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If you’re running an Nvidia GPU you should consider a G-Sync monitor for more fluid gaming. They can be a bit pricey, so here’s our rundown of the best cheap G-Sync monitors.

Gears 5 represents something of a change for the shooter series in that its campaign mode features levels that are “more open and expansive.” That’s according to The Coalition boss Rod Fergusson, who explained to GameSpot that while Gears 5’s levels will be larger, the studio isn’t aiming for a true open-world experience that’s similar to what you might find in the Red Dead and Far Cry franchises.

Some people who worked on Gears 5 previously developed open-world games in the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises. They’ve taken those learnings to Gears 5, but the game is doing something different.

“We just knew that we weren’t trying to be another Red Dead or Far Cry or Ghost Recon,” Fergusson said. “We were just saying, ‘How can we take Gears and make it feel more open and expansive without trying to go toe-to-toe with Ubisoft?’ Because that’s not really what this game is. We just wanted to take inspiration from genres we love to give a bit more freedom and that idea of player choice.”

Making Gears 5 less linear than previous Gears of War games has been “one of our biggest challenges,” Fergusson said. That’s in part because of the unique dynamic of The Coalition.

The studio took over development on the Gears of War series after Microsoft bought the franchise from Epic. The team made its first brand-new game, Gears of War 4, which was more linear. With Gears 5, the studio ramped up its ambition further, and this wasn’t easy.

“The unfortunate part is once you figure something out, you have to go down to where you truly understand it,” he said. “So we had a team that didn’t make Gears before, so we made Gears 4. We were feeling pretty confident. ‘Okay, we know how to to make a Gears game, we know to do all this stuff,’ and then this little thing called ambition gets in the way and you start creating new ideas that nobody has a clue how to do necessarily. And it makes an interesting challenge again.”

Gears 5 also differs from previous Gears of War games in that it has some light RPG systems that provide branching narrative experiences. However, Gears 5 is not an RPG at heart. In playing a section of the campaign, GameSpot’s Mat Paget speaks about how Gears 5 still feels like a traditional gun- and action-heavy Gears of War game.

Looking ahead to the future, Fergusson said he struggles to see how The Coalition can top itself with a potential Gears 6 in terms of size and scale. Not only that, it seemingly remains to be seen if future games–which have not been announced–will continue to include new elements like larger levels and RPG elements.

“I have trouble imagining a bigger game than Gears 5,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see how people react to some of the changes. I don’t know how people will react to the RPG-ness, how people will react to the larger levels … “

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.

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

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.