Gears of War: E-Day made a big splash during the Xbox Games Showcase, as The Coalition dropped an action-packed preview on audiences. Not only is Gears looking better than ever, thanks to Unreal Engine 5 powering it, but several design choices are also adding up to make the game play better through fluid movement mechanics and levels that’ll give you opportunities to put your skills to the test.
GameSpot had the opportunity to take a closer look at the game and sit down with The Coalition’s developers to learn more about the prequel. You can check out everything new that we learned from this interview that wasn’t shown off in the initial preview in the video below.
Gears of War: E-Day is a fresh start for the franchise, and according to The Coalition, the developer started with an “empty hard drive” to rebuild Gears in Unreal Engine 5. The key location for E-Day is Kalona on the planet Sera, a city that will be devastated during Emergence Day when the Locust rise up to attack humanity. The Coalition says that the destruction will be felt throughout the campaign as environments change, and while E-Day isn’t an open-world game, its large-scale arenas are combat puzzles waiting for players to solve them through smoother cover transitions and ultraviolence.
Some missions will have tighter spaces to fight in, while others will give players access to entire neighborhoods to wage war in. The main goal is to make players feel like they’re in a big-budget action movie as they slide and mantle over obstacles so that they can flank enemies.
Other interesting tidbits from our time with The Coalition include the studio mentioning that E-Day has the longest campaign that it has ever designed–with the studio estimating that it’ll take around 14 hours to complete–how E-Day was the story the studio wanted to tell next, and owners of PC gaming handhelds should expect to see it run just fine on those systems.
Gears of War: E-Day launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 3, but it’s not coming to PS5.