Gears of War 4 Is Balanced for Controller Before Keyboard and Mouse

Gears of War 4 releases on October 11 for both Xbox One and PC, and on the latter platform, you can play with a controller or keyboard and mouse. Despite working on the controller balancing first, lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven told IGN that both ways of playing the game are "really important" to developer The Coalition.

"We definitely work from the controller out," he said. "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," he continued. "But, we have to make sure that the controller experience, which has been the legacy of the game, is definitely perfect."

Gears of War has been a predominant Xbox-exclusive series with only the first game and its Ultimate Edition coming to PC. And although the upcoming Gears of War 4 is on its way to both platforms, players won't be able to compete against each other in multiplayer. They will, however, be able to team up and play the co-op versus mode together via the Xbox Play Anywhere program.

"We don't really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they're each kind of balanced independently," Cleven said. "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's minimum PC specs were recently revealed. You can see what you need in your rig to handle the game here. Additionally, you can check out some of the new Gears of War 4 preorder bonuses here.