'Gears of War 4' News: Why Players Got Map Remakes Instead of New Ones; River Map Absence Explained
"Gears of War 4" gamers are still wondering why they got remakes of the title's existing maps instead of new ones and multiplayer design director Ryan Cleven has provided an explanation for that in a new Q and A video.
We thought we had a very unique post-launch DLC strategy for our maps — 10 maps in the box and we had 24 over a year. We thought that was really cool.
However, Cleven said that they failed to anticipate and were, in turn, overwhelmed by the amount of workload this "Gears of War 4" feat would require:
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We had a combination of new maps and the maps that were some of the best from previous games and in retrospect, we probably bit off more than we could chew and we had to find a way of living up to our promise to bring out 24 maps over the year while still maintaining as much quality as we could.
He adds that while they ended up releasing remakes of the "Gear of War 4" maps, he said that they did their best to "make it much more than that" by bringing "a whole new fresh experience" to the existing ones.
This is true with the Reclaimed Windflare map, which brought the campaign to multiplayer, something Cleven says took a lot of work to do especially with the new visual effects and the code improvements.
It was a really big journey for the team to deliver all these maps. Twenty-four maps in a year was a really big challenge. We've definitely seen an opportunity to hear what the community thought about them, to hear what players like and we've learned a lot from the experience.
Meanwhile, Cleven also explained why the River map did not make it to "Gears of War 4." It turns out it is because "they could not quite get it to the point where we got to play it as well as we wanted to, given the quality of the map."
Also with other maps still unfinished at that time, including Avalanche, the team decided to shift their design efforts to those since they knew they were play well in "Gears of War 4" instead of River, which, while they play-tested internally, was not just up to snuff. Cleven noted that this is a decision that was "heartbreaking" for them to make.
