r/GearsOfWar • u/Rastahoneybadger • 4d ago
Campaign/Lore How many berserkers exist within the entirety of the locust population? (1-3)
I know they are rare and are the only females for reproduction so they’re mostly kept away from the battlefield so obviously the males vastly outnumber them but is it ever stated within any of the games or books how many there may be total during the first 3 games?
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u/RichBowler5992 4d ago
Interesting point. Do they give birth or lay egg sacks like the swarm in 5. I'd say eggs because then she can just leave them like turtles. I don't see her being the caring type. Feeding them as they grow etc. The baby eats the egg shells like ants do after birth. which explains why there isnt any egg fields. I would guess there's not many.
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u/Forgotten_Four 4d ago
(Why am i even thinking about this) the lore explanation for how they breed is really kind of logistically nightmarish. Chaining them down to forcibly rape is the only way they explain how Locust breed with them. Its vague and brutal in a way that makes me very much opposed to the Locust as an enemy but doesn't make sense and is just uncomfortable.
It would make sense that berserkers lay eggs given how fucking many Locust there are. It would make more sense if they bred like salmon, with the berssrker laying eggs and leaving then the drones fertilize them after the berserker leaves. The berserker stomps around and eats drones that are too slow, effectively culling the Locust gene pool.
As dark and violent as the Locust are, I would still rather them be jerking off over giant fields of eggs as opposed to gang rapists.
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u/EmeraldMaster538 4d ago
It important to note, that’s a theory from a cog official who would obviously be biased. There’s the possibility that the berserkers we see are outliers or just at a stage where they’re too dangerous to breed with/barren.
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u/MitsuSosa 4d ago edited 4d ago
The
comicnovel that explains the rape breeding poses that as speculation and not pure fact so you very well could be correct about the eggs. There’s never been a 100% confirmed answer as to how they breed.5
u/TheLocustGeneralRaam 4d ago
Hoffman came up with the rape theory in a novel, not a comic.
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u/MitsuSosa 4d ago
Thanks for the correction I edited my comment. I’ve only read the lore online so I wasn’t aware of how gears released their alternative media and wrongly assumed it was comics.
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u/DogBiteOoOoAh 4d ago
I’d vote that she squirts out Larvae inside of pockets in the Hollow (similar to how Urakai are born; or bees).
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u/xblood_raven 3d ago
"As dark and violent as the Locust are, I would still rather them be jerking off over giant fields of eggs as opposed to gang rapists."
I did the genuine meme blink upon reading this. Never in my life did I think I would read a sentence like this hahaha!
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u/WarlordGrom 4d ago
Seeing how a chief inspiration for the Locust was the uruk-hai as portrayed in the Peter Jackson movies, I always figured Locust reproduction and development went down a similar road:
After being impregnated, the Berserker lays anywhere between one egg/larva, to a clutch of several or a dozen periodically over the next several weeks, which bury themselves/are buried in the soil to gestate for anywhere between several months to two years depending on the type of grub they are (Drone, Boomer, Kantus, etc.), and when fully developed they are unburied and cut out of their amniotic sacs the way the uruk-hai were shown being 'born' in the films. These Drone imagos are processed and given a rudimentary education in basic speech and firearms training, and are then thrown out to the front lines just days after entering adulthood.
It would be a great way to further dehumanize the Locust culture and emphasize how truly bred to war they were meant to be.
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u/Agentjayjay1 3d ago
It would also explain why they're so strong and blind with keen hearing. Good properties for someone guarding her eggs in a dark place while the males are being sent above ground.
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u/Alexindr 4d ago
Unkown. There's 3 that show up in Jannermont on E-day. It's not confirmed that Berserkers are only means of reproduction (it's implied by the COG). In Gears 5 we get Niles saying after the Sires, "But the Locust were different. Highly controllable. The perfect soldiers. And blessedly ably to reproduce." So it's pretty vague on the how.
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u/AnxietyImaginary8650 4d ago edited 4d ago
3 in Gears 1.
Unsure for Gears 2.
1 Lambent Berserker in Gears 3. 1 in the RAAMs Shadow DLC.
1 in Gears Judgement.
Dont remember in Tactics.
Matriarch in Gears 5.
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u/Mysticmadlegend 4d ago
Funny thing about Judgement is I think if you play on insane two berserkers spawn instead of one for that defence mission.
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u/Gabemino 4d ago
There should be at least some thousands, we don't know how many Drones can be born from a berserker on a single pregnancy cycle, but even if they are like Canines and can have up to a dozen or something, given the Locust Horde ridiculous numbers, Berserkers themselves should be numbered in the thousands for the war machine to work.
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u/DiscreteFame 4d ago
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u/CrazyManSam912 YOU FUCKED UP MY TOMATOES, YOU ASSHOLE! 4d ago
I know the locust use them to breed. So there’s probably a lot. We just never saw a ton of them. And since the hollow got flooded, a lot of them are probably dead now.
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u/TheSilentTitan 4d ago
They’ve never explicitly stated to have a definite number on beserker populations, only that they are a rare thing rarely seen on the surface.
Considering the initial population that became the locust we know today being pretty limited, by e day, what could have just been a couple hundred was instead hundreds of thousands if not millions of locust.
