“We actually made the decision that I think was absolutely the right one,” Venezia said. Much of Splash Damage’s development time over the next few years would focus on finding and resolving each of those issues in turn. The decision was not made lightly, Venezia said, and involved formal presentations by every department either for or against the decision - including game design, technical design, art, user interface design, and even the sound team.Įventually, Splash Damage pulled the trigger and elected to go without the grid, which introduced myriad edge cases into the mix. To move the game further, the developers began to consider leaving the one-inch grid behind, adopting a gridless movement model common to tactical miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000. And it was a lot of fun as well.”īut, even as the prototype helped solidify how the final game would play, it also demonstrated the limitations of the board game model. It was a huge, huge advantage to following that process. “We found different players did different things, and that was super encouraging because we found, even with the same mechanics, even with the same mission type, you can actually encourage quite a lot of replayability if you set the map up just so.

“Right away we started learning things there about giving the player objectives that would give them a space to play in, but it could play out very, very differently each time,” Venezia said. Photo: Splash Damage, The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios

The final product was played dozens of times by many different members of the team. The team salvaged miniatures from an old copy of Fantasy Flight Games’ Gears of War: The Board Game, first published in 2011, to spice things up. Enemies were controlled by AI cards with simple if/then statements, not unlike the rules that guide bosses in co-op tabletop game Kingdom Death: Monster. The cooperative mission required a four-player squad to repair a vehicle while defending it from Locust spawning in from the side of the board and up from underground. Rather than create an entire tabletop campaign, he used a single scenario as an experimental test bed. To work through the design, Venezia built a prototype using dice and a large map.

They’re actually getting that extra movement, and it suddenly feels Gears-y.” “We realized when you start to translate that into game mechanics, doing things like giving the player a little bit of extra movement when they slip out of cover and go into another piece of cover,” Venezia explained, “the player feels like they’re kind of cheating the system almost just by reading the environment, trying to deduce where they should move from and to. “Tyler was super useful as a guide through this,” Venezia said, “talking about things like ‘horizontal platforming,’ which is basically how units move from cover to cover. It was Bielman’s job to help translate the design language used to create Gears of War 4 and Gears 5, two games that carried forward the series’ dynamic third-person action. The process began with support from Tyler Bielman, publishing design lead at developer The Coalition. “We really wanted to bring Gears of War into the tactics genre, to actually push the genre forward and see what that could bring to us.” Tyler Bielman and Steve Venezia working with the prototype for Gears Tactics. “We didn’t want to just do Battle Chess but with the Gears logo on it,” Venezia said in a telephone interview with Polygon. More than anything, he said, the early prototype helped his team experiment and take risks in a fun and flexible way. Polygon talked with associate creative director Steve Venezia, who cobbled together the paper prototype using the office printer way back in 2017, to learn how that work contributed to the final product due out on April 28. That’s because Gears Tactics actually started out as an elaborate board game. But it also feels a lot like a tabletop game. It actually feels like a Gears of War game, with all the fluid movement and high-powered weaponry fans have come to expect. The new turn-based strategy game from Splash Damage is more than just another XCOM clone. After previewing the first few missions in Gears Tactics, I’m pleasantly surprised.

Gears tactics base game