On a bit more serious note though, anyone else want to see more of the Pendulum Wars?
Recently re-read some of Unsaid, Promise Me and Dirty Little Secrets, just makes me want an anthology series of our older Gears ala Gears 4 prologue.
Where was Dizzy on E-Day? What was Barrick’s life like before operation Lifeboat? How was Vectes? What all did Adam go through before he went to the DRA?
Whether it’s more original like the Hivebusters or takes a lot of inspiration from the comics, I think seeing more smaller stories from Gears would be phenomenal. Don’t think TC is great with the world-encapsulating scale of affairs like in Gears 5.
Genuinely interested in the small-scale stories.
Jace + Thecelia
It would be cool to know more about all the characters during different time periods of the series but a campaign for the Pendelum Wars would most likely get monotonous very quickly because it would just be the players fighting other humans that are all the same.
Fighting Locust, Swarm, Deebees and Lambent is fun because there are so many different enemies from those factions, if we’re just fighting UIR then we’re just gonna be fighting humans that all look the same and tanks probably.
This is true. But, doesn’t mean you can’t introduce variety to gameplay.
How do you fight “Just a bunch of humans” if you’re playing as an Islander like Tai with literally nothing but a knife?
How would you fight a tank in Gears without an explosive?
If you were on the UIR’s side at any point, how do you fight laser beams from the sky that fall without warning?
Not saying it’s easy but there’s definitely ways to add variety even with a similar group of people. Technically all the Locust were the same just a few that crawled and a few that were larger (outside of the set-piece monsters). But most foot soldiers were the same.
I could see the UIR deploying early Silverbacks or Bucketheads. Maybe if you tried to push the G5 open-ness, you could have an Elden Ring style map that’s just crawling with UIR forces and you have one or two guns just trying to push these large bases with overwhelming odds on all sides.
Another possible alternative for this idea would be to add some ship boarding action, assuming that such a thing even took place during the Pendulum Wars rather than it all being “Shoot the enemy ships until they’re dead”. Although that begs the question if it’d actually be different from the regular Gears gameplay, besides changing the setting of said combat to a rather narrow, close quarters environment.
Perhaps a GOW: Chronicles kinda game where there each act is its own standalone story from different periods of time in the existing GOW canon? That way it won’t outstay its welcome. So one act could be set in the Pendulum Wars as a younger version of say, Hoffman. Another act set around the time of E-Day covering a Stranded character. Another as a younger Paduk from the UIR perspective. You could even split the acts similarly to RAAM’s Shadow and intersect it with bits of a Locust/Swarm campaign too.
TC can definitely make UIR variety, sure we wont have juvies or wretches or big monsters but I’d love to fight UIR tanks, helis, APCs, and really any other vehicles they possess. Plus different UIR units.
But besides that, TC making gears short stories would be more fun then them making full length trilogies.
I love the locust and sometimes the swarm, but I also would like some UIR love thrown in there.
I would love one or more games covering the time period of the pendulum wars, they would add a lot to the expanded lore of the franchise, they could tell more original stories and they could rethink several things that we saw in the classic games and in the new ones even, they could basically make their own clone wars in concept, show a war that in the period of both original trilogies only vague references were made and we knew little about these wars
they could give us more information about both factions, both cog and uir, we could see a period where the cog was socialist, we could visit places that are mentioned in novels but that we don’t see in the games (gorasnaya, pelles, ostri, etc), also discover new places by expanding the sera map, I would love to see the cog evolve, that at the beginning of the pendulum wars its weapons have a somewhat retro style, ww2 type, and that throughout those long 80 years its technology flourishes and expand to the clouds (driven by the fact that wars tend to speed up technological progress somewhat), I’d love to see familiar places at their peak, so that going back to the classic games and seeing them in ruins would cause feelings in me, they could also show complete unfinished battles that they showed us in other media, like the battle of irohma island, which we only saw from tai’s perspective in the comic, but in a game they could show the liberation of the entire island by the cog, in the jungle very umbara style
the designs could be a mix between what was seen in the comics and what was seen in the new games, I will give 2 examples, one where I think this fusion or adaptation of designs was made (maybe unintentionally) and another in which I would like see an adaptation:
a) I’ve mentioned this before in a capability thread I’m creating about the cog elsewhere, but here it is, in promise me, it is seen that the uir has turrets, which look quite similar to twin barrel turret level 1 and 3, from gears 4
this added to the fact that, as we saw in 5, twin barrel was the main turret that the uir used in its bases, such as ozp-11, or even in the asp’s
And I said maybe unintentionally, because, although I don’t rule out that the tc designers have done a good investigation and have rescued the design of this random weapon to give it a second chance in 4, it seems a bit overthought to me, I doubt that everything was planned and organized that way. I don’t rule it out but it is more feasible to believe that it is a coincidence derived from the fact that both artists were based on an M2 Browning, but within the story both can go through the same weapon, despite not being exactly the same, as this may be because the current design did not exist when those comics were drawn, at that time the UIR did not have such a unified style and sometimes the drawing of the comics is not very consistent between the different panels
b) there are designs and vehicles from that time where the uir did not have such a characteristic style that I would like to see, but they should have a redesign with the current style of the uir, one of them is the khimera, which shows too much that they used the design of a Mi-24 Hind, because literally it is a decal of the latter, and although I understand that an artist is not going to make a unique and complex design for a vehicle that only appears on a panel, I think it should be redesigned if it makes a debut in some new audiovisual material, and it shouldn’t be such a drastic redesign either, they could keep the most characteristic features at first glance (a pair of wings with rocket pods, 2 cockpits, a pair of engines above the cockpits, a searchlight mounted on the nose, a tail rotor) and adapt it to the same style of the other indie transport helicopter, this could be applied to multiple things too, in those comics the uir has mortars, a gun of its own, a type of light machine gun, a variant of the AP C with a tank gun etc, things that, like the turret in the first example, could be redesigned to fit better with the current uir style
