general Why Judgment will not cover e-day or pendulum wars

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Many Gears fans are wondering why the upcoming prequel, Gears of War: Judgment, doesn't cover the two events that have influenced the world of Sera the most; Emergence-Day, the day the Locust came scuttling out of the planet's mantle to start eating people; and the Pendulum wars, the oft-referenced, 79-year-long conflict that shaped the planet's government. According to Bleszinski, neither setting would have made for a good Gears game.

Bleszinski' view of Gears of War's chronology is refreshingly simple. There are two distinct periods in the series' history: the period before people starting using chainsaws as bayonets (Before Chainsaw) and the period after people started using chainsaws as bayonets (Anno Chainsaw). Any game set in the former period simply won't work, apparently.

"The time came, we finished Gears 3 and obviously it's done well for us, and a prequel seemed like the next logical step," he told Joystiq. "So we started looking at the timeframes and what we could do. I looked at E-Day and was like, 'Yeah, there's no chainsaw on E-Day.' It took the COG a little bit to figure out that the Locust have thick skin and their bayonets are breaking, things like that."

The Pendulum Wars are even worse. Not only are there no chainsaws, there's no monsters either.

"Now you have no chainsaw and now you have no monsters," he continued "And now we're not Gears of War anymore. So we looked at the timeframe, looked at the timeline, and figured that there's a window there of several months after Emergence Day, where humanity got hit and quickly got their shit back together and figured out, hey, put a chainsaw on the end of the gun - that'll help. So that's the timeframe for the game."

Of course, switching up the series' focus on chainsawing malformed cave monsters in half could have been the perfect way for Epic to "further evolve [the series] in more of a Christopher Nolan way," as Bleszinski said he would like to do in an interview earlier this year.