Splash Damage is working on Gears of War 4’s multiplayer

London developer Splash Damage is once again back in the Gears of War fold, developer The Coalition has confirmed.

Splash Damage had a hand in the recent Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, having previously worked on the likes of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and its own online shooter Brink.

Now studio head Rod Fergusson has told Game Informer that the UK outfit is contributing to the online mode for Gears of War 4.

They’re helping with a lot of the level design stuff," he confirmed. "Especially with meshing of multiplayer maps, we’re tapping into the expertise they got from Gears of War: Ultimate Edition.

They also have a lot of expertise with online systems, in terms of matchmaking from Ultimate Edition. They basically had to rewrite for Xbox One, between us and them, the whole matchmaking sub-system… when you get a strategic partner like Splash Damage, we talk about training up our own team on Gears, but when you have another team that’s trained up on Gears, we definitely want to work with them as much as possible.”

The studio also confirmed that it has a full time staffer assigned to the game’s eSports interests.

"What we’re trying to do now is treat eSports as a brand,” director of community Adam Fletcher added. We started that with the Ultimate Edition where we partnered with the ESL, and worked to created different seasons in of a pro league as well as an open series that spans North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia.

During our championships, we had over 130,000 unique viewers on Twitch, and we sold out of tickets for a live event down in Burbank."

MCV recently revealed that UK developer Sumo Digital has been handed the keys to Deep Silver’s Dead Island 2.