The Coalition has a new job opening, as a new job listing has appeared on Microsoft’s website. The listing itself highly suggests that a new Gears of War game is now in the middle of development.
The Coalition is looking for a senior gameplay designer, but the job listing expressly says: “Senior Gameplay Designer– Gears of War – The Coalition.”
While the studio was given the name The Coalition relatively recently, it has been around since 2010 and in fact started out as a mobile game developer. Of course, The Coalition were also not the original developer for Gears of War. Epic Games produced the series defining trilogy of the first Gears of Wars games before Microsoft purchased all rights to the franchise.
The Coalition has Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 under their belt, games that understand that they need to do more than recreate the original experience, as addictive and popular as they were. While The Coalition’s Gears of Wars games still feature the same multiplayer cover shooter mechanics, the story takes a wild turn, with surprising revelations about the origin of the Swarm, and the franchise’s original antagonists, the Locusts.
Speculation on new Gears of War games will just keep going until Microsoft actually announces them. Xbox’s marketing director actually just debunked a rumor about new games last January, but that certainly isn’t the last word about it (Particularly since it debunked very specific detailed rumors).
Rumors of a Gears of War Remastered Collection have been going possibly as far back as when The Coalition took over the franchise. This wasn’t a simple coincidence, as that happened around the time Microsoft had moved on from the Xbox 360 to Xbox One. For better or worse, Microsoft did not give Gears of War the The Last of Us treatment. The latest rumor about this came just last January.
Perhaps more credible and believable was a rumor coming up for new games because of a former Gears of War staffer. Joshua Ortega held multiple creative roles in the making of Gears of War 2 and Gears of War 3, including story writing and marketing. Last month he tweeted “Once again it’s on!” after quote tweeting himself talking about his work in the games.
Since that time, Ortega has been engaging fans with Gears of War related tweets, including surveys for what fans would want with future games.
This might just be Ortega enjoying the Gears of War fandom on his own. But we cannot rule out that he could be involved in some capacity, even if a smaller one, in a future Gears of War related project.
Given all the focus at the moment is on Microsoft’s pending purchase of Activision Blizzard King, if a new Gears of War game is coming, Microsoft might just choose to shadow drop it. Given all the noise around the Activision deal, Microsoft could get away with it too.
