Microsoft spent much of the air time at its Xbox Showcase on Sunday with a session that focused on the Xbox exclusive Gears of War: E-Day. After that, I was able to join a special briefing to learn more about the game.
The game franchise is one of Microsoft’s most valuable properties, with tens of millions of copies sold to date for the first five mainline games. And E-Day is now coming on October 6.
I’ve been a fan since the first one came out in 2006, so it was a treat to talk Sunday with three of the key leaders at Microsoft’s The Coalition studio: Matt Searcy, studio creative director; Nicole Fawcette, studio brand director; and Aryan Hanbeck, studio art director.
They filled our press group in on the story, the development goals, the squad of Gears — and answered our questions about the game, which is the first major Gears game since 2019.
While this is a mainline title, Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel. It goes back to Emergence Day, or the day the Locust horde emerged from underground and attacked the human planet of Sera. As you can see in the trailer, it takes place entirely in the city of Kalona, where series heroes Dominic “Dom” Santiago and Marcus Fenix are having fun in a bar with their Bravo Squad comrades Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes.
Mags Carter is a former Gear veteran. She served but was dishonorably discharged, but Searcy would not say why. She now works at the Emulsion Refinery. Marcus and Dom are not from the city, but Lukas and Mags are, so they can be guides in the city.
Much like Halo: Reach, the story of E-Day is one of a collective tragedy for humanity. The Locusts win the day, and two thirds of humans disappear. The day is about the heroic efforts of the Gears — the heavily armored marines of the future — who run to trouble rather than away from it as they defend the city.
In the trailer, Marcus Fenix gets into trouble toward with a Locust leader the end of the trailer, and his buddy Dom comes to the rescue with a chainsaw bayonet.
The game is made in the Unreal Engine, and it looks pretty amazing. The Gears trailer opened the whole Xbox Showcase, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced at the outset that Gears would be an Xbox console exclusive.
The fight takes place in one city, after Marcus and Dom suffer the lost of Carlos Santiago, Dom’s brother and Marcus’ best friend. It takes place 14 years before the first Gears game, and after a human-on-human war on Sera.
New upgrades in gaming technology
In the special E-Day showcase after the Xbox show, The Coalition developers said the game will have a lot more verticality, with the ability to jump and go up into buildings and shoot down on enemies. There is some gallows humor and dry humor to break up the sadness of the end of the world.
Facial capture animations have been upgraded for the game. Marcus has more link in his eyelids than he did in his entire character in the original game. That enables much more expressive characters. It will have native 4K HDR resolution and 100 frames per second in multiplayer. There’s a cool grenade launcher where you can control the timing of an explosion.
Unreal Engine 5 enables much better graphics, with things like peach fuzz visible and hair on character’s faces. It’s possible the game will take advanced features of controllers like haptics. There are more polygons in the eyelashes than in the entire bodies of the characters in the first game.
With the Lancer chainsaw bayonet, there’s a satisfying moment when you finally cut through the enemy’s body. The theme revolves around the bond you form with your squad, and it comes back to the story of Dom and Marcus and their friendship. It has four-player co-op play with the two-player split-screen co-op on the couch with a console.
Open beta weekends will take place later this summer. The first open beta starts on August 6.
Why return to E-Day
Searcy said that the team saw E-Day as a return to the roots of Gears of War. It’s an important moment in the lore, with the planet of Sera at its darkest hour, when the Locust come out.
“It’s built from scratch. This is a brand new game. All of the content is new, obviously. We have some new mechanics, but we also built it to feel and play like a Gears of War game,” Searcy said. “We’ve been working on Gears for over a decade, and so it was our opportunity to sort of take Gears into Unreal 5 and into a modern era.”
They went back to an image from the original Mad World trailer, which was among the best trailers ever done in gaming. It’s an image of Marcus Fenix getting ready to fight the horde.
“So really early on, this is what we had at the studio. We said this is the vibe we wanted to build E-Day around,” he said. “I just wanted to share these as some of our earliest concept art that just spoke to our to us, the team, the squad, you know, heading out into the chaos of the world. The Locust: how we could bring them back, more evil, more nightmarish.”
The thinking was that you as the player would fight as Marcus against incredible odds as the world of Sera, in incredible detail, falls around you.
He noted the trailer had seven minutes of gameplay from one of the first missions in the game. It jumps around a bit, and he notes the squad knows what to do at the outset of fighting.
Running toward trouble
“This is literally the first moment our squad picks up a gun in Gears of War. They run towards the monsters coming out of the ground when everybody else is running away,” Searcy said. “That’s our moment of forming the squad, and you can see the beginning of the game starts like no other Gears game.”
Marcus Fenix, for instance, is in his civilian clothes for the first time ever. They’re scrounging around for weapons.
“We really wanted the beginning of this game to feel like an invasion, like a monster invasion, before we get to the part where you throw on armor and you fight side by side with all of the soldiers,” Searcy said.
