In our game, when you activate a unit, you have three actions вЂ“ and you can move three unitsвЂ™ worth of distance, you can shoot three times, you can mix it up, you can use skills. In others, if you shoot, you canвЂ™t thenВ move. In a lot of tactics games you activate a unit, and you get one move action and one shoot action and thatвЂ™s it. When you activate a unit you have three actions, and you can mix it up - you can move, shoot, or use skillsДЄnother point I would mention under that umbrella of open combat is the action system. We went in prototyping really hard to make sure, because it was a risk for us, and we think it paid off wonderfully because the game feels so much more fluid. We donвЂ™t take place on a grid, and that allows you to go anywhere in the map you want, take any shooting angle you want, and find cover anywhere you want. The other one, conceptually, is this idea of open gameplay. Every decision we made from the very beginning was вЂcan we pace this up? Can we make it feel more action-packed?вЂ™ You probably noticed that there are a lot of enemies and they move quickly вЂ“ we try to get through the downtime and get to your turn so you can really be playing the game. TB:В For us it was really important that we approach Tactics with some very firm goals in mind, and one of them was to create a faster experience. Just to take XCOM as a signpost, how would you say Gears tactics differentiates itself? Obviously the concept for that cancelled Gears of War Tactics emerged very soon after the success of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which still looms over the genre. It really is the essence of Gears boiled down to a nucleus of actions and reactions in the tactics space. But once we were able to prove that a Wretch could have the same role in Tactics as in Gears, then we knew we could build a system where the combat feelsВ like Gears, even if you may not necessarily be able to put your finger on whyВ it does. This is a very simple combat dynamic, and there are a lot of these dynamics happening. ItвЂ™s a tacticalВ shooter in a lot of ways, so we had to make sure that enemies had the same role they have in Gears.ДЇor example, a Wretch is what we call a вЂflusherвЂ™ its job is to push through and shove you out of cover so that the drones, which we call вЂmirrorsвЂ™, can shoot you. You can take an enemy and just dump it into the tactics space and see what happens, but for us Gears combat is very well-defined. Were there any other Gears cornerstones that you really felt you needed to realise in this genre before you felt confident it would work? We had a big map and we had cover, and that was also a proving point for us: could we make it feel like Gears on a table, with just paper and pencil and stuff? That was also a really cool moment for us early in development. TB:В We also put together a tabletop board game version of it first. That was the first point where we realised thereвЂ™s probably some magic in here that we should explore.

The cover-based nature of really stood out even from that first test of the camera angle. We had to prove along the way that we were interpreting Gears into tactics in a way that aligned with Gears, but that was when we kind of got rolling.ДЄlex Grimbley:В One of the first moments where I realised weвЂ™d got it was we actually just took existing Gears and just moved the camera up.

If you look at it, kind of from a 50,000-foot perspective, a lot of things just line up. So I wrote a pitch document which said, вЂHey, the turn-based tactics genre aligns well with the kind of game we are already: cover-based combat, squad-focused, tactical.вЂ™ That really resonated with everyone. TB: Alex and I are the publishing team within The Coalition, and our mandate is to expand the Gears brand in ways that make sense and bring it to as many people as possible. I realised weвЂ™d got it when we just took existing Gears and moved the camera up Their answers indicate why translating a heart-thumping console cover shooter to the more considered turn-based tactics genre makes a great deal of sense, why itвЂ™ll still feel like Gears anyway, and why Gears Tactics has what it takes to stand tall not just among an increasingly crowded genre, but in comparison with the modern classic that revived it eight years ago.

I spoke with Tyler Bielman and Alex Grimbley, publishing design director and executive producer respectively at The Coalition, about why thatвЂ™s not such a difficult balancing act as it first sounds. The PC-friendly spin-off from what was once one of the XboxвЂ™s leading console exclusives is out in a month, and making a number of carefully judged, if incremental, changes to the XCOM formula while staying true to GearsвЂ™ spirit. One that may not, based on my first impression, is Gears Tactics. Ever since 2012вЂ™s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the formerly anaemic squad tactics genre has exploded, and most of its new entrants have wilted beneath XCOMвЂ™s shadow to some degree.

Xcom enemy unknown easter eggs