Those hoping for a Gears of War 4 announcement at E3 may be disappointed as Black Tusk's Rod Fergusson has said "it's only been 100 days," since the studio took over the franchise after Microsoft's acquisition of the IP from Epic.
Fergusson made his remarks in the inaugeral Black Tusk webcast on Twitch, he continued:
"I can't go into a lot of depth about a lot of things. This isn't going to be the place where I announce the name of the next game and all these sorts of things. Obviously it's going to take some time to get to a point where we can do some stuff like that."
"We are in what we would call the concept/prototype stage, so again, we're really super early."
However, he did reveal a piece of blurry concept art which you can see at the top of this post.
Of course, it's always possible that we'll see a rendered CGI trailer at Microsoft's Xbox media briefing, they have to be keeping something back after the announcement of Halo 5: Guardians and numerous reveals about the future of Xbox One in recent days.
Fergusson worked on previous Gears games before helping BioShock Infinite's development and he comments:
"The hardest part is getting everyone up to speed here on how you make a Gears game.
"I mean, everyone here is a Gears fan, everybody's played the games and loves the games, but there's a certain style – the way you have to think when you make a Gears of War game. That's been the harder part; there's a lot of rules and ways and design methodologies and pillars and the way that we think about the franchise.
"Making sure that everyone's on the same page and we're working towards the same goals is probably the most challenging – to go from zero to 'hey we need to make the next Gears'."
It does help that the next Gears will have Microsoft's direct financial support this time round, "[This] means we're able to push a lot harder in a lot of bigger areas," Fergusson said. "The franchise can do a lot more now that Microsoft owns the IP; we can expand it's breadth and do a lot more with it."
While Gears 3 and Judgement players shouldn't expect significant updates, they can look forward to playlists being mixed up more regularly:
"We're going to try and get into a cadence of updating the Event playlist every couple of weeks. And then once we feel really good about it, we'll probably try and change it and get back to the way we had it at Epic where we're doing it every week or so."
Gears of War 4 does not have a release date but is presumably coming to Xbox One exclusively.
