How Gears of War: E-Day Revives the Gears Franchise
Summary
During today’s Gears of War: E-Day Direct, we saw an extended look at the game’s campaign, gameplay, combat, characters, and setting.
We spoke with The Coalition Studio Creative Director Matt Searcy, Studio Brand Director Nicole Fawcette, Studio Art Director Aryan Hanbeck and Studio Technical Director Kate Rayner about why The Coalition chose to tell the story of Emergence Day.
Gears of War: E-Day will be available on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud, and is XBOX Play Anywhere. Play it day one with Game Pass Ultimate. Also available on Steam.
Gears of War: E-Day launches October 6 – pre-order now for early access to the open beta starting August 6.
Gears of War: E-Day closed the annual XBOX Games Showcase in 2024 as the surprise final reveal – a moment of emotion and relief for The Coalition as the project they’d been keeping secret was finally shown to the world.
In front of a theater full of gaming media and influencers and streamed around the world to millions of viewers, The Coalition revealed that it was making the decision to tell an origin story instead of a sequel. And Gears of War, despite being synonymous with Xbox, had never closed the show.
When I spoke to the team before the 2024 reveal, the excitement was real. So was the anticipation.
Two years later, I sat down again with Studio Creative Director Matt Searcy, Studio Brand Director Nicole Fawcette, Studio Art Director Aryan Hanbeck, and Studio Technical Director Kate Rayner. What I found was a team running on conviction.
“Showcase was super special for our team,” Searcy says. “Everybody here is such a huge fan of the series, and we poured our heart and soul into the announce trailer.” When Searcy and Fawcette returned to the studio from Los Angeles on Monday, their colleagues had assembled a compilation of fans reacting to the trailer. “That felt like the distillation of our creative vision for the game,” Searcy says. “It was super energizing for us.”
For Fawcette, it was the emotion that surprised her. Not the excitement — the tears. “That’s how we knew we had something special,” she says. “We really dug into breaking down what makes Gears Gears, what’s endured in the franchise, and had some hard conversations about what did and didn’t work. Now, we have a huge job in front of us.”
Brotherhood, brutality, melancholy beauty, spectacle — the qualities the team had refocused on were the same ones players recognized on sight. However, The Coalition was making a different kind of bet; the decision to go back instead of forward, to tell an origin story instead of a sequel, to make E-Day instead of Gears 6. That choice, they feel, has paid off.
“Now we know that E-Day is a story that people want,” Fawcette says. “We can see we’ve tapped into people’s hearts with what we’ve shown.”
From there, the challenge changed. It was no longer a question of direction. It was a question of execution. As Searcy puts it, the goal since then has been to make “the gameplay version of that trailer.”
Today, that version opened the 2026 XBOX Games Showcase — the first time a Gears game has ever led the show.
Empty Hard Drive
Before E-Day, The Coalition had spent the better part of a decade in constant production — what the studio internally called “five Gears in five years.” Two mainline entries, Gears Tactics, and a foray into mobile gaming, each one built on inherited code and shipped under pressure. There was never a real pause. E-Day would be the first Gears game that did not port anything from previous titles – all the assets and every animation is new.
The move to Unreal Engine 5 made that possible. The team started, as Studio Technical Director Kate Rayner puts it, with “an empty hard drive.”
“We literally rebuilt everything from scratch,” Rayner says. “Characters, enemies, weapons, animation, sound, the world itself.”
For Searcy, that constraint was also a liberation. Without inherited systems or legacy assets, the team could stop asking how to update Gears and start asking what Gears actually needs to be in 2026.
“We took advantage of UE5 to bring Gears up to speed with where modern gaming is, without losing what makes it authentic,” Searcy says. “You’re playing a sweaty Gears game — but it’s entirely built from scratch to capture the emotional core of those older games.”
The technical gains are concrete. Hanbeck points to MegaLights – a groundbreaking UE5 lighting system that E-Day is amongst the first games to ship with – as one example of how the new engine serves tone, not just graphic fidelity. We’ll learn more about MegaLights implementation from The Coalition when Rayner takes the stage as part of the State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest in Chicago next Wednesday.
