Up close and personal with Gears 5's surprisingly big toilets
Rage against the latrine.
If you've played Gears 5's excellent campaign you'll probably have walked through its toilets.
But did you realise just how enormous they are?
About three quarters of the way through Act 1, Chapter 4, you find yourself in the Palace Theatre, which is currently hosting a play called Embry (yes, it's a Hamilton reference).
Anyway, on the upper lobby are toilets. Very big toilets.
You probably didn't notice this when you played the campaign as you only realise just how big the toilets are when you're up close to various objects in the room. There's an odd scale thing going on here. As the hulking COG soldier, JD, who's fully kitted out in armour and weapons, you'd expect toilets to be cramped place. But, well, they're not.
Walk up to any of the mirrors on a wall and you find it's set above JD's head. No-one could possibly be tall enough to see into one.
Walk up to a hand dryer and you find it's set so high it could be used to dry your hair.
The cubicle doors are massive, and make the toilet bowls look tiny. The vase with flower in the corner by the door is almost as tall as the player character. The table with a plant and tissues is as tall as the player character.
(You can see this for yourself in the video below.)
Of course, this isn't an issue. It's not game-breaking, or a bug. Most players won't have noticed! But after I came across a thread about it on the Gears subreddit, I thought I'd have a closer look. And you really do have to have a closer look. At a distance everything seems to be in the right place. But as you move closer to objects, they appear massive. It's all a matter of perspective!
Or maybe we've had Gears of War wrong all these years, and COG soldiers are in fact very short stumpy things. As redditor GyariSan suggests: "Lol I've always suspected COG soldiers to be of Dwarven heritage due to their tree trunk like super wide body builds."
What's going on then? I asked developer The Coalition but unfortunately it was too busy to explain, which I totally get! I imagine the developers there have a lot more important things to think about right now than a silly story about Gears 5's giant toilets. And that's all this is, by the way. A silly, but hopefully fun, story for a rainy Friday.
(The Gears 5 campaign is great, by the way. Perhaps it's even better now I've noticed the toilets are huge. Go play it!)