Following up on its recent showcase of Gears of War: E-Day, developer The Coalition has revealed more details about the upcoming title. In an interview with XBOX Wire, creative director Matt Searcy, brand director Nicole Fawcette, art director Aryan Hanbeck, and technical director Kate Rayner discussed how the studio is going to bring Gears of War back in a major way.
Among other things, Rayner has revealed that Gears of War: E-Day will be the first project by The Coalition that won’t make use of any assets or animation from previous entries. The studio had spent most of the previous decade in a constant development title, having worked on Gears of War 4, Gears 5, its Hivebusters expansion, Gears Tactics, and even mobile game Gears Pop!. Throughout this time, the studio was constantly carrying over what it refers to as “inherited code” into future projects.
Gears of War: E-Day, on the other hand, has been built up from scratch. This includes things like the levels, the animations, characters, enemies, weapons, and even the sounds. Unreal Engine 5 played a key role in allowing the studio to accomplish this, according to Searcy.
“We took advantage of UE5 to bring Gears up to speed with where modern gaming is, without losing what makes it authentic,” Searcy said. “You’re playing a sweaty Gears game — but it’s entirely built from scratch to capture the emotional core of those older games.”
One of the biggest Unreal Engine 5 features used by the development team while making Gears of War: E-Day, according to Hanbeck, was the MegaLights lighting system. Hanbeck explained that the studio wanted to tap into the horror adjacent elements that the original Gears of War was known for, and the lighting system allowed the studio to go deeper into creating atmosphere levels with moody lighting.
“We wanted to lean into the horror-adjacent elements Gears always had,” he said. “Light and dark, getting into scarier spaces, dynamic shadows. This tech lets us do that in a way we couldn’t before.”
“You really don’t want to tell that story if you can’t deliver on the visual gravitas of what has to go with it. It deserves a certain amount of weight.”
Fawcette reiterated Rayner’s statement by noting, “Literally everything you see in E-Day did not exist before we made it for this game.”
The studio wasn’t just happy with creating brand-new assets for Gears of War: E-Day, however. The development team went on to discuss how even the gameplay was approached from a new direction. Searcy said that the goal was to make a game that “feels like Gears but plays like new — a return to the feelings we had when we played the original games, now reimagined, evolved, and enhanced with the power of a new engine.”
Gears of War: E-Day got a major showcase over the weekend, and The Coalition has also confirmed that it will support 60 FPS with hardware ray tracing in its main campaign, and 120 FPS in multiplayer modes. The title is also slated to be console-exclusive to Xbox Series X/S, along with a PC version. It is set for release on October 6th.
