As suggested by the title, it’s official that Gears 5 won’t feature any smoking to condemn the deadly habit.
Fergusson's role
On behalf of the team at The Coalition, head developer Rod Fergusson made his points clear through many tweets from the past about his objection to smoking in the Gears series. At the beginning, we could see the concept art of Gears 2’ Dizzy with a cigarette. However, as Fergusson stepped in, the character turned out be in a non-smoker. That’s also the case with Gears 4 and Gears 5 as both of them didn’t feature any smoking depictions.
For your information, Gears of War series was originally a product by Epic Games. In 2014, Fortnite studio made a move to sell the series to Microsoft in 2014 without revealing the price.
Why smoking?
On the other hand, on Twitter, people were confused about this strange take coming from the Gears series. As a Mature-rated series, full of alcohol and violence abuse, what’s with all the focus on smoking?
For Fergusson, he wasn’t trying to be a moral police; the guy just wanted to show his objection towards smoking after a personal connection to lung cancer. In fact, he lost friends to lung cancer and did not want to glamorize the addictive and deadly habit.
The Truth Initiative
Alongside Fergusson, there’s an anti-smoking group called Truth Initiative that also calls out games that glamorize smoking. They wanted to discuss the smoking concept in Gears 5, but Fergusson denied the appearance of smoking in the first place. In the past, The Truth Initiative did also call out Blizzard’ Overwatch for the same reason, seeing a cigar in McCree's mouth. According to them, the art concept of the hero was really influential and negatively affected the young players a lot.
As a matter of fact, the organization called out a few other games that glamorized smoking. The list included Overwatch, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, XCOM 2, We Sing and Injustice: Gods Among Us.
For now, we’re waiting for Gears 5 to launch this September for PC & Xbox One. In the meantime, don’t forget to follow Fergusson’s idea: don’t smoke!