“We wanted to lean into the horror-adjacent elements Gears always had,” Hanbeck says. “Light and dark, getting into scarier spaces, dynamic shadows. This tech lets us do that in a way we couldn’t before.”
But the point was never the spec sheet. It was that the technology finally matched the scale of the story. “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 puts it simply: “Literally everything you see in E-Day did not exist before we made it for this game.”
One City, Three Days
The Coalition is based in downtown Vancouver, at the intersection of the stadium district and Yaletown — and every Gears game since 2015 has been built there. The studio looks out over BC Place, the working waterfront, and the mountains beyond. When it came time to build Kalona, the city where all of E-Day takes place, Studio Art Director Aryan Hanbeck says the team drew on what was right outside the windows: the ocean, the landmarks, the geography of a city they know by heart.
You can feel it. The sports stadium, the industrial waterfront, the airfield at the city’s edge, the dense residential neighborhoods stacked around the refineries that sustain them — Kalona is fictional, but it was built by people who know what it feels like to live in a city like this. That matters, because E-Day is not a story about soldiers traveling to a distant battlefield. It is a story about home being destroyed.
Emergence Day is a global catastrophe — the entire surface of Sera breaks open. But Searcy and the team made an early decision: at that scale, the human impact gets lost. To feel it, you must bring it closer — one city, over three days, as it falls apart around the people who live there.
“We wanted Kalona to feel like another character in the story,” says Hanbeck. “A place with its own history, its own texture.”
“We’re not an open-world game, but this technology has allowed us to build an entire city that feels alive,” Searcy says. “In previous games, you see linear levels that are often disconnected — you load from one to another, they have different vistas, and don’t feel super cohesive. When we look at Kalona in the [UE5] editor, we can literally lift up the camera and look at this entire, integrated city.
That continuity is what makes the destruction land. In E-Day, you watch a living city torn apart—homes still lit, meals half-finished—while people abandon their cars and run for cover. Small details—a child’s toy, an uneaten dinner—make the loss real as everyday places collapse under the Locust assault.
“The environment gets to tell a story, whereas before, you’re just walking through the ruins of cities in the aftermath of war,” Fawcette says. “You’re going to see it through Marcus and Dom’s perspective, but you’re also going to open up the lens of what else is happening in the world, and what other people are going through. That’s pretty unique to E-Day.”
And Kalona is not empty. Marcus and Dom — played again by John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro, who have voiced the pair since the original Gears of War — are not deployed here. They are recently back from the now ended Pendulum Wars, attending an armistice memorial in the city when the ground opens. The people around them react, adapt, and break down in real time.
“At the beginning, people don’t know what the hell is going on,” Hanbeck says. “Then they’re being slaughtered by monsters. Later, you might encounter groups that are trying to fight back. The evolution of how our civilians act, and how we act towards them, has been one of the most interesting things to explore.”
Bravo Squad
E-Day tells two origin stories. The first is the start of the Locust War. The second, as Fawcette puts it, is “a brotherhood coming together.”
Searcy describes the structural rule that governs how both stories are told: “We never leave Bravo Squad for the entire game. The entire story is told from their perspective. Even though there’s an event going on all over the world, we never jump anywhere else. You only see what they see and learn what they learn.”
He compares it to Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan — “you know there’s this huge event going on, but you’re just seeing this group that happens to be in certain places. And they’re not always in the right place at the right time.”
That constraint shapes everything — what the player knows, what the player doesn’t, and how the war reveals itself.
Before the Locust first emerge, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are young veterans contemplating their futures on a Sera that has just declared peace for the first time in almost eighty years. War is the only world they’ve ever known. The Pendulum Wars consumed generations — Marcus and Dom were simply the most recent to ship out. Now they’re home, trying to figure out what comes next.
But the peace is complicated by grief. Both men are carrying the loss of Carlos Santiago — Dom’s older brother, Marcus’s best friend — who died in combat just before the war ended. Without Carlos, Fawcette says, Marcus and Dom’s relationship is “distant.”