The scene shows the game has a lot of new systems, like an entirely new movement model, an animation system built from scratch, and all other content build from scratch. You see the sprinting mechanic. The camera pulls out rather than stays close up.
“There’s a bunch of reasons for this, but the biggest one is just the amount of variety we have in our environments and the kinds of traversal options we have now. When you have a camera that pulls back, it just works much, much better in terms of your ability to move through the battlefield to take advantage of different parts of the world,” Searcy said. “And then you probably noticed in there some of our active reload system, which has long been a staple of Gears.”
I noticed in the trailer there was a short time to kill. That was different compared to bullet sponges in past games for tough enemies.
“We have multiple difficulty levels in the game, folks. It’s a demo. We got seven minutes on stage to show everything off. Our campaign always has multiple difficulty levels, and our game plays best on hardcore when our drones are really tanky and stuff. But for today’s baby
mode, we wanted to show off sort of as much as much action as we could in the time,” Searcy said.
Improvements in cover
Gears introduced hiding in cover for shooters, but it was kind of ridiculous in hindsight to have so many rectangular barriers in the landscape.
The new game has a larger variety cover, including low ground cover. You can slide a lot now, and you can go under a car and shoot an enemy now. He noted the team built those mechanics internally. You can mantle over things and Gears soldiers can finally jump now — but don’t expect Gears to be a platformer, Searcy said. Jumping enables more vertical play and flanking maneuvers.
There’s a lot of destruction in the game. He noted the battle in the grocery store is famous, as it’s been ripped straight out of one of the novels.
“At the core of Gears is this cover-based shooter that’s all about you die if you stay out of cover too long. It’s all about the decisions you make, the movement model,” Searcy said.
A lot of the environment looks like the 1970s, and the inspiration was 1970s New York.
“Since this game goes back in time, we wanted the game to have a nostalgic vibe to it,” Hanbeck said.
The game is open in some ways, but it’s not an open world, he said. That’s because the missions are very linear in nature, where you follow linear streets that lead to combat arenas. You don’t pick and choose what your quests are. The story pulls you through the adventure. It tells the story of the city of Kalona — a contrast to the multiple environments of Gears 5.
“The main reason we did that is because we want to be able to go deeper in one location, so we really want you to feel what a city would look like after the world of Sera found peace after [79] years of the Pendulum Wars,” Searcy said.
The Pendulum Wars
In the Pendulum Wars, the human superpowers — the Coalition of Ordered Governments and the Union of Independent Republics — go to war with each other. They fight for control of Imulsion, a rare, glowing subterranean fluid that becomes the most valuable energy source. The wars end, and then six weeks later, the Locust Horde emerges to wipe out humanity. (It turns out the Locust were forced out of their underground homes by a parasitic infection called the Lambent).
To get a sense for the loss of the city, the action takes place in only Kalona, so you can see what the place was like from its stores to its landmarks. There are a lot of classical architecture buildings as well as some modern sessions, Hanbeck said. Emulsion and its yellow color are everywhere. The team had to design a full city, and then tear it apart.
“There’s a lot of death,” Searcy said. “Almost an apocalyptic majority of the world population died. It’s going back to our roots: gory, brutal and dark. But it’s also tied to our story in a way that helped us bring the Locust back.”
The missions vary and show a lot of the extreme chaos. Everyone is thrown into the fighting. People are trapped in part of the city. There are massive battles where you fight alongside other Gears. There are times when you are completely cut off from the rest of the army, Searcy said.
The city itself was created in honor of an All Father who was the father of science and innovation. It was meant to show human progress, where you could make scientific discoveries. But because of the Pendulum Wars, it becomes a grimy and dirty city.
It’s still Gears
Even with all the updates, this is still Gears of War, and I’m happy about that. It’s still a mature title, with a lot of blood, profanity, and violence. It has more cinematic moments.
He noted that Boomers are bigger than they’ve ever been before.
I asked how far they went down the road toward developing for the PlayStation 5.
“We’re not here to talk about the development parts we did inside,” Searcy said. “Gears has always been Xbox focused. That’s what we’ve done forever in terms of being an Xbox flagship studio. I think it has had such a close relationship with Xbox that it was a natural fit for us to be exclusive to Xbox.”
Searcy said that as controllers get better, adding things like haptics, the developers can take advantage of them.
One surprise: The game focuses almost entirely on these four characters in the squad. It’s an origin story, and you learn about the world and the characters too. It’s a natural entry point for those who haven’t played games before, Searcy said.
I asked how does the narrative cheer up the player every now and then, given how dark the story is. They said that the game has gallows humor. There are no gags, and death is all over the center of the game. But Gears as a brand is not bleak. There’s always a bit of hopefulness around the war effort.
The game will horde mode and core siege modes in co-op play. More details will come on that. There are four-player squads, and you’ll probably be able to play zero to 50 rounds of co-op. There will be “really cool” multiplayer, but the team isn’t talking about that yet.
I’m just glad they’re finally talking about something.