The first Gears of War game for Xbox One may draw on what 343 achieved with Halo 4, Black Tusk Studios general manager Rod Fergusson has told OXM as part of an exclusive interview you’ll read in the latest issue of OXM UK, which is on sale now.
The two projects are easy to compare - Halo 4 was the first numbered Halo sequel not to be created by Bungie, while the currently untitled Gears of War game for Xbox One is the first not to be created by Epic Games (last year’s Gears of War: Judg(e)ment was a co-production with People Can Fly). What’s more, both 343 and Black Tusk are developers founded by Microsoft. An opportunity to swap notes about the etiquette of franchise evolution, perhaps?
“It’s a great model,” Fergusson told our editor Jon Hicks. “I would be lying if we didn’t say that was an interesting model to look at and I feel, as a fan of the Halo series, they were successful with Halo 4.”
He was adamant, however, that Black Tusk won’t make changes till it has mastered what makes existing Gears of War games memorable. “That’s going to be our big focus, doing right by the fans and the community to show that Black Tusk understands Gears. You have to do it right before you do it differently.”
Black Tusk employees are “ridiculously excited” about the project, as we reported the other week. There’s very little to reveal at present about the game’s structure and feature set, though you can deduce a fair bit from Rod’s answers in our interview. Among other things, he discussed the difference in priorities at Epic, Microsoft and Irrational Games (where Fergusson worked briefly during Bioshock Infinite’s development), and praised Black Tusk’s handling of the Unreal Engine.