Gears 5 to Feature “Skills and Cards”

Gears 5 is coming in September, and alongside the regular campaign and suite of multiplayer modes, the game is introducing an all new Escape co-op mode. Players work together to get through player created levels with waves of enemies and limited ammo.

After the Xbox E3 Briefing where the mode was announced, series Lead Rod Fergusson appeared on the IGN E3 Live stream to shed a bit more light on the upcoming mode. He gave the hosts a walkthrough of some new features – special abilities, classes, player created hives – and dropped an interesting tidbit. Players will be able to “equip skills and cards” as they play.

Skills and cards are not exactly new to the series. Gears of War 4 featured unlockable skill cards extensively. These skills, levelled up by collecting multiples of the same cards, were used in Horde mode and broken down by class. Players started by only being able to use a single skill, eventually reaching five skills at once once the class is fully levelled. Presumably, since Gears 5 features classes as well, cards and skills will work the same way.

Of course, there’s a dark side to all of this. In Gears 4, you acquired these cards through loot boxes. This dragged the game down. Playing Horde mode at it’s full potential, with five high level skills, took either dozens of hours of grinding out virtual currency or dozens of minutes shelling out real currency. Obviously, neither method is enjoyable and turned a lot of players off of the game before they saw the best it had to offer.

Are these comments by Fergusson indicative of a return to the exploitative loot boxes featured in Gears 4? Or are they more innocuous and delivered at a much more natural pace? We can’t currently say, but will be paying attention to more interviews all this week to see if we can find out more details.