Is it weird not having the Epic guys around this time? Obviously Cliff Bleszinski has left the company.
Yes and no. They are obviously great friends and collaborators - it's not one person makes something, it's a team effort - but what I'm really excited about is just the pure energy that's at Black Tusk. When you live with a franchise for seven years, there were people at Epic who were kind of done - like I wanted to do something else interesting. But when you look at Black Tusk it is just a pure, raw, pool of energy and excitement for what they want to do.
So I'm like walking through the studio and Gears of War is on every screen, we're playing multiplayer together and we're playing horde together, and doing all this different stuff. Just to have that fresh enthusiasm is really invigorating.
When you did come back, did you have any kind of unfinished business that you wanted to see to? Any existing things you can now address?
Not really. I mean, one of the things I think we were guilty of when we were making Gears of War 3 was trying to put everything in. We felt like it was going to be our opus - like, this is the end of this franchise - so we probably could have been a little bit more diligent in terms of scope management. So there's no unrequited feature that I always wish I could have done. To me there's just something about Gears being Gears, and we've got that energy about 'let's make a great Gears of War game' and focusing on the franchise as opposed to 'well, I'm sort of tired of it, how can I change it?'
There are a lot of Gears stories already out there in the world. Do you have to mesh with that universe and the extended fiction?
That's part of it, but what's great is that at Epic we were always super lean, we always had the smallest team possible, we were always sort of understaffed and overworked so we weren't able to fully take advantage of what the franchise could do. So one of the other reasons I'm excited about having Gears of War at Microsoft is that we can actually see Gears do more than just any one particular instance. There are just a lot more opportunities because we have more resources to do that.
On the technical side, Black Tusk was already working on Unreal Engine 4. Did that mean the team was already up to speed? Did Microsoft do the deal with Epic and just get handed some hard drives with the assets?
They've been doing a lot of work in Unreal Engine 4 and what is great is that we're going to continue that partnership with Epic. It's not an adversarial relationship, it is very, very much a collaboration and a partnership. That goes back to what was Gears of War, from the first game through Judgment, but it's also a technology partnership. We're going to highlight the engine just like Gears always did. And the engine is going to an amazing game like Gears.
You said Black Tusk's first job is to prove you can make a Gears game. Does that mean you've got to do that first before you can start evolving the format?
It's the same thing with all sequels. This isn't a great way of phrasing it but I always talk about shipping a sequel to customers as 'managing betrayal'. They want something new but they don't want something so new that it doesn't feel like what they want. But if you put out something that's very familiar and is the same as the game they just had, then it's like 'I've already had this. This isn't new enough.'
You actually have to betray them enough to give them something new and surprising but not so much that they disconnect, and I think that is a big thing that we have to focus on. It's how we can innovate and bring something new to the franchise while at the same time really proving that we understand Gears - that this is the franchise that you know and love.
So I've already given multiple speeches to the team like 'here are the core tenets of Gears, here are the things that won't be changing, and here are opportunities for us to innovate that we think we can knock out of the park.'
