Gears of War: E-Day'in Yeni Bir Önizleme Videosu Yayınlandı ve Gerçekten Gears of War Gibi Hissettiriyor

Three hours with Gears of War: E-Day produced the least surprising verdict available, and that is the point. Ari Notis from Polygon spent that time in the game's Horde mode on Xbox Series X and came out saying The Coalition has not lost the feel that has carried the series for twenty years. The prequel lands 6 October on PC and Xbox Series X/S, with early access starting up to five days earlier, and the preview covered none of the campaign.

E-Day sits fourteen years before the 2007 original and follows young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago through Emergence Day itself, the morning the Locust came up through the surface of Sera and killed a quarter of the human population inside a single day. Seven years have passed since Gears 5, which shipped before either the PS5 or the Xbox Series X existed. Netflix still has a film adaptation in development with David Leitch attached, announced back in 2022.

The multiplayer mode is called Horde Siege now, and the headline change is size. Lobbies hold twelve players split into three squads of four, across three match types. Blitz gives a squad a handful of objectives before extraction, Siege does the same with more of them, and Horde is the older stand your ground format. Gears popularised the horde format in the first place, and Xbox describes this version as three squads defending Kalona across expansive city maps. Three maps ship at launch with more promised in seasonal updates. Notis played one of them, Golden Quarter.

Golden Quarter is a baroque European style metropolis with wide avenues, Haussmann buildings, parks, bakeries and open piazzas, big enough that hours of play did not cover all of it. Notis describes getting a real sense of the world the Locust ruined, then spending the match shooting Locust inside it.

Structure changed more than scale. Blitz and Siege hand out randomly assigned objectives, often of the defend this area type, and they push squads across the map instead of parking them in one arena. Matches end at a landing zone, where the squad clears the area, survives a final wave and boards a chopper. The chopper carries turrets, so whoever gets there first has work to do.

Four classes carry the loadouts, each with thirty levels. Assault is the all rounder, Breachers work close, Marksman opens with the Longshot, and Medics get a burst fire SMG plus a device that heals nearby teammates. Levelling unlocks weapons and perks and widens what a player can buy from the machines placed around the map mid match. Those machines sell what a class has already unlocked, so a squad's options grow as the match runs rather than being fixed at the spawn screen.

Twelve players in one lobby mostly feels like four, because squads stay on their own objectives. Seven types of secondary objective break that up, enough that two matches on the same map should not run the same way. Notis describes a corpser, one of the thirty six foot arachnids, arriving unannounced and pulling the entire lobby into a single fight before everyone scattered back to their own tasks, and a high profile target hunt that dragged his squad into backstreets they had no other reason to visit. I think Horde Siege is the part of E-Day worth watching, because randomised objectives across a city map are a better reason to keep a shooter installed than another four versus four playlist.

The feel survived the redesign. Sera runs on twenty six hour days, four hundred and forty day years and two moons, with a gravitational pull unlike Earth's, and the games have always translated that into weight. Jumps land like something heavy coming down, and sliding into cover stays deliberately clumsy. Fans have joked for years that the gravity explains why everyone in the cast is built like a fridge.

"sawing through a Locust grub is as awesome as it's ever been"

— Ari Notis

Two gaps sit in the preview. Competitive multiplayer went unplayed for scheduling reasons, and Notis raises doubt about the campaign, since Emergence Day is already well documented in the lore and Gears 5 ended on a cliffhanger that a prequel pushes further away, Kate Diaz's unresolved story included. I know that event well enough from the existing games that a prequel has to earn its place on how it plays rather than on what it reveals.

Cliff Bleszinski may return to development, and his reasoning lines up with where E-Day is putting its effort. The series creator spent eight years away from development after Boss Key Productions collapsed in 2018, writing a memoir and co-producing Broadway shows in the gap. Sober since a March hospital stay, he has said he is finished with player versus player and points at co-op PvE for whatever he does next, having already consulted on an asymmetric horror project called Soul Walker.

"Horde mode saved Gears 2"

— Cliff Bleszinski

He has also given E-Day his public blessing, which fits a designer whose stated reason for coming back is characters people care about and a co-op mode they keep booting up.

The run up has been noisy. E-Day's first gameplay and system requirements arrived at the Xbox Games Showcase alongside a dedicated E-Day Direct, which confirmed a pre-order beta on 6 August plus the classic four versus four PvP running beside Horde Siege. Pre-orders also carry skins, weapons, player emotes and in-game currency. The PC minimum asks for an RTX 2060 class card or an RX 6600, twelve gigabytes of memory and a hundred and thirty gigabyte SSD, with sixteen gigabytes and an RTX 3060 Ti class card recommended. Creative director Matt Searcy has said E-Day will be the longest game in the series, running past fourteen hours.

The $400 million figure that circulated after the reveal came from Tom Henderson and was contradicted by Jez Corden, who called the number false and described The Coalition as the technological glue for the rest of Xbox, working on development tools and Unreal Engine work that reaches games outside the series. Corden said part of the spending was spread across the wider Xbox portfolio, including titles that do not run on Unreal Engine 5 at all, Forza Horizon 6 and Fable among them.

The platform decision is the part that hardened. Jeff Grubb reported that E-Day was cancelled for PlayStation 5 at the last minute by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, and that the PS5 build is finished, with fans opening a petition that is unlikely to move anything. Microsoft has not said what it intends to do with that finished build. Halo: Campaign Evolved and Fable are still going to Sony's console. I own a PS5 and a laptop that sits under E-Day's minimum spec, so that decision settles the game for me, and I will be reading about it rather than playing it.

Players will see more on Gamescom 2026, where Xbox is bringing the E-Day story campaign as a playable demo to a booth in Cologne holding twenty five games between 24 and 30 August, alongside Fable, Minecraft Dungeons II, Metro 2039 and the six versus six mode of Modern Warfare 4. Sony is skipping its own booth. That makes Cologne the first place anyone outside the studio gets hands on the story half, the part this preview skipped entirely.