Author: Trafficblast

Studio head Rod Fergusson has discussed the one time he chose to pull rank and put his foot down on a creative decision. Surprisingly, it was to ensure the survival of protagonist Kait Diaz’s hat in Gears of War 4.

In an interview with GameSpot, Fergusson and franchise narrative lead Bonnie Jean Mah revealed that they were the lone hat advocates at the studio. And he used the hat to illustrate a related point, about how skeptical the studio was of the Skiff vehicle segment.

“It was a battle,” Fergusson said. “It was literally a battle, much like Kait’s hat. So in Gears 4, we had the beret on Kait, and almost everybody hated it.”

“I liked the hat,” Jean Mah interjected.

“I mean, you and I liked the hat,” he continued. “We essentially had to fight really hard to keep Kait’s hat. It was one of those things where I was like, ‘Look, I don’t pull rank very often, but we’re keeping the hat.'”

He went on to explain that the Skiff was a battle too, and that it sprung out of his desire to do a sailing simulator. The team kept hitting engineering challenges to make a wind-based vehicle, but he was steadfast that they couldn’t change it.

“The number of times that engineers came up to me and said, ‘Can’t we just make it a dirt bike? Can we not make it a Jeep? Please, God, let it be a monster truck.’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, it’s a weird sailing thing that you ride on the back of.’ You’re kind of parasailing or wakeboarding off the back of this thing. And so, there was a number of times where people were trying to rebel against it, and it felt like it was an opportunity to do something really cool and ownable, and at the end of the day I think where we landed, much like Kait’s hat, was that it turned out really awesome and I think it is a unique sort of differentiator for us.”

Tragically, her hat appears to be nowhere to be seen in Gears 5. For more on the next Gears, check out our hands-on campaign and Horde Mode impressions. Gears 5 launches on September 10 on Xbox One. Early access for Ultimate Edition buyers or subscribers to Game Pass Ultimate will start on September 6.

Gears 5 makes a number of big changes to the series with its new hero, Kait, along with bigger levels and some RPG elements. These ideas came from developer The Coalition, but how did Microsoft feel about these changes? “They actually don’t have any creative input at all,” The Coalition boss Rod Fergusson told GameSpot in a recent interview.

According to Fergusson, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty and overall Xbox boss Phil Spencer put a lot of trust in their studio heads to manage their own projects.

“It’s really about trusting the studio heads and the teams there to recognize what’s the best way to leverage whatever it is they’re building,” he said. “Matt has a great line around just building great games. It’s just the notion of don’t worry about business models, don’t worry about subscriptions, don’t worry about changing things to adopt to a particular strategy. If you make an awesome game, then we can take that awesome game and apply it to different strategies.”

The first and most important rule is to “make a great game and focus on quality of execution,” Fergusson said. “We say what we do and we do what we say, and when we say we’re going to deliver you a game, we deliver you a game, and we do it at the highest quality we can.”

Fergusson said creative decisions shouldn’t be made from higher-ups on the top-down model. “I think the strength of the bottom-up way we’re doing things now allows for each studio to have its own identity and to be creative–the top-down stuff doesn’t work,” he said. “And we saw that I think. I was part of the Gears of War Kinect game that never saw the light of day, and that was okay. How do we force something to be on strategy? And now the strategy is to make awesome games and then we’ll figure it out.”

The business models at Xbox have indeed changed since Gears of War 4 came out. All of Microsoft’s first-party games–including Gears 5–launch into Xbox Game Pass for no extra cost. Microsoft hasn’t said how this change has impacted developers; some have wondered how royalty payments and other sales-related metrics change in this new model. Those specifics remain unknown.

Whatever the case, Fergusson said he’s focused on growing the Gears of War franchise to get it back to where it was during its heyday when it was developed by Epic Games. (Microsoft bought the Gears of War franchise from Epic in 2014 for an undisclosed sum).