Now, if I had to think that all this should be a game, it’s, mmmm, complicated, I’m in favor of the things they raise above, I think they could give unique behaviors and mechanisms to indies in combat, it’s not something really impossible and with a lot of effort and creativity it can surely be achieved, although, I think it should be, like tactics, THE quintessential spin-off for the franchise, but seen as something apart, perhaps even with an ingenious variant of the name “gears” , or “gears of war”, because, is something that could work perfectly as something a little different, seasoned, of course, with the unique and great coverage and shooting mechanics of the main games, but, many, not to say the Most fans and veterans will say that fighting humans is not Gears, if many say that about deebees, imagine what they will say about indies, it is something that can be a great experience on its own, but it should be made clear that it is a spi n-off and that is something else
If we talk about multiplayer, things get more complicated, because we already saw what happens if we put humans vs. humans in Gears, although I have to say that, apart from the fact of not having locust in the mp, the judgment version was quite limited, they were the same characters, same voice lines, partially the same appearance, but in the red vs blue version, if you do a human vs human again, they should be different characters for each faction with different skins
that, about the skins, with enough effort and creativity something worthy could be done, I always wondered why tc never exploited the concept of having a character that represents a generic gear to design many variants dedicated to different tasks, hundreds of them can be done variants like this, a clear example of this idea are the clones and stormtroopers that, between legends and the Disney canon, have too many designs of soldiers dedicated to different tasks, and many of these designs are incredible, of course, we must not go to abuse , since many of those “variants” of clones / stormtroopers become redundant and repetitive, tactics ventured to exploit this idea with the different armor available in the game, however, I do not see why they should stop there, there are many other variants dedicated gear that could design and introduce, to name a few, a diver gear, a dedicated mechanical gear, a pilot gear (create a uniform for raven pilots or petrel pilots), a paratrooper gear, a dedicated sniper, and we could mention many others, not to mention the counterparts that the uir could have, and why not, they could also invent their own variants with more extravagant designs, the locust have their own shock trooper , a type of rifleman with a helmet with only one eye, which prevents the cog and the uir from having their own soldier with an extravagant design, so, the concept of humans vs. humans could be better used, it is still risky but surely something better can be done than judgment, so surely there would be a variety of skins, and that’s not counting the dozens of war heroes and main characters that the war surely had in 80 years
(I put special emphasis on the skins because it is the main concern of many when thinking of a game of the pendulum wars, due to the fact that there is no locust there, the vs. Classic Game modes would not have to be affected by the fact of changing locust by uir, it worked in judgment and it would surely work too, pve is something else, but it’s more complicated to think about it)
being something very different (as I said, the fact of not having monsters for many already condemns it to be something different from gears of war), it could really be anything, I would like the classic mechanics to be preserved, but it could be an experience linear, or a PLEASE MORE ELABORATE open world game, where you can constantly meet enemy pariahs, stalker khimeras and squads with artillery and heavy weapons, as they said above, I would like them to be based on a, ammmmmm, game?, in the ideas of a game maybe, (which was supposed to come out in 2009 but currently has not given the slightest sign that it will come out soon), called six days in fallujah, which was very controversial due to the fact that it was based on a battle that was recent at the time, which raised controversy, not only can tc avoid this controversy due to the fact that sera is totally fiction, but also that the promise that six days offered was quite good, and remembering it did not leave or to think that it would combine excellent with gears of war
"Atomic Games describes Six Days as a survival horror game, but not in the traditional sense. The fear in Six Days does not come from the undead or supernatural, but from the unpredictable, terrifying, and real tactics employed by the insurgents that were scattered throughout Fallujah. Benito states that “Many of the insurgents had no intention of leaving the city alive, so their entire mission might be to lie in wait, with a gun trained at a doorway, for days just waiting for a Marine to pop his head in. They went door-to-door clearing houses, and most of the time the houses would be empty. But every now and then, they would encounter a stunningly lethal situation… which, of course, rattled the Marines psychologically.”
it is interesting and at the same time complicated to discuss about a game about pendulum wars, although it is always pleasant to do so
An Adam Fenix centered game would be a great spinoff title. I would like to see a focus on the development of COG technology as it progresses through the Pendulum Wars into E-Day. He was a brilliant scientist and honored soldier, and would bring in a great amount of lore from pre-Gears 1 as we could see life before the Locust, or even right exactly when the Locust attack.
The latter of which would be a lot of fun to see. I know Judgment delved into the early days of the Locust War, but I want to see Day 1 Locust siege. We all know Adam and Myrrah were in talks with one another, as Adam’s service was requested to help defeat the Lambent (but ran out of time). This would allow for a bridge from Pendulum War era into the Locust War.
I believe Judgement was 6 weeks after E-Day, the gears 4 prologue was on E-Day in Ephyra, and Tactics was a year after E-Day. Unfortunately the prologue isnt enough to satisfy my want for more day one content.
