Gears 5 is a fruit of many years of labor, and a result of many years of hard-earned pedigree. Nobody knows this better than Rob Fergusson, the series’ long-standing Director. In a recent interview, he said that the game’s new Escape Mode isn’t quite as fresh as we thought.
To be more exact, Escape Mode started its life cycle as Chaos, and was initially supposed to release as part of Gears of War 4. Sadly, The Coalition had to cut Chaos from the game due to it being very unpolished and rough around the edges.
“We had Versus, we had Horde, and we had Chaos and we had the campaign,” said Fergusson. “As we started to turn the corner to final the thing, we were like ‘Oh, crap, this is not where it needs to be to be final.’” Chaos was simply not far enough along for the developers to ship it, and so they had to cut. “We did it really quickly,” added Fergusson, citing his philosophy of rather having something small and polished, rather than something big and mediocre.
“If my producer spider sense is going off, I just go, ‘This isn’t going to fit. Does everybody agree it’s not going to fit?’ And if they’re like, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t fit’ then cut it. Today. Now. We’re done. Just remove it from the menu and move on.” According to Fergusson, this resulted in a meatier Horde Mode for Gears of War 4.
Chaos was, of course, revisited during the development of Gears 5, and was eventually turned into another cool addition to the game, now that Coalition had the time to polish things up properly. “It was sad in Gears 4; that was going to be one of our points of innovation,” explained Fergusson, adding that he’s very happy to have the mode finally up and running, even if later than they first anticipated.
As it stands, Escape is quickly becoming yet another staple Gears game mode. Learn some of its intricacies here. You can also check out our short microtransaction overview, as well as find out how to get more Supply Drops.
