The Coalition has stated that they have balanced the upcoming Gears of War 4, which will release on Xbox One and PC, around a controller rather than mouse and keyboard.
“We definitely work from the controller out,” Gears of War 4 lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven 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. But, we have to make sure that the controller experience, which has been the legacy of the game, is definitely perfect.”
Xbox One and PC players will not be able to play against each other in competitive multiplayer. However, they will be able to play together in the co-op versus mode via the Xbox Play Anywhere program. Players will be able to choose to play with mouse and keyboard or controller when on PC.
“We don’t really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they’re each kind of balanced independently,” states Cleven. “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.”
Gears of War 4 will be available for PC and Xbox One on October 11th.