Diablo 4 Boss’ Original Plan For Gears 6 Was Space Travel
It’s been five years since the last Gears games, and while Gears of War: E-Day was announced at Microsoft’s last big Xbox Showcase, there’s no word on if and when The Coalition will be continuing work on the story left behind in Gears 5. That game’s executive producer, Rod Ferguson, recently shared what his plan was for the sequel at the time, and it’s not at all what I was expecting.
One of the final open-world exploration sections of Gears 5 revolves around exploring an old space program that belonged to the UIR in order to re-launch a Hammer of Dawn that can be used to fight off the resurgent Locust. It’s one of the most beautiful sections of the game, complete with impressive sandstorms, striking industrial ruins, and Mars-like red sandscapes. Ferguson said on the latest episode of IGN’s Podcast Unlocked that this was The Coalition tipping its hand to what he had in mind for Gears 6.
“At the highest level, I was just getting us off [the planet of Sera],” he said regarding early planning docs for the sequel. “So Gears 6 was to leave Sera, and so that was something we were building to. If you watch the story, if you pay attention to the story in Gears 5, you kind of come across that UIR rocket technology and that kind of stuff we were laying the seeds and the groundwork that by taking over this UIR territory, we’ve also kind of inherited their space program. So what I wanted to do with Gears 6 was to get you off Sera to encounter what that could mean for the rest of the galaxy or at least the rest of the solar system.”
Ferguson, who left The Coalition in 2020 shortly after Gears 5 launched and is currently leading Diablo IV at Blizzard, said that space exploration would have been less like Mass Effect than the Sputnik era of the 1950s space race. Presumably, travel would be slow, costly, and strategic. It no doubt would have introduced new alien enemy types as well, potentially introducing some interesting sci-fi mysteries about the origins of human and Locust life on Sera.
The industry veteran suggested those ideas, which didn’t sound like anything more than a pitch document at the time, were scrapped as The Coalition works instead on mining Gears’ past with a prequel centered around Emergence Day, the franchise’s version of the Invasion of Normandy when millions of Locust came out of holes in the ground to attack humanity, eventually leading to the use of weapons of mass destruction that ended up crippling Sera’s surface-dwelling nations.
Gears 5 also ended with a cliffhanger related to a choice about which main character to rescue, the consequences of which would seemingly get hashed out in Gears 6. It sounded like the plan was for the most popular choice among players to become the canonical one. Though, at the rate the franchise is going, it could be years before fans get to see that play out in a game.
Alan Wake 2’s Final Expansion Is A Perfect Ending
After the crowning achievement that is Alan Wake 2, you’d think developer Remedy Entertainment would take a break. Yet in the subsequent expansions to the 2023 survival horror game, the studio has poked and prodded further at the base game’s thesis, teasing out even more fascinating aspects of its world. The Lake House, the final DLC for Alan Wake 2, does this poking with exceptional style and an eye towards discussing one of the industry’s hottest topics of debate: AI’s role in art. As a goodbye to one of the best AAA games in recent memory, it’s a triumph.
Those familiar with the base game might remember The Lake House’s protagonist, Kiran Estevez, as the Federal Bureau of Control agent who helps Saga along her journey. Told through narration, The Lake House recounts Estevez’s investigation into the titular location, an FBC facility that has gone dark. Like Night Springs, the first of AW2’s expansions, The Lake House is a bite-sized experience that will take you only two to three hours to complete. That’s perfect, as it lets Remedy tell a more concise story with a clear point of view.
Despite being more closely connected to 2019’s Control than anything else in AW2, don’t expect The Lake House to play like that supernatural action game. Estevez isn’t packing special powers, just a pistol and a flashlight. As in the base game, you’ll collect a few more weapons along the way (including an entirely new armament) to fight off the now-infected inhabitants of the Lake House. As a conclusion to the AW2 experience, The Lake House clearly wants to challenge you, boasting some tough fights against large groups of enemies made even tougher by a seemingly abysmal amount of resources throughout the facility. If you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself with an empty clip and no other option than to face your inevitable death and restart with a better plan.
The expansion’s titular facility gives The Lake House its own aesthetic identity, one that’s far more in line with Control. This is an FBC building, after all, and as soon as you walk inside its concrete lobby, the sleek brutalist architecture might almost make you feel like you’re back in the Oldest House. The enemies you encounter within the facility, like the weapons you find, are mostly rehashes of what you saw in the base game, a bunch of zombie-like figures who’ve been infected by the Dark Place. There is, however, something else lurking within the Lake House: looming humanoid figures dripping with paint that jump out of canvases to kill you. The Lake House itself is decorated with countless paintings and graffiti across its walls (alongside lots of blood).
The physical art you encounter around every corner in the Lake House represents the facility’s (and the expansion’s) continued obsession with the artistic process. Unlike Wake himself, and many other important figures in the extended lore of the series, the major players in The Lake House are not artists themselves, yet they are preoccupied with the production of it. The competing co-heads of the facility, whose story The Lake House truly is, conducted experiments in an effort to harness Wake’s ability to reshape reality through art, a path which ultimately plunged the building into chaos.
