XBOX and The Coalition fully pulled back the curtain on Gears of War E-Day during XBOX’s summer showcase, and there are a lot of details to break down including the fact that XBOX CEO Asha Sharma herself appeared in the presentation to say that it would be XBOX console exclusive. Let’s get into it courtesy of Danielle Partis and the team at XBOX Wire.
Returning to its Roots
XBOX Wire speaking with Studio Creative Director Matt Searcy, Studio Brand Director Nicole Fawcette, Studio Art Director Aryan Hanbeck, and Studio Technical Director Kate Rayner.
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.”
Squad Up
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.
Old is New Again
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.
What’s to Come
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.
Collector’s Edition
For those who have been waiting for Gears to return and want to celebrate with the ultimate edition, the team at The Coalition unveiled the Gears E-Day Collector’s Edition.
Finally, if you missed the Direct and want to catch up on the full presentation, you can find it here:
