Cliffy B: The Gears series will do better without me.

http://dudehugespeaks.tumblr.com/post/74738315563/the-one-constant-is-change

The one constant is change

Friends,

Waking up today I was drowning in a deluge of emails, tweets, direct messages and smoke signals.

My former employer has sold the Gears of War IP/franchise to Microsoft and my friend Rod Fergusson is going to be working on it.

To be honest, I don’t think the franchise could be in better hands. Heck, Rod’s Twitter handle, to this day, is “Gears Viking.” Gears is just as much Rod’s baby as it was mine. He’ll take good care of her. (Rod, I owe you a girly drink at GDC.)

Phil Spencer went out of his way to give me a phone call to inform me of the transaction last week. Phil, you didn’t have to do that, you’re a gentleman. I appreciate it; that goes a long way. 343 knocked it out of the park with Halo and I think Black Tusk will do a fantastic job with Gears.

I suppose this puts the nail in the coffin of the question “Will Gears ever come to Playstation?”

Safe to say that’s not likely to happen. (Besides, it gives me something to look forward to on Xbox One besides Titanfall and Project Spark…oh and more Halo, of course.)

Now that that’s out of the way…

I’m not going to move to Vancouver and work on it.

I’m not going to consult on it.

My headspace is in the future now, not the past. I have come to realize that until you give people something new to focus on they will obsess about the past. (good problem to have!)

To those of you who love Gears, I love you as well, and I appreciate your support through the years. The fandom, the cosplay, the tattoos, it all means more than any amount of money could ever mean.

These recent events have steeled my resolve to make something entirely new.

Time for new cosplay, new tattoos, new fandom.

Fingers crossed there will be news soon.

Stay tuned.

Love,

Clifford

Well no one was expecting Cliffy B to work on the series since Cliffy B barely put input in 3 and none in Judgement, but it seems Cliffy B are looking forward to Gears along with Halo, project Spark and Titanfall.

I wonder what Cliffy B is working on now?

I wonder if he's working at all.

I personally dont care about the gears series. The 3rd games was bad and the last game I didn't even rent.

I'll give the PC game game that EPic is working on a chance but considering how they fucked UT, I'm not expecting too much.

Well you never know, they might redesign Gears to be interesting again and get new life. Which they will have to because like UC and GOW the same formula will hurt it badly. They did change the gameplay a bit in judgement although they removed too many things to do it.

Luckily, Blacktusk is not People can fly.

He's making a PC exclusive game

i think the opposite of cliff's statement is true. he's actually pretty modest considering his track record of success.

i think gears will do OK without cliffyb, but with cliffyb i suspect the end result would be better.

What game wouldn't do better without him?

…oh and more Halo, of course.lol

I thought he retired

Actually without Cliffy B the franchise suffered.....Judgement was just unbearable.

http://gamerant.com/cliffy-b-pc-games-arena-shooter/

Indeed. I thought he opened a restaurant of some kind.

LOL. If he's out of the gaming biz then I'm glad, he deserves a break from us

read my link, he's making an arena shooter for PC

@ darkangel115

With who or which studio/team ?

read the link lol i posted it right here in the thread. a PC only exclusive arena shooter

Love the gears series, can't wait for more news.

Gears will be even more shit

@ darkangel115

I did. And thats not working. Its what I use to do back when I was a teen, coming up with ideas for a game. Just venting ideas.

yea, it could go either way. but Black Tusk seem capable. here's a little more about the company...if anything they have the resume to believe in them enough to handle this accordingly. they have devs from a lot of top rated games in their studio.

http://m.ign.com/comments?url=http%3A%2F%2Fm.ign.com%2Farticles%2F2014%2F01%2F27%2Fwho-is-black-tusk-studios&id=52e6a5a97addebe34179cb28&type=ign-articles&title=Who+Is+Black+Tusk+Studios%3F#disqus_thread

its interesting to see their efforts in talent acquisition. i do believe that people are central when it comes to anything, including making good video games.

forgive me, but i will not get my hopes up. basically, look at my face. grey hair which recedes, wrinkles - i've seen and heard it all before dude. i am open minded about the games coming from black tusk, or sony or whomever. but these days i find it few and far between that a game tries to sell itself based on merit, selling through marketing and pre-orders is more common and i choose not to buy in to that.

so yeah i'll agree with you that they've set themselves up for success, but success is not guaranteed, and i would certainly wait until seeing an output (eg game), and then I would judge that output independent of any prequels, sequels, talent involved, platforms etc. but yeah if you're excited about them and wanted to hype them, sw is the place to do it.

We wish you the best Cliffy B. May your next Xbox Exclusive take you to ever greater heights. Now fly!

that's fair, and the best way to look at things. make them put up or shut up. and i don't do too much hyping. i usually wait for things to happen first, then react. so i'm on the lets wait and see path like you lol. should be interesting.

Distancing himself from the overmilked and destined to fail again franchise. Smart man he is.

Be interesting to see what happens with the franchise.

He said all the right things knowing Gears is going to die.

Phil Spencer went out of his way to give me a phone call to inform me of the transaction last week. Phil, you didn’t have to do that, you’re a gentleman. I appreciate it; that goes a long way. 343 knocked it out of the park with Halo and I think Black Tusk will do a fantastic job with Gears.

WTF is Cliff smocking.? 343 knocking it out of the park with Halo.? It has been the worse halo since ODST and the fastest Halo game ever to be drop online by its user base..

@tormentos:

I actually liked ODST. Halo 4 did suck though.

I don't get the hate for Halo 4. Granted I just played SP, but I quite like it.

@millerlight89:

But then again, you like Miller Lite as well. Lol

Lol. And just a couple months ago people were acting like the statement from MS: "Gears belongs to Epic, and they can do whatever they want with it" was confirmation that Gears would be coming to PS4.

