It’s been 12 years since The Coalition took the reins of the Gears of War franchise. After Microsoft acquired the rights to the series from Epic Games in 2014, the team was formed and tasked with remastering the original Gears of War in 2015.
It’s also been a decade since the studio’s first original title, Gears of War 4, and seven years since the studio’s last game, Gears 5. Fans were eagerly awaiting the continuation of this story, but instead, The Coalition sought Gears of War: E-Day as a return to the gritty roots of the series. But why?
At Summer Game Fest 2026, Space got a hands-off preview for Gears of War E-Day and sat in a group Q&A with developer The Coalition about the game. We spoke to brand director Nicole Fawcette, creative director Matt Searcy, and art director Aryan Hanbeck about how some of the Gears of War novels were integrated, new gameplay mechanics, and bringing in new characters.
“We did not port any assets. All the animations and movement models were built from scratch, “ Searcy explained. “So this is a game built around the pillars of the original Gears game, but built in 2026.”
According to the team, they wanted to replicate the dark atmosphere that the first three games had, and make a prequel focusing on E-Day, the planet Sera’s darkest moment.
The footage of Gears of War: E-Day starts with series protagonist Marcus Fenix and his best friend Dominic Santiago, 14 years before the events of the first game. In plain clothes, they grab guns to fight off the emerging Locust alien threat, who are bursting out from the ground and slaughtering civilians. The chaos reminded me of the opening hours of The Last of Us, where protagonist Joel has to navigate around town, avoiding the infected as they turn into violent creatures.
Marcus and Dom are younger-looking, but they’re still built like trucks, with massively thick necks and biceps that put Superman to shame. Hanbeck briefly touched on the art style, saying. “Marcus and Dom are quite stylized in their proportions, so we had to work in pre-production quite a bit of back and forth to try to get them to be believable.”
Searcy confirmed that the game doesn’t take place in a single day but across three days, with the story unfolding seamlessly to tell the events of E-Day. The footage also showed off some new gameplay features, including a modernised revision to the active reload mechanic that Gears of War pioneered. As always, players can speed up a reload with a well-timed button press (or slow it down with a bad one).
On some guns, such as the Gnasher shotgun, we can see the individual bullets being loaded into the chamber in the center of the screen. You can stop in the middle of the reload to get out of sticky situations when only a bullet or two is needed to finish the job. The downside is that they’ll have to forgo the active reload bonus, which fully reloads the gun if a button press is timed correctly.
Later in the footage, Macus and Dom head into a grocery store with the other two members of their Bravo squad, Lucas Reyes and Mags Carter. These new members are based on real-life actors (Jake Ryan Lozano and Elizabeth Ludlow, respectively), and since all four of them need to work as a cohesive group, the dev team didn’t want a big visual divide between them.
“We’ve had to revamp our whole face blend shape system because the themes of this game are quite a bit more serious,” Hanbeck explained. “These guys are talking about burdens and brotherhood. It all really falls flat if they can’t pull off really subtle emotions.”
Fans can rest easy because voice actors John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro are reprising their roles as Marcus and Dom, respectively. Fawcette confirmed that they’ll retain the same voices for the characters as previous Gears of War games, as opposed to sounding different to fit their younger characters. “I think for us it was more important to maintain their iconic voices than to ask them to change or sound a specific age. We had a really good creative discussion about how to approach that.”
In the grocery store, Bravo Squad fights off a swarm of Locusts, but a monstrous and hulking Drone pins Marcus’s neck against a pillar. As he’s about to pass out, a chainsaw rips through the grotesque creature, revealing fan-favorite Tai Kaliso.
He and Marcus have saved each other’s behinds more times than they can count throughout the Gears of War universe, and this moment honored that. In fact, this moment was actually a reference to one of the novels, Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant, which depicted the origins of the iconic Chainsaw Bayonet — essentially a chainsaw strapped to an assault rifle.
“We worked really hard to keep the canon and everything. In fact, that one moment of Marcus’s bayonet snapping in the grocery store and Tai chainsawing it is lifted directly out of a book, dialogue and everything,” Searcy explained. “It is the moment that was described when somebody used the chainsaw for the first time to cut a drone, and it was really cool to be able to fold that into our E-Day story.”
The alien Locust threat has gone through a bit of a redesign to fit this new prequel entry. The series’s basic fodder enemies, Wretches, usually come decked with armor, but not in E-Day. The wretches here are pale and skinny, like they haven’t seen the sun or eaten anything.
Searcy said, “We played with the idea that it’s possible that there were Locusts that were here 14 years before [the first game], so it’s possible they were creatures that they fought in the first 10 years that weren’t in Gears of War 1, 2, and 3.”
“I think you’ll be surprised by the variants of locusts that we were able to introduce,” Fawcette added.
One of the biggest differences between Gears of War: E-Day and previous games is that the game will take place in a single location: the city of Kalona. “In contrast to Gears 5, where you were globetrotting all over the place, [it’s] quite a departure,” Hanbeck said. “I think it’s the right choice for this story because we treat the city itself as a character. The fall of the city is a major theme throughout the game.”
Speaking of Gears 5, we had to ask why E-Day. Why do a prequel instead of finishing the story the team was already telling, especially given that Gears 5 finished on such a cliffhanger ending?
With Gears 5 out the door and the COVID pandemic striking, The Coalition took some time to reevaluate what its next project would be. As opposed to continuing the storyline, the studio decided that it wanted to shape its own Gears of War origin story. The reveal and release of Unreal Engine 5 also played a factor.
“We’re going to be starting with an empty hard drive,” Searcy said. “And the opportunity to build out not just our mechanics, but the Locust, our characters, and all those things from scratch, was just too good to pass up.”
Gears of War: E-Day launches on October 6 for PC and Xbox Series X|S. An open beta will begin on August 6.