'Gears 5' was ahead of schedule. So The Coalition rewrote the rules.

The entire Gears 5 story mode was playable by the end of 2018, albeit in rough form. That was almost a full year before it eventually launched on Sept. 6, 2019.

That's definitely not common in game development, and it's even less so when you're talking about a blockbuster franchise like Gears. There's a growing understanding among the people who play games that development is a tricky process, and that a lot of the time, major productions come together just under the wire.

So Gears 5 was almost a full year ahead of the curve. It wasn't the polished gem back in 2018 that it is now. But before Christmas of that year, The Coalition had built something sturdy enough that people could take it home over the holiday break and play it from start to finish.

"We called it the 'genesis' build," studio head and Gears 5 director Rod Fergusson said in an interview shortly after the game's launch. The team hadn't yet reached the beta testing stage of development, or even the alpha testing stage. But there was still this fully playable "horizontal slice" of the full game. There's nothing in the Greek alphabet before alpha, and so the genesis build was born.

"We took it home over the holidays [in 2017] and played it, and we came back and we had a whole laundry list of [ideas]," Fergusson said. "Seeing the game come together as one big entity, like to play the whole ... campaign start to finish, [we saw] all the things we needed to fix or change." Then it happened again, a second genesis build that went home with the team during the 2018 holiday, followed by a proper alpha.

That unusual scenario in modern game development was only possible because of Gears of War 4. The Coalition faced some criticism in 2016 for the fourth numbered Gears game, with many critics and players seeing it as too safe, and too afraid to innovate. It's a response that caught The Coalition, a newcomer to the series after Epic Games' successful initial trilogy, by surprise.

"I was a big believer in [proving] we can do it right before we do it different," Fergusson said. "And then when we started doing [press for Gears of War 4] and I started talking to people about the game, it was pretty clear ... that wasn't even a topic anymore. They weren't going, 'I don't know if you can make a Gears [game]. It was just, 'Tell me what you're doing different, what's the innovation?' We hadn't even shipped yet."

Still, Fergusson wouldn't change a thing. That game was instrumental in teaching The Coalition how to make a Gears of War experience. Only four veterans from the Epic days still work on the series, Fergusson included. so there was a feeling that people needed to perfect the basics first.

By the time the team reached the early stages of Gears 5 development, they had a framework in place, something sturdy that they could build out even more. That's what made The Coalition's genesis builds possible.

"It was crazy for us because I'd never had the ability to do that before," Fergusson said. It's important to understand that getting a playable build ready, even something as small as an E3 demo, is time-consuming. Not just that, but it's often time-consuming in a way that robs the primary development efforts of resources. The shiny, impressive E3 demo we all salivate over can sometimes spell a delayed release, even if we don't know it.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"It can cost you a lot of lost of time," Fergusson said. But, he said, The Coalition was focused on "playability over visuals" as development kicked off on Gears 5. So while putting together the genesis build was a risk, it was a constructive risk. And it paid off.

"We learned a lot," Fergusson continued. "The pacing wasn't where we wanted it to be [in the first build]. There was too much of certain types of missions and not enough of ... the other things we wanted to do."

Having that broad overview also shook creators who would normally spend multiple years working on whatever sliver of the game was theirs to own, and nothing else. It's another quirk of game development: Productions like this draw from so many disciplines that individual creators aren't necessarily accounting for the whole. But having that genesis build allowed The Coalition to, as Fergusson said, "see [the full game] in context."

"If you get insular, you don't really see what's coming before and coming after. You don't see the peaks and valleys of gameplay, the peaks and valleys of narrative, you don't get to see how it all lays out as one big experience," he said. "There's a lot you can get from that sort of holistic 'forest for the trees' moment [of playing through a full, early build]."

Plenty of other processes helped shape Gears 5, including public beta testing and, before that, private focus tests. But don't underestimate the impact of The Coalition having a finished, playable version of its campaign mode to work off of almost a year before release.

The results speaks for themselves. Gears 5 is a "series highlight," as Mashable's own Kellen Beck noted in his review. Even if you can't trace any one idea or feature back to The Coalition's genesis builds specifically, the structural wins and overall level of polish tell the rest of the story. The gamble paid off.

UPDATE: Sept. 30, 2019, 12:44 p.m. EDT Slight changes to the wording around the timing of the two genesis builds, to make it clearer that there was one during the holidays in 2017 and another during the holidays in 2018.