Delightful.

It's amusing when a company spends tens of millions on an IP the original creator doesn't care about any more.

He's being diplomatic. Him moving on says more than any statement ever will.

It's a PC-only arena shooter. Sorry lem, you're going to have to beg elsewhere for games.

That has less frequent installments than Uncharted, Killzone, and Infamous.

MS probably sent Cliffy a nice check to say that after they bought his series away from him.

MS probably sent Cliffy a nice check to say that after they bought his series away from him.

Oh really? Killzone has 4 console releases across 2 platforms, Uncharted has 3 on PS3, Infamous will soon have 3 across two platforms (4 is we count Festival of blood, but that was a standalone DLC), while Gears of War has 4 releases all on the same platform.

Handhelds are not counted in this because you know damn well if MS was in the handheld business there would be just as many handheld versions of Halo/Gears/Forza on there since they have no other games.

You failed to take into account the YEARS those games came out. If you read my post, the keyword I used was "less FREQUENT" installments.

Gears came out in 2006 and has 4 installments (there was even 3 years between Gears 2 and 3, a bigger gap than ANY Uncharted, Infamous, or Killzone since its PS3 debut). Hell, counting Judgement is even messy considering it was a shovelware cash-in from an C-tier dev.

Uncharted came out in 2007, and put out the same amount of games as Gears by the time 3 came out. It will also have its fourth game this year, and it is CONFIRMED that ND will continue to make the franchise until people dont want to play it anymore. Please, lets not entertain the idea that Uncharted wont be a Bi-annualized franchise this gen. Same thing goes for The Last of Us, which will also be Bi-Annualized. (for the record, I would not care about this as I quite enjoy TLOU, Im simply poking holes in the logic)

Killzone debuted on PS3 in 09' with 2. 3 games in 4 years.

Infamous debuted in 09', and has its 3rd game coming in 2 months. How is this any different than Gears, taking into account that the game wont come out until holiday 2015 at the earliest? I could also throw in Resistance, and Motorstorm, if I wanted to go that deep. The point is, ALL of these franchises debuted after Gears (only counting the post PS2 Killzones), some of which in 09, and they are already rivaling the amount of total console installments of a franchise from '06.

Its just funny that Cows act like Gears is an annual franchise, when there was a bigger gap between 2 and 3 than between any Uncharted, Killzone, Infamous, and most likely ANY future The Last of Us/Uncharted installments.

@StrongDeadlift:

There's a big difference though. When those games were releasing , they weren't the only games Sony was focusing on. None of this would even matter if if Microsofts last new retail IP on the 360 didnt release in 2010.

This is Cliffy's clever reminder (and potential warning) to those not paying attention he's not behind these new inbound GeoW games.

It's also an intelligent way to get his name out there for when Cliffy B. is finally ready to unveil his project in a big way.

Cliff's a cool dude.

I'm looking forward to what he does, and I'm glad he's moving away from Gears.

A: that series felt stale(at least campaign wise, I loved the MP of 3)
B: In between his recent interviews I get the sense that he wants to make a game with the mentality of a Crysis, Dishonored, Deus Ex, etc. I feel like if he did Gears, he'd be too afraid to do that kind of level design with the Gears formula(even though the series badly could use stuff like that).

As for Black Tusk. I hope they make a new ip. Because otherwise it's just another tribute band. The same way 343 is Bungie's Tribute Band, them being a Gears factory would make them Epic's tribute band. That's not exactly a good thing to be quite honest. Probably a lot of money in it(that's good), but come on.

Gaming would be better without Cliffy B and Gears.

Sold more then any PS3 exclusive other then one......

Eh, I was kinda done with the series around 3. Great franchise, and I had a lot of fun with it (some great campaigns, and 3's MP is sublime), but I don't think the series really has anywhere left to go.

Still this let's Cliffy B do his thing, and he's been talking up player agency for a while, so maybe we'll see some Dishonored/Deus Ex style games from him in the future.

I just hope Black Tusk does Gears more justice than 343 did Halo.

I remember when CliffyB made excuses for the Xbone's DRM.

**** CliffyB.

Dam right Cliffy, Halo 4 was the tits.

Like others, I'm done with Gears after the trilogy. Unless a next gen version actually shakes things up a lot (doubt it) I'd rather remember it as one of my favourite 7th gen series and move on.

VERY interested to see what Mr Bleszinski works on next tho.

So it's Sony's fault that their devs work much more efficiently than Epic does? ND works in 2 year dev cycles, which is perfect for a single console generation. Epic wanted to give up on the series after Gears 3, but I'm sure MS insisted the series had to continue to be milked, so Epic threw People Can Fly some work for a clearly unnecessary sequel (I'll be the first to say that God of War Ascension falls into the same boat here).

The Gears of War series is done, and Epic knows that it is done so they sent it off to MS's camp to die.

I'm a huge Gears fan. Love the game play, graphics, and campy humor/gritty style. That was a class post by Cliffy and nice to see Phil reached out to him a week before the story broke. I'm looking forward to Gears 4, Cliff's new game, and the new Epic game. Better that Cliffy is burned out on Gears and has no part of it then to return just for the money minus any spark to reignite the series.

No full-on Gears game has sold less than 5 million copies. Judgement wasn't even made by Epic or anyone involved. Rod, as Cliffy noted, was as big a part of the creation of Gears as he was, and no doubt with the talent surrounding him and the importance MS places on the franchise this new Gears is likely to be a f'ing monster. To say its done is a complete joke. Its one thing if you dont like the series as thats your right. But there is zero evidence this series is done, and judging by the length of all the threads on all the gaming sites, Gears interest is is still there and huge.

Did that really happen? if so that entirely explains why M$ recently bought the rights to it then.

all he does is troll on twitter....