Microsoft’s Black Tusk will make “innovative Gears Of War,” claims Lobb

Gears of War Xbox One developer Black Tusk is going to make an innovative entry to the series, according to Microsoft Game Studio’s Ken Lobb.

Lobb made his comments in a new Edge interview, which explained that he was instrumental in the discusssions that led Metroid Prime to become a first-person title. The man’s not afraid of suggesting big risks, clearly.

“They’re an internal studio, but the reality is it’s cool to have [an IP] that can be a grand slam right out of the gate. The concepts they’ve been toying with are awesome. You take what they were thinking about and their expertise on Unreal Engine 4, because that’s what they’ve been playing with since their founding, and really go with the IP. Again, this was a mutually agreed thing. It’s not, ‘Here’s this thing you must take.’ That’s not the way Phil [Spencer] works; that’s not the way we work.”

On Double Helix – which was recently purchased by Amazon – Lobb continued, “[Double Helix] gave us their best pitch for Killer Instinct and that was a prototype that was playable. I was deeply involved in Killer Instinct 1 and 2 working at Nintendo with Rare. I designed the core combo system and worked closely with them on basically every character on the game and all the animations. It’s an IP that I love dearly, both from the memory of working with these guys and also because it’s kind of fun to go to the arcade and win a lot.

“I was able to bring some of that back. [Creative director] Adam Isgreen ran the product internally, and we had a bunch of great designers working with Double Helix to make the game. That was a game where I went literally no more than two or three days without looking at it for pretty much the whole time it was in development. I love the genre, so I cared a lot about making sure the game was balanced.”