, and when people pick it up, it feels incredible because it’s just built really well. It’s got all these really cool elements to it. And then Luke, we love Luke Preece who did the art here. He’s, back of our shirt. He’s been working with us I think since “Gears 5”. And this should be very familiar, this style. But by putting it on an XBOX Design Labs, you get to use his art and then combine it with whatever you want, whatever colors you want, the button types, the textures, all that stuff. And he was here, I think last night he was signing controllers for people and stuff. “Gears” fans love the way the brand looks and the symbolism inside of it. And this was just a way for us to put it in your hands. And they’re awesome. We’re super proud of them.
RAUL FIGUEROA: I’m going to tell you, I was at the booth.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah.
RAUL FIGUEROA: All the booths have these controllers.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, really?
RAUL FIGUEROA: And they’re a little bit hidden under the monitor, right? So people come in, look at the screen there, they grab the controller, and the first thing they do is like, “Whoa Whoa!” And they just look around it and take pictures of it, right? So, it’s really awesome to see that people really connect with it just by holding it.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, “Gears” has always had, I want to say since maybe “Gears 4”, there’s been a number of really cool “Gears” controllers and this one may take the cake.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah.
RAUL FIGUEROA: It’s amazing. It’s pretty great.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Any last thoughts here from gamescom? When are we going to hear from you all next? Because we’re coming down the final stretch.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah, I mean, as we come up to launch, I’m sure we’re going to have a ton of, our last push, we will have things that we put online. There might be another trailer coming at some point. But we’ve had so much, we’ve been able to share so much since Showcase. It was amazing getting to go deep with the Dev Direct, sort of have our reveal to people of how the gameplay had changed, get deep into “E-Day”, and then we had —
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: The beta. We didn’t bring that up.
MATT SEARCY: Yeah, we had the multiplayer preview in the beta, which was, hey everybody, come play it. We showed it to you, and it was awesome getting to watch people play, playing with them ourselves, PVP. Seeing people sweat again.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah. Yeah.
MATT SEARCY: But with our new mechanics and especially “Horde Siege”, which was something we’ve been secretly working on, just this epic version of Horde on these big maps with multiple squads, and seeing the engagement there and seeing how people kind of got all of the elements, the gameplay, the new gameplay mechanics. The new maps we’re able to build, the way they’re all set in Kalona, the tone we have, that was awesome. So this has been a really exciting couple of months, because we had these three beats showcase, multiplayer, now campaign here. People seem hyped. We’ve been super hyped as well. We’re really proud that we’ve been able to show off the team’s work so fully in the last little bit. But everybody’s still only seeing like this much of what the game is. So, launch is coming up soon.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: October 6th.
MATT SEARCY: October 6th, I think early access is October 1st, so we’re just over a month away. So I don’t know, next time you see us, we might just be playing the game.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, it might be at home for you, which is great. Raul, Matt, thank you again for taking time out. I know you’ve got a lot more people that you’ve got to show “Gears of War: E-Day” to, so I will let you get back to it. And you should check out all of the “Gears of War: E-Day” content that is on the XBOX YouTube channel. We also have more shows coming here from gamescom. In fact, we just put live a great “Persona 4 Podcast” as well, and we’ve got another one that we’re working on as well. So, make sure you check all of that stuff out. But in the meantime, thanks for watching us on “The Official XBOX Podcast”.
RAUL FIGUEROA: Thank you, everybody. [ XBOX sound ]
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