Gears of War: Judgment writer to embrace "brutal, savage" game world

Gears of War: Judgment writer Tom Bissell is keen avoid the kinds of story typical to shooters, where the player's violent actions clash with the characters' behaviour during cut-scenes.

One-half of the veteran team called in to pen Judgment, Bissell told Eurogamer that he also finds it a bit silly when a player rampages across the battlefield slaughtering minions in a psychopathic rage, and then is presented as a gentle soul

"If you're trying to tell a story in a shooter where you're doing shooty things, then have a cutscene in which the hero drops to his knees and agonises about finding his lost wife, that's never going to be good, ever," he said.

"There's not that weird disconnect where the story is telling you our hero cherishes life so much he's willing to charge across the world to save it and he's going to kill a thousand guys on the way there.

"Gears has never been about the sanctity of life. It's actually the opposite. It's a brutal, savage world in which people are fighting for their lives. I think Matthew's right in the sense that most people choose to tell the wrong kind of story in a shooter space. This is a brutal, savage game about a brutal, savage world in which people do really brutal, savage things and it's all is grounded in itself. So we're not seeing contradiction in it to the degree I think a lot of shooters suffer from.

"When you're making a shooter story, you have to be very careful about the kind of story that you want to tell for there to be any hope that it'll be good."

Bissell said Judgment's story will be told in action as much as possible.

"We're getting all of our storytelling juice into the moments that the player's actually playing," he said.

Gears of War: Judgment is in the works at People Can Fly for a March 2013 release, exclusively on Xbox 360.