If you’ve been following up on Gears of War 4 then you know it’s currently in development by The Coalition, the same developers who have previously worked on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. However, we’re just finding out that the multiplayer aspect of Gears of War 4 will be developed by Splash Damage. This news came from Rod Fergusson, head of The Collation.
Rod broke the news when he spoke to Game Informer and why the decision was made to work with Splash Damage when it came to developing the multiplayer aspect of Gears of War 4.
In the statements given to Game Informer, Rod spoke of how the multiplayer aspect was something that the development team was working on from day one. Rod mentions that within the first Gears of War, the multiplayer aspect was barely a factor in the game though as the series continued, multiplayer grew alongside the singleplayer campaign.
With Gears of War 4, gamers will be met with a grand multiplayer aspect compared to previous installments.
So if you look at the development of Gears one, it was probably 90 percent single player, 10 percent multiplayer. Over the course of the franchise, that percentage shifted, but I don’t think it ever got above 70/30. Coming here, multiplayer has a much greater position at the table.
In order to make a stunning and spectacular multiplayer feature within Gears of War, The Collation looked towards Splash Damage who previously worked on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for the Xbox One.
They also have a lot of expertise with online systems, in terms of matchmaking from Ultimate Edition. They basically had to rewrite for Xbox One, between us and them, the whole matchmaking sub-system… when you get a strategic partner like Splash Damage, we talk about training up our own team on Gears, but when you have another team that’s trained up on Gears, we definitely want to work with them as much as possible.
We’ll soon find out on how well the Gears of War 4 multiplayer aspect plays out as the beta will begin this spring while the release of Gears of War 4 will not make its way onto the market for the Xbox One until some time later this year.