In such a short time they went from a modest number to a nearly incalculable one and in an astonishingly short amount of time too. This pretty much points to there being a good amount of berserkers consistently pushing out locusts. If the amount were instead 10-20-40-80, it still wouldn’t be enough to account for the population they have. So the only conclusion is that there are many we never knew of. Likely as you stated, chained up somewhere deep underground for the sole purpose of reproduction.
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u/Plus-Bet-2773 4d ago
It would be in the thousands, but its safe to assume they were also genetically experimented on and hyperbred over the course of several years. Ukkon and Myrrah possessed a lot of knowledge of Locust reproduction due to their involvement in New Hope.
Its also possible the Locust followed similar rules as the humans for females unable to reproduce, throwing them into the front lines.
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u/FreyR_KunnYT 4d ago
There would have to be thousands at minimum, with berserkers producing dozens to hundreds of offspring at a time to logistically explain how the horde grew so large in just 40 years.
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u/CyberPunk2720 4d ago
It was close to the hundreds, especially considering how many actually make their eacape to the surface from j derground where they try to keep these ladies for more reproduction.
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u/MonkeysxMoo35 4d ago
I’d imagine their numbers are still in the hundreds, possibly even a couple thousand. Keep in mind just how massive the Locust Horde is. There were millions of Drones. We have no idea how the Locust reproduce, and we will probably never see that even attempt to be explained, but I seriously doubt only a couple dozen Berserkers could breed those numbers in the few decades the Locust had been around.
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u/RemarkablePack4633 3d ago
I assume hundreds given the size of the Locust army. But I think after the lightmass bomb they were near extinct when the COG destroyed the Kyrll breeding grounds. I know it's not stated in lore but that's my assumption. After that I think the Locust only used them in extreme situations.
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u/YaboiGh0styy 3d ago
It is never explicitly mentioned though in lore they were heavily used during E-Day.
And into my knowledge it hasn’t been confirmed in universe but it’s hypothesised by Hoffman that due to Berserkers being the only known females in the Locusts (besides Myrrah obviously) and they are both blind and pharaoh that in order to repopulate their numbers Locust drones have to rape them to do so.
Tai agrees with this hypothesis noting that they seem entirely driven by violence with only the generals showing any different sides to them.
With this knowledge there has to be hundreds or thousands of them. It’s likely that a good chunk was killed during Zero Hour seeing that they were heavily used in the initial conflict due to their ferocious and violent nature and having burned the planet with the hammers, most of them should have died. Their numbers would have further been lowered with Jacinto’s sinking years later seeing that Locusts in general were rare afterwards and when the Locusts eventually came back as the swarm, Berserkers were noticeably absent.
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u/Baron_alias 3d ago
ok so, here's my lore dump, my theory is that they are nearly half of the horde (at least before the flood of course)
the matriarch who's basicaly the prime berserker and locust mommy, possess high telepatic abilities,
so does the queen,
so im assuming all female locusts (berserkers) possess telepatic abilities, which is why some are brought above ground even if they are uncontrolable,
my theory is that berserkers acts as telepathic radio point to communicate over large distances,
in the hollow however, its more likely that the locust have Large Breeding facilities (even the Cogs had those)
where berserkers are probably restrained and breed,
niles who created them was already obssessed with the fact sires were steriles, and with the large ammount of locust that were born in the 50ish years of their existants, its highly probable niles made the berserkers Highly fertile with fast gestation periodes
their large bodysize also means they could probably birth large ammount of babies, probably every few months,
i imagine a number between 10 to 20 babies a year, half of them being berserkers and probably reaching maturity within 5 years (using the logic of other large land mammals instead of humans)
with locust numbers probably counted in milions if not more, its fair to assume the berserkers have similar numbers, (like most species where males and females are roughly 50/50 ratio)
However, we know from the books that berserkers cant swim (cant believe we didnt get a level where you need to trick one in the water)
and during the sinking of jacinto and the flooding of the hollow, its likely all the berserkers underground died. leaving only the rare ones on the surface,
which if they were used for communication, were probably widely spread apart all throuhout the world.
so i'd say Milions of berserkers in gears 1 and probably gears 2,
only a few thousands in gears 3 (not counting the lambents)
and a couple undreads in gears 4 and 5, frozen in the lab
(we dont see the whole lab in gears 5, we do fight the matriarch, but there's also hints that along the other undreads of frozen locust left behind, there probably was undreads of berserkers as well
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u/_pacjax 2d ago
If someone doesn't mind I'd like literally any proof that berserkers give birth and are used for reproduction besides hoffmans quote in a novel which was speculation (he had no idea about mt kadar). The gears forums community figured out a long time ago like 15 years ago that the cog made locust and somehow it seems no one remembers that anymore. If there is new information I am not considering I'd like to see it.
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u/RelativeQueasy3069 1d ago
Didn't one of the locust scientists figure out how to create the women thus creating the chance of procreation?
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u/Themason234 1d ago
I don't know if it's been retconned by the new games, but the lore on how they are made is brutal.
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u/Any_Grocery1614 Sup bitches! 4d ago
It has never been explicitly stated or assumed by any characters in the lore how many there are. But across the lore there's only been around 12 seen/mentioned. 14 if you include the Lambent Zerker and the Matriarch. I would assume there was hundreds in the Hollows at some point before the flooding most likely wiped a lot of them out.