“We looked at it like this: okay, Epic put Gears of War on a shelf and said, ‘We’ll never make it again.’ So when Microsoft bought Gears, I was really excited about the fact that we can actually see where this is capable of going,” Fergusson said. “And then sort of parallel to what Microsoft was doing, we wanted to expand the audience and the reach of the Gears of War brand. So how do we go back to what it was in its heyday?”

Gears 5 launches on September 10, but the game unlocks four days early for people who buy the game’s Ultimate edition or subscribe to Xbox Game Pass. The game is available to pre-load right now, and you can see GameSpot’s rundown of the Gears 5 server start times, launch maps, and more.

For more, check out GameSpot’s new preview of Gears 5: Gears 5: Huge, Open Levels And Creative Combat Deliver Big Changes

The Gears of War series is known for a specific pace of combat. The cover-based mechanics helped revolutionize shooters, but Gears 5 is taking a very different approach inspired more by open-world shooters. In an interview with GameSpot, studio head Rod Fergusson explained how the studio took notes from another game he worked on, BioShock Infinite.

“We were saying we want to challenge expectations of player choice,” Fergusson said. “What are ways that we can give the player more choice? And so one way is player-initiated combat. I learned that lesson from Bioshock Infinite. And so, the idea that there are battles that the swarm are just kind of meandering around and whatever, and you get to look around and see that there’s a weapon over there or there’s a flank point there or a sniper over there, and then what are the tools I have in Jack that I can sort of use to overcome the situation? We wanted to allow you that moment to take it in and decide how you wanted to play it out.”

Fergusson went on to explain that introducing enemies with health bars helps more clearly signal to the player how aggressive they can be, as compared with past Gears games, and the RPG elements and upgrades help add more variety to combat.

“What are the ways that people are going to play? We didn’t want there to be one where you would just fill up all the upgrades, and at the end, everybody plays the same,” he said. “That’s why we didn’t do the tech tree thing. We wanted people to be like, ‘Oh, I want to invest in this thing’ or ‘This is the way that I like to play. I like stealth, so I want to do this,’ or ‘I don’t like stealth, I like this.'”

Gears 5 launches on PC and Xbox One on September 10, but early access begins a few days earlier for Ultimate Edition purchasers or Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. For more detail, read our hands-on impressions of the campaign, Horde Mode, and how its microtransactions and multiplayer progression work.

Recently, Ubisoft’s Chris Early spoke out against Valve’s PC digital store, Steam, saying its business model is “unrealistic.” He added, “It doesn’t reflect where the world is today in terms of game distribution.” Now, Ubisoft has further clarified its position on the matter.

A spokesperson for Ubisoft told GameSpot that the publisher elected to release The Division 2 on the Epic Games Store instead of Steam because Epic’s distribution model is, in the long-term, more beneficial to publishers.

“It was a business decision to not put new releases on Steam and focus on the Epic Store and Ubisoft Store,” the spokesperson said. “Ubisoft fully supports Epic and their third-party distribution model, which is in the long-term, beneficial for publishers both large and indie and the video games industry. We hope this partnership helps to validate and evolve the model.”

Early’s comments and this statement are likely connected to the revenue split that Epic offers relative to Steam. Typically, Steam typically keeps 30 percent of game sales, with 70 percent going to publishers. By contrast, the Epic Games Store offers much more to the people who make games; on the Epic Games Store, 88 percent of revenue goes back to developers.

Looking ahead, one of Ubisoft’s next big releases, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, will also skip Steam in favor of launching for the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft’s own Uplay.

The Uplay part of this story is important, too. Uplay is Ubisoft’s own store, so removing Steam from the equation helps drive sales on it. For The Division 2, Ubisoft saw Uplay sales of that game grow tenfold over The Division 1.

It remains to be seen if Ubisoft will ever release another new title on Steam, but for the foreseeable future it seems the company has no intention to.

For what it’s worth, Epic has stated it will change its policy of chasing exclusives if Valve reduces the cut it takes from game sales on Steam.

One of the biggest and most prominent eSports organizations–100 Thieves–will not have a team competing in the Call of Duty World League scheduled to begin in 2020.