As you explore the levels of the Lake House, you’ll read emails and memos about two dueling projects, both of which seek to quantify the emotion of an artistic piece in some objective manner that can then be replicated. One researcher attempts this by dragging in a painter and forcing him to adhere to an inhuman production schedule to create the correct art for triggering a supernatural power like Wake’s. The opposing project believed that it could recreate the outcome of Wake’s writing through observation, measurement, and replication.
One of the most striking environments in The Lake House is a sprawling open office filled with dozens—maybe hundreds—of automated typewriters trained on pages written by Wake that the FBC recovered. The mechanical whirring of machines and cacophonous clicking of keys produces countless pages of text. In a room off to the side you can find a white board on which researchers graded each resulting page on metrics like tone, style, readability, etc. There is a constant desire to define what makes something “art.”
It’s a not-at-all subtle takedown of artificial intelligence in tech, specifically products like ChatGPT that scrape the work of real creators in order to produce empty facsimiles of art that impress only the most unimaginative people. Remedy beats you over the head with the sheer stupidity of both the Lake House experiments and their real-life counterparts. Signs plastered on the walls encourage workers to not decorate their desks and remind them that “art is for analysis.” At one point, a page written by Wake describing the projects within the Lake House reads “art was not art, just content for the experiment.”
That’s Alan Wake 2’s final message to audiences. Art is not content. It’s a word that’s become so much more prolific across cultural discussions in recent years as the proponents of AI push us toward conceiving of every piece of art as simply a product for viewer enjoyment rather than a thing that can challenge your worldview. Games are not content. Writing is not content. Art is not content. Those who create are not cogs in a machine to be used and disposed of or turned into food for an algorithm. The Lake House is Remedy’s clear statement that the push to quantify and replicate art without emotion is nothing short of a horror story. As far as farewells go, it’s a pretty fucking good one.
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Black Ops 6, As Told By Steam Reviews
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, understandably, a pretty big deal. The franchise has been in a bit of a lull lately, despite routinely setting new sales records, and this game especially needed to be a slam dunk given its unique position. As the first Call of Duty game to release on Game Pass following Microsoft’s purchase of Activision—which itself has been followed by numerous disastrous layoffs—Black Ops 6 has been touted as a return to form for the series, as well as for its embattled publisher. The status of its probable release on Game Pass was debated for months until it was finally confirmed, and now it’s Microsoft’s single greatest chance to bolster the stagnant subscription service and make good on promises.
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Recent installments in the franchise like Modern Warfare III, Vanguard, and Black Ops Cold War have been met with a decidedly more tepid reception than, say, 2019’s Modern Warfare or even the battle royale game Warzone. It almost seems like with every new entry of late the series has strayed from the desires of its outsized and fairly casual audience. Call of Duty is, after all, one of those games that most people pick up once a year and play till the next one comes along, much like a sports game. Folks who play those games tend to want refinements of core principles rather than drastic or convoluted reinventions.
All of which is to say, Black Ops 6’s return-to-basics approach was a welcome bit of news among the cacophony of showcases, directs, and overbearing blog posts about why this game would be the best Call of Duty ever. After MWIII’s flop of an open-ended campaign, Black Ops 6 doubled down on having a cinematic, blockbuster story mode like the best in the series have offered. Its iteration on Zombies feels like a healthy mixture of new and classic features and mechanics. Even the multiplayer feels sensibly pared back, and it restores tenets that fans have missed, like the prestige system. Treyarch and Xbox clearly want us to think that Call of Duty is “back,” but is it really?
According to the reviews that Black Ops 6 is accruing on Steam, the answer’s a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. Fans seem to generally agree that the campaign here is better than average, and some are even calling it the best story mode in a COD game in years. And of course there are players who have cherished the simplified renditions of both the competitive multiplayer suite and the cooperative Zombies mode, myself included. As is always going to be the case with a series this big and this polarizing, though, the more you look, the more people you’ll find who are disappointed in some of the game’s features.
One of the biggest problems many seem to have with Black Ops 6 actually has little to do with the game itself and more to do with the packaging, specifically the launcher, Call of Duty HQ. While the tool has been reworked since its initial release, it isn’t significantly better, and it seems to be even worse on PC, where fans of the series seem to hate it more than I do! One review joked that Black Ops 6 is actually a “game is updating simulator.”
Elsewhere, Black Ops 6’s various modes are causing division. Some are appreciating their time with the competitive multiplayer suite, but there are also repeated mentions of terrible maps and spawns throughout the reviews. Having played the beta extensively, as well as jumping in after launch, I can kind of agree that there don’t seem to be any unilateral winners among the crop of multiplayer arenas available right now. Zombies has enjoyed a more positive reception than multiplayer, but still there are players who are unhappy with the settings and crying out for more ambient (spookier) maps in the future.
Overall, Black Ops 6 seems to be earning its “Mixed” reception on Steam. It isn’t the greatest game, but it’s a perfectly fine and fun middling title, and that’s about all I need from it to have a great time. The divisiveness surrounding the game is at least producing some good material in the Steam reviews page, though, so read it and weep.