Anyone who's tried to get into Gears of War's PvP multiplayer recently knows it can be absolutely brutal. Hunky soldiers zip from cover to cover and back again in the blink of an eye, but one of the series' co-creators says its wallbouncing mechanic was never supposed to dominate the competitive meta for decades. It's as accidental as his cult classic platformer turning fans into furries, he reckons. Hold on.
For anyone who hasn't been shotgunned into bits faster than you can say the word gnasher, wallbouncing in Gears of War refers to how players use the game's snappy, almost magnetic cover system to zip around maps. Quite literally, it looks like they're bouncing off the walls. Paired with the close-range gnasher shotgun, there's basically no playstyle that's even half as viable as learning to wallbounce - a meta that's kept more casual players away from Gears' Versus mode.
Original Gears of War co-creator and former series lead Cliff Bleszinski (AKA CliffyB) has now compared the mechanic to, well... here's what he had to say in a recent tweet. "Wallbouncing in Gears is like Jazz fans becoming furries," he tweets. "It wasn't the intended nor desired effect, yet here we are."
Bleszinski likely isn't referring to actual jazz music fans here - the famed game dev cut his teeth as a designer on Epic Games' oft-forgotten platforming series, Jazz Jackrabbit, which apparently served as a gateway into the furry community, at least somewhat.
Furries aside, his point is that Gears of War's snappy cover system wasn't meant to lead to an inescapable wallbouncing meta in the same way that Jazz Jackrabbit wasn't created with furries in mind.
Over in a different post, Bleszinski explained that anyone who masters wallbouncing becomes "unstoppable" and "this is not the way the game was meant to be played." He's quick to note that wallbouncing isn't strictly a bad thing - it's really fun to watch and pull off, in fact - but it was never supposed to become the entire game, as it has nowadays.
"It breaks the game for anyone else trying to play it in any other way," he adds, which is a shame considering Gears of War's damn fun sandbox of weapons. Thankfully, it's a problem that Gears of War: E-Day is looking to solve when it comes to PC and Xbox Series X|S in October.