Fawcette says the team found an unexpected advantage in the fact that Epic never wrote Marcus and Dom’s E-Day story in detail. She calls it “negative space” — a blank the team could fill without contradicting established canon. They drew on the novels, particularly Aspho Fields, for the Carlos backstory and Dom’s family life. Most players, she says, don’t know any of it: “They just know that Marcus and Dom are these best friends that fought in the Locust War. But did you know that Dom had a full-on family? He had two kids. He had a brother that died before the war. That was Marcus’s friend. There were tensions.”
The author of those novels, Karen Traviss, collaborated and consulted with The Coalition in the development of E-Day. Before she was a military science fiction novelist, Traviss was a war correspondent.
That history gives the game an emotional starting point that most prequels don’t have — not a clean origin, but a fractured one. Two men who should be close and aren’t, thrown back into a war neither expected.
First Contact
Then the ground opens. And nothing about the Locust comes with a playbook.
“There’s a lot of ‘what the f**k is that?’ in this game,” Searcy says. “They don’t know what these things are. They don’t know what to call them.” The squad gives the creatures nicknames on the fly — and as Hanbeck puts it, “the nicknames become the names.”
For Hanbeck, finding the right tone for that first contact was one of the hardest creative problems in the game. “In all the other games, they’ve had years of fighting the monsters,” he says. “But in our game, if they immediately start fighting the way they do in all the other games, then the invasion doesn’t really have much weight.”
The answer was vulnerability first, then instinct. And the moment that defines Bravo Squad arrives before anyone has introduced themselves.
“These four Gears happen to be in the same place when the road opens and Wretches pour out,” Searcy says. “Everybody runs the other way. And these four, all in plain clothes, look at each other, turn, and run toward it. There’s a bonding moment before they’ve even met, where they all have a shared value, a shared loyalty, and they all know exactly what to do.”
The four are Marcus, Dom, and two new playable characters: Mags Carter (played by Elizabeth Ludlow) and Lucas Reyes (played by Jake Ryan Lozano). Mags is a former Gear now working at Kalona’s Imulsion Refinery — a veteran, hardened, with her own history. Lucas is a young cadet and communications officer who never saw the front lines, despite wanting nothing more. Together, they form Bravo Squad and the entire campaign can be played by any character from the start, with four-player online co-op and two-player split-screen on console.
“Our first thought was that these characters have to be as awesome as Marcus and Dom right off the bat,” Hanbeck says. “But more importantly, we’re not trying to make other versions of them, or four characters that feel equal. We want to create characters that are interesting in their own way and have their own stories. We see it like the front and back seat characters — Marcus and Dom sit in the front, Mags and Lucas sit in the back. Different roles, but all important to the journey.”
What Bravo Squad sees over those three days changes — and so does how they feel. Fawcette describes the campaign’s emotional arc in three phases. Night one is confusion and fear — the ground has opened and no one understands what’s happening. Day two is regrouping: connecting with the military, forming the squad, deploying on missions. By day three, desperation. “It’s very clear that this is not an isolated thing,” she says. “This is a massive, life-changing, world-altering event.”
The Locust escalate alongside that arc. It begins with Feral Wretches — mindless, animal, terrifying in numbers. Then Drones appear. And then there’s a moment Searcy describes where Dom turns to Marcus and says: “They shoot. They make weapons. They f**king talk.”
“We were able to play with the idea that it starts like a monster invasion — almost like a zombie movie,” Searcy says. “And at some point it has to dawn on these people that there’s an army, and they have commanders, and there is structure, and they’re not mindless.”
Bravo’s story also intersects with other defenders of Kalona — including returning characters like Tai Kaliso, a fan favorite from the comics and Gears of War 2. Tai plays a major role in the Showcase gameplay demo, and Fawcette says the team wanted to honor the character’s cultural roots. Tai comes from the South Islands, with an identity shaped by islander and warrior traditions. For E-Day, The Coalition cast Maateiwarangi Heta-Morris in the role — a man who holds the New Zealand bench-press record and has been the Aotearoa arm wrestling champion since 2012. “The casting search was pretty short,” Fawcette laughs. “He’s a living Tai.”
