Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski has shared the original direction he had planned to take the Locust in after Gears 3.
Cliff Bleszinski took to Twitter to reveal the rough direction he wanted to take the Locust in after Gears of War 3. He shared concept art for never before seen Locust character designs, including an underwater Boomer and Ticker!
Bleszinski also shared concept art for what appears to have been the main villain planned for Gears 4. He terms the menacing looking Locust as the “New Big Bad”. Concept artwork for this new Locust boss can be seen below.
Of course, none of these concepts could materialize into an actual game, as development of the Gears series was moved to The Coalition once Xbox acquired rights to the IP. Meanwhile, Bleszinski went on to work on the multiplayer title, Lawbreakers. Regardless, it’s interesting to see these concepts and how they compare to the direction The Coalition chose for the Locust and the series as a whole.
The original Gears of War trilogy focuses on the conflict between humanity and the subterranean reptilian hominids known as the Locust Horde on the world of Sera. On November 7, 2006, Gears of War, the initial installment, was made available for the Xbox 360. Marcus Fenix, the game’s main character, is a soldier in the Coalition of Ordered Governments tasked with leading a desperate effort to exterminate the Locust Horde and save humanity. A three-way conflict between humanity, the Locust Horde, and their mutated counterparts, the Lambent, was featured in two subsequent games, Gears of War 2 (2008) and Gears of War 3 (2011).
A prequel spin-off to the first game in the series, Gears of War: Judgment, was released in 2013 and focuses on Damon Baird, a member of Fenix’s squad. Meanwhile, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was released for the Xbox One and Microsoft Windows between August 2015 to March 2016.
Gears of War 4 is the fourth game in the main series and takes place 25 years after Gears of War 3. It follows Marcus Fenix’s son JD and his friends as they fight security forces sent by the totalitarian COG government as well as the Swarm, a reconstituted version of the Locust Horde that once again poses a threat to humanity. Meanwhile, in Gears 5, a friend of JD’s, Kait Diaz, sets out on a quest to discover the truth about her past and the connections between her heritage and the Locust Horde.