In a video statement, 100 Thieves founder Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag said the decision basically came down to money. Activision charges a reported $25 million per team, and this fee was just too high for 100 Thieves, which is still operating as a start-up company with only around 30 people on staff (in addition to its paid competitors).

“Activision has decided to franchise, and obviously there are a lot of costs that come with that,” Nadeshot said. “The CDL is incredibly expensive. It’s so expensive.”

There are upfront costs related to joining the league, as well as operational costs that 100 Thieves would have to bear for “years,” Nadeshot said.

“We are just not equipped and not prepared to make that jump and to make that decision to be all-in,” he said.

Joining the Call of Duty League and putting up the money and resources is “a risk we can’t take right now,” Nadeshot said.

“We’re a start-up. We’re still a new company,” he said. “To make a financial commitment as large as this isn’t possible for us right now.”

Not only that, but because the Call of Duty World League is city-based–like the Overwatch League–100 Thieves would need to plant itself in one particular place, and it isn’t ready to do that. Nadeshot said 100 Thieves is a global brand that doesn’t want to be tied to one particular location.

Nadeshot and the other leaders of 100 Thieves debated this decision for “so long,” he said, but ultimately they decided to pass.

“It’s just a shi**y situation, man; there’s no other way to put it,” he said.

100 Thieves not competing at Call of Duty World League is a big loss for the competitive Call of Duty scene. The 100 Thieves team won twice in the Call of Duty majors competitive circuit in 2019 and came in second during August’s Call of Duty World Championship.

As ESPN reminds us, eight of the nine current members of the Call of Duty World League are financially backed by the same extremely rich groups that own Overwatch League teams.

“For those buyers, the $25 million expenditure is a way of doubling down on Activision Blizzard and trust in that company’s CEO, Bobby Kotick,” ESPN said. “If you’re Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke, Minnesota Vikings chairman Zygi Wilf or the New York Mets’ Wilpon family, $25 million is a drop in the bucket. But if you’re 100 Thieves, that’s a huge investment–one that could make or break your startup in the future–and it’s arguable if the reward outweighs the risk.”

The next Call of Duty game is the Modern Warfare reboot which launches in October for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Valve will be fighting EU antitrust charges over geo-blocking within the EU. Five other video game companies that were presented with similar charges will settle the case.

Reuters reports from sources familiar with the matter that six companies – Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax – have been charged by the European Commission for antitrust practices.

Specifically, the EU claims that the six companies prevented customers in the EU from shopping for better deals on video games within the 28-country bloc. The EU alleges the six companies used geo-blocking keys, so a customer in one EU country couldn’t access another EU country’s web store which might offer the same game for less.

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SEGA threw Yakuza fans for a loop this week with the reveal of Yakuza 7 in a gorgeous new reveal trailer.  The new title, called Yakuza: Like a Dragon in the West, is due out in 2020 on PS4.

The new trailer shows off the newest protagonist Ichiban Kasuga and follows his story in Isezaki Ijin, Yokohama. In the trailer, he appears to turn himself into police, serve some time in prison, and is released 18 years later. The trailer, of course, has its emotional moments, but also shows off some of the quirkiness Yakuza is known for. Check out our favorite stills in the gallery below.

This iteration of Yakuza is a bit of an outlier, however, from what long-time fans might know the game to be. This Yakuza is steering away from its brawler roots to a turn-based combat system.

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Decades of video game tribalism, juvenile insults, and schoolyard myths about distant uncles working at certain console manufacturers can be traced back to one provenance: Super Nintendo vs. Sega Genesis. Yes, there were ancient console wars in the ’80s, and today there exists a mild chill between Sony adherents and Microsoft lifers, but the battle was never more ferocious than it was in the mid ’90s, when Sega fielded their Hedgehog against Nintendo’s plumber, and threatened a fight to the death.

Disney decided to throw gasoline on this long-dormant fire on Wednesday, when the company announced they’ll be remastering a pair of the classic platformers: The Lion King and Aladdin, to release fall 2019.

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