Gears of War: E-Day Happened Because Starting Over Sounded More Fun Than Gears 6

Gears of War: E-Day will once again see fan-favorite characters like Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago headline the next game in the franchise, but what about that unresolved cliffhanger from Gears 5? Will we ever see those lingering plot threads addressed? Developer The Coalition isn’t spilling the beans on whether Kait Diaz and her team will be back in action, but the studio has revealed why it chose to craft a prequel instead of a sequel.

Speaking to GameSpot, studio creative director Matt Searcy said that the tale of Emergence Day was simply the story it wanted to tell the most, with passion for the project dominating discussions.

“We’ve got an opportunity here to tell a story we want to tell. What story do we want to tell? We chose E-Day,” Searcy said to GameSpot. “After Gears 5, we shipped a bunch of games back-to-back, and the pandemic hit at the same time. Everybody was evaluating their job, where they wanted to live, and it wasn’t so different for us. As a studio, what do we want to do with our next game? And it lined up exactly with Unreal Engine 5. No matter what we do, we’re going to be starting with an empty hard drive.”

“So we looked at those two things, and the story we really want to tell is a story we’ve been talking about. And the opportunity to build all those things–not just our mechanics–but the Locust, our characters, all those things from scratch, was just too good to pass up. So we looked at that, and it’s one of those things where the passion dominates like any other conversation. We love that story, but we went, ‘if all we want to do is this,’ then this is what we should be doing, and we just chose that.”

Gears 5 introduced some big revelations about the Locust, their origins, and Kait’s connection to everything. For now, it looks like the dark origins of the Locust won’t be a central plot point in E-Day, but that doesn’t mean that the campaign won’t be grim. The Coalition revealed that players will see plenty of civilian casualties during the campaign–which the studio estimates will take around 14 hours to complete–and the city of Kalona will start to fall apart as Emergence Day becomes a global catastrophe.

Gears of War: E-Day launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 3, but it’s not coming to PS5. Ahead of its launch, The Coalition has shown off how movement in the game has evolved and how the iconic Lancer will get an origin story. An open beta to test out the multiplayer will be held in August.