Epic Games will unleash the fourth game in its $1 billion Gears of War franchise on March 19. Gears of War Judgment is a prequel to the original trilogy, which allowed the developer to delve into new territory with this story of Kilo Squad.
Microsoft and Epic brought in new writers to craft this action-packed tale. Rob Auten, half of the Los Angeles-based writing team, explains what makes Gears tick in this exclusive interview.
What’s your video game background?
“I’ve never stopped playing games” is the easiest way to put it, though I may have tried to briefly once or twice. I’ve been working more or less in and around games for the better part of the last ten years. I worked on a bunch of stuff as a writer and came into games through animation and worked on non-interactive sequences. I came to quickly realize that I was missing out on the most fun part of the game, which were the parts that people actually got to play. I worked a little bit in production at a lot of studios and learned some of the ins and outs and some of the methodology. And then Tom Bissell and I looked at this art form and we love this medium, so we decided to put our powers together. We were lucky enough to convince the guys at Epic that we were capable to write their next title.
How have you seen video game storytelling evolve since you started playing games?
When I got the original Xbox one of the first games I played was the original Splinter Cell. I remember literally not sleeping that night and coming away with the revelation that games had really gotten so much better. In college, I didn’t have as much of a chance to play as I wanted to on the system and that straddled somewhere in the modern console generation, starting with the first PlayStation system until today. I feel like we’re now able to tell stories in a way that’s totally distinct from other mediums. Games can do things with the variability of the storytelling through multiple characters and the way those characters move and the way worlds are created with the realism of the world through things like physics, sound design, and all of these technologies that are developed by cinema and by animation. All of these things have come together to form this hybrid art form that really has no precedent to it.
When it comes to the mythology, what do you like about what Gears has done over the years from a transmedia perspective?
I came to the franchise knowing pretty much only the games. I knew there were books and I had seen some of the comic stuff, but when we started talking to the guys at Epic they sent us this giant Fed Ex package full of the comic books and the novels and we learned a lot about this amazing Gearsipedia resource that the fans have put together. We really were able to dive in whole-hog and soak it all up. What I was most impressed by was that everything was internally consistent but things are assessed on a case by case level based on their own merits. There isn’t a set bible that things must adhere to. War is confusion in a way and the series embraces that by saying these aren’t hard and fast rules. We have a story that is compelling and as long as it doesn’t break any crazy canonical things, let’s tell that story. It made us, coming into this late in the series, feel really welcome.
What attracted you to Gears of War Judgment?
Games started in text and right now we’re seeing the need for more writing and more writers to come back in and fill in the level of content that somebody who is playing a game really needs. The rest of the world is so well fleshed out and so detailed that now the actual story has the opportunity to stand out. There’s a bar that can be raised there. That’s been a real interesting transition and Gears of War Judgment was really important for me because there are multiple stories within the game. There are things that you can discover in one playthrough that you may not see through the second playthrough and vice versa. This was an opportunity to work in the Gears medium, which is something that’s always been cinematic and somewhat linear, but then take both the spawn system, which is more dynamic, and the kind of content, which is arranged more dynamically; and make something that’s distinctly gamey in what I think is the best and most modern possible way.
What does the animosity that exists between the Cog and the Union of Independent Republics (UIR) add to the story on top of the conflict that’s going on with the Locusts?
The Cog and UIR conflict is almost a century old. It’s a human on human conflict. It’s torn the planet apart to the point where another kind of planetary battle seemed unthinkable. Then just at the end of this first major gripping and disgusting conflict comes the Locusts. The transition from one kind of form of warfare, the Pendulum Wars, to the new more guerilla-based techniques of waging war that are being put out there by the Locusts is interesting. When you see that in the character of Loomis, that kinds of breaks him strategically and emotionally. He doesn’t know how to process this new war and I think that’s what we’re seeing in the game. Kilo Squad adapts quickly because they’re for the most part new at being soldiers, so they just have to go with what makes sense for them. Whereas their orders and their superiors are stuck in a mindset that’s more in line with this old way of fighting.
[EPIC GAMES ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Epic Games stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]