Plays Like Gears, Feels Like New
Of everything The Coalition rebuilt for E-Day, nothing took more care than the gameplay itself.
The result is a game Searcy describes as one 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.”
At the center of that is what Searcy calls the Gears “combat puzzle” — a mix of unique enemy combinations, tactical weapon choices, and the player’s ability to read and move through space. That puzzle has always defined Gears. What E-Day changes is the vocabulary available to solve it.
The fundamentals have been completely rebuilt. Cover transitions are smoother, with a wider range of heights and shapes, including new low-ground cover that allows for more complex, organic combat spaces. From sprint, players can now slide — under objects, around corners, or directly into cover. And for the first time in Gears, players can jump, which opens up vertical combat across Kalona’s rooftops, crumbling buildings, and elevated flanking routes.
Those systems reshape how encounters play out across the city. Missions move from tight linear fights in narrow streets and alleys to open districts where the player has access to entire neighborhoods. Approach an enemy position head-on, flank from a side entrance, or climb to a balcony across the street and pick them off with the Longshot. In co-op, a squad can try all three at the same time.
At the peaks, Searcy says the gameplay becomes “almost action-movie sequences — you throw yourself off a balcony, land next to your buddy and revive him, scramble through cover, slide under a truck, and hit safety on the other side.” E-holes return as both spectacle and tactical mechanic — Locust can emerge from the ground anywhere, and a well-placed grenade can close them up, adding a reactive layer to every encounter. At larger scales, sinkholes pull down vehicles and entire buildings. Micro-destruction chips away at cover across a range of materials.
The weapons have been rebuilt to match. The Gnasher remains the close-range king. The Longshot still rewards patience and precision at distance. New additions include the Gut Puncher, a grenade launcher that fires armor-piercing explosive rounds with player-controlled detonation — quick-fire and let it blow, or hold the trigger and place the explosion behind an enemy’s cover. The Incinerator is a new Imulsion-fueled shotgun that melts enemies on contact. And the Lancer gets its own origin story: in E-Day, the Chainsaw Lancer is born on the battlefield, kit-bashed from a prototype on the front lines of the invasion.
The phrase the team keeps returning to is simple: it plays like Gears, but it feels like new.
Multiplayer, Evolved
While campaign lays the setting and tone for E-Day, Gears has always been a multiplayer franchise, too — and The Coalition is not leaving that behind.
The biggest multiplayer addition is Horde Siege: a new 12-player PvE mode where three squads defend Kalona across larger city maps, reimagining the Horde formula first introduced in Gears of War 2 for a bigger, more connected scale at a moment when PvE is experiencing a resurgence in popularity.
In addition to Horde Siege, Versus returns—bringing classic, sweaty 4v4 Gears PvP to all-new maps set in locations in and around the war-torn city of Kalona. Versus combines classic Gears symmetrical PvP map design with new traversal opportunities. Players will put their skills to the test alongside a seasonal road map of killer content, almost all of which you can just earn by playing the game and completing in game challenges, events and achievements.
More details on multiplayer are coming soon. In the meantime, players will be able to get their hands on multiplayer before the game’s release during the Open Beta weekends starting August 6, with early access to the first weekend offered exclusivity as a benefit for pre-ordering any version of the game or if you are a Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass subscriber.
Never Fight Alone
Gears of War: E-Day ships this October — twenty years from the game that started it all. For The Coalition, a studio that has spent over a decade building Gears games, that anniversary carries a specific weight and obligation. The team went back to the beginning — the moment everything is at stake and nothing is certain. The moment you find out who stands beside you when the ground gives way.
“We probably have something that is like a career highlight to make,” Fawcette says. “A super special title that we’ll never really be able to do again. And it means so much to so many people.”
Gears of War: E-Day will be available on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud, and is XBOX Play Anywhere. Play it day one with Game Pass Ultimate. Also available on Steam. Gears of War: E-Day launches October 6 – pre-order now for early access to the open beta starting August 6.