The Coalition revealed a new mode for Gears 5 at E3 2019 called Escape. In it, a team of up to three must outrun a cloud of venom while slaying the Swarm that patrols ahead with their limited resources. The thing is, Escape isn’t limited to just one map. The Coalition will be uploading a new Escape hive roughly every week. This mode’s maps are built with a tile system, which will be available to all players through the new 2D Map Builder feature. We sat down with The Coalition to make our first map and explore the lengths at which we could customize a hive for Escape.
My goal was to make something terribly hard but not completely impossible. You have to complete one run on your custom map in order to publish it, which is fair. I began by placing a starting point and picked a few corridors and rooms of varying sizes to lay the framework. For the sake of time, I chose to stick with only one chapter, though The Coalition said you can build your hive to have many chapters, which are sections of the hive that are broken up by Safe Rooms. These Left 4 Dead-style Safe Rooms allow players to get a little bit of a break from the chaos; pause, get a snack, or do whatever you need. Each chapter also has a limit to how many pieces you can add based on a point value assigned to each piece. Once you meet that budget, you need to move onto the next chapter. I didn’t feel like the budget was limiting.
Source: IGN.com Gears 5’s New Map Builder Lets You Make Brutal Maps…on One Condition