When The Coalition took over Gears of War part of the community was highly skeptical of its capabilities of running the franchise. As a result, the developers played it safe with Gears of War 4 and kept things as familiar as possible, according to Rod Fergusson.
During a recent interview, he explained that the developer knew what the community expects from Gears of War. The studio wanted to prove it can develop a proper Gears of War experience before experimenting with it. Now that they have proven it, Gears of War 5 would a playground of developers to innovate the franchise.
When asked about the lack of experimentation with new features in Gears 4, Rod explained:
Basically, it was a reaction to what we want to do with the franchise. We were a new team, a new studio, Gears was coming back after being on the shelf for a while and we didn’t want to mess with the formula, we didn’t want to change it too much because we wanted to prove that we can build an authentic Gears of War experience. Now that we have done that and people have accepted Gears 4 now it is an opportunity with Gears 5 to bring the new like we really want to show what we want to do with the franchise and where we want to take it; whether it is changing core mechanics, the way we do storytelling, or the way to make certain aspects around controls and gameplay, or whether it is reaching with new types gameplay mobile and tactics on PC.
The statement is a clear indication that developers will be making some core changes to Gears 5. The extent of these changes is unknown but come E3 2019 we will see more of the game, hear a lot about things to come.
As for the release date, it is set for 2019 for Xbox One, Xbox One X, and likely to released on Xbox Scarlett as well. Gears of War 5 will also be available on PC and it built from the ground up for the biggest gaming platform in the world.
