April 7, 2012 by Paul Curtin
One of the biggest surprises at last year’s E3 didn’t come in the form of a big announcement and instead actually came from something we were expecting to see and didn’t end up getting. After trademark filings that leaked the name, many believed that Epic Games and Microsoft would use their 2011 E3 media briefing to officially announce Gears of War: Exile, the next installment in the iconic series that would make use of Xbox 360’s Kinect motion controls and be an on-rails shooter.
Instead of ending their briefing with an Exile announcement, Microsoft left off with a Halo 4, 5, and 6 announcement and no word regarding a new Gears game. Now, in a recent interview with Gamespot, Epic’s design director Cliff Bleszinski has made the first official word on the rumored game by saying that it has been cancelled. Bleszinski doesn’t give any further details away and doesn’t even explain if the game was in fact using Kinect and simply tells Gamespot:
“Let’s just bury the hatchet now,” he said. “Gears of War: Exile was an unannounced game that I can’t give any details about that has since been cancelled.”
This news is bittersweet since the Kinect has yet to produce a game up to the standards of hardcore gamers, but if anybody was going to take Kinect to the next level and help justify its $149 price tag, it would be Epic. Exile not seeing the light of day is probably for the best since Epic can now work on more serious games, and we’ve already seen what happens when a great developer has to take their beloved franchise and dumb it down to make use of motion controls, and both the game and the end result suck.
