Gears of War 4 Is Balanced For Controller First

Xbox One and PC players won't be able to play against each other.

By Miranda Sanchez

The Coalition’s Gears of War 4 is coming to both Xbox One and PC, but it’ll be balanced for the controller first.

“We definitely work from the controller out,” Ryan Cleven, Gears of War 4's lead multiplayer designer told IGN. “We do play [with] mouse and keyboard, but the core of the game is around a controller.”

“I don't think that we...would say that we have like, one of the other as the priority; they're both really important to us.” Cleven said. “But, we have to make sure that the controller experience, which has been the legacy of the game, is definitely perfect.”

PC and Xbox One players won’t be able to play against each other in competitive multiplayer, but they can play the co-op versus mode together with the Xbox Play Anywhere program. Even still, players can choose to play with the mouse and keyboard or controller on PC.

“We don't really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they're each kind of balanced independently. They're all using the same core tuning; so, when we look at the PC players versus PC players, they can choose to use a mouse and keyboard or they can use a controller. That's up to the PC players. On the Xbox, we tune the game internally with a controller, so everything is tuned to be balanced that way, and then we make sure that the two groups, when they're playing competitively online, they aren't actually playing with each other. ” Cleven said.

Gears of War 4 will be out on October 11 for Xbox One and PC. For more on Gears of War 4, be sure to check out IGN's exclusive coverage from this month's IGN First.

Miranda Sanchez is an Editor at IGN. You can find her ranting about cute things, anime, and video games on Twitter. 

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