Despite being the champion of the third-person cover shooter genre, Gears of War could one day take a foray into the overpopulated world of the first-person shooter if enough fans like the idea enough. It’ll also have to make sense to take the series in that direction too.

“I’m a big believer in never say never,” Executive Producer Rod Fergusson told OXM. “It’s all about what’s interesting in the industry at the time and where fans want us to take it. We don’t want to say never but it’s not on the top of my mind either. We look at what makes sense and move in that direction.”

Of course, should Gears of War ever adopt the guise of an FPS, development buddies People Can Fly who are working with Epic Games on Gears of War: Judgment, could potentially be brought along for the ride. PCF main man Adrian Chmielarz has even expressed interest in creating a Skyrim-style open-world game.

An open-world Skyrim-esque Gears of War? Very doubtful, but as Fergusson says, “never say never”. Gears of War: Judgment is out on March 19th, 2013.

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Cliff Bleszinski, otherwise known as “Dude Huge” and the guy who created one of the Xbox 360’s few remaining exclusive franchises, wants to do a Firefly game, and he’s even spoken to Joss Whedon about it, according to Kotaku.

“Going back to game possibilities, the ship may be somewhat similar to the Normandy in Mass Effect, as well as some of the dialogue trees. Consider Kinect voice interactions with the crew to further push immersion, along with awesome Wing Commander-style dogfights.”

While we’re not big fans of Gears of War, we’d almost be interested in this project except for one big problem: the Kinect reference means he’d make it an Xbox 360 exclusive, and after Darrin went through five of those (three RRoDs, one E74, and one console dead right out of the box), we’re staying as far away from Microsoft’s consoles as possible.

March 2013

Cliff Bleszinski believes that this generation of titles have become too easy. He doesn’t think games challenge us any more. So with Gears of War: Judgment he’s cranking up the difficulty levels.  Speaking to X360A, the Epic Games Design Director outlined the pitfalls of catering to a broader audience, while detailing the pain we’ll go through in Epic Games and People Can Fly’s upcoming Gears prequel.  “It feels like in this current console generation that we’ve taken a lot of steps to grow the audience and what I think’s happened is that the games have become more linear and easier, so it feels like a lot of quick-time-events,” said Bleszinski.  “The more I play games like that the more I turned off to them and just want to get back to systems interacting with systems, and get back to a game that, you know, when was the last time a game really challenged you and asked something of you, right? There’s a reason why Demon Souls and Dark Souls have taken off lately. It’s because they really require you actually try.”  To help embrace this spirit, Gears of War: Judgment has a few nasty tricks up its sleeve, reckons Bleszinski. Just as in the Souls games he references, you should prepare to die.  “Casual mode will still be casual, whatever, if you just want to see graphics and you don’t want to die,” he said. “But every other mode will be hard in this game and you will die.  “When I played this in 4-player co-op… I mean, I’ve been playing Gears since the beginning of the course and I really have to hunker down and focus, and if my buddies aren’t reviving me, and we aren’t working as a team, you’re going to die, and it’s okay to die a few times in a game to try some different strategies, the S3 respawn system [Ed - as referenced in our preview] provides unique challenges.”  Not only does this system maintain the challenge, it also means that different players will have different experiences with the game.  “We then get some cool, ‘How did that combat scenario play out for you?’ ‘Oh, I used grenades against this one declassified challenge and then my buddy came in,’ which is interesting and cool, as opposed to, ‘I came around the same exact corner and saw the same exact plane crash, the same exact enemies, there’s nothing unique,’” said Bleszinski.  “There’s nothing unique to you,” added Adrian Chmielarz, People Can Fly’s Creative Director. “This is what we’re trying to provide… your own moments, something that you’ll feel like only happened to you and you figured this out.”  Bleszinski concluded, “If this game doesn’t make you sweat, we haven’t done our jobs.”  Gears of War: Judgment is out next year.