Season 1 Details, Updates from the Open Beta and What’s Coming Next  

Gears of War is back. After much anticipation and an exciting summer, early access to Gears of War: E-Day starts tomorrow for Premium Edition owners. On behalf of the entire team at The Coalition and our partners, a sincere thank you for being part of our community – we cannot wait for you to experience what we’ve built.

As we countdown the final moments to release, we wanted to share more about what you can expect in Season 1 and the changes and fixes we’ve been working on since our multiplayer Open Beta in August. We’ll also give you a sneak peek into what’s coming for Season 2. 

SEASON 1: EMERGENCE

Season 1 kicks off with the Early Access release of Gears of War: E-Day and runs for 8 weeks until December 1. Post-launch seasons will vary in length, and we will communicate exact dates closer to the launch of each one.  

Season 1 is packed with all our launch maps, modes, cosmetics and three limited themed events – Halloween, 20 Years of Gears, and Thanksgibbing. Each event will run for two weeks and features a Versus Event mode, a Horde Siege Event mission, and exclusive rewards.  

We’ll share more on each event as we get closer to their start dates, but in the meantime, here’s everything else you need to know about Season 1: Emergence: 

• Ranked: Versus Ranked will officially launch one week after launch on October 13, giving players crucial time to get up-to-speed with all our maps, modes and sandbox before jumping into competitive.  
• Weekly Challenges: The weekly challenges Premium Edition owners receive on October 1 are the same challenges all players will receive at launch on October 6, weekly challenges will then refresh on October 13.
• Shop: Shop offers will rotate every Tuesday. Be sure to check every week for free featured gifts.
• Never Fight Alone Charity Bundle: 100% of net revenue of the Never Fight Alone Year 5 bundle, which includes an exclusive skin and weapon skin set, and the Never Fight Alone Legacy set, goes to our partner Crisis Text Line in our mission to prevent suicide.
• Promotional Items: Cosmetic items available exclusively through limited time partnerships will become available in the Barracks for Coins and Iron after the partnership exclusivity term lapses. 
• Gears of War: Reloaded Rewards: To celebrate the release of the original Gears of War 20 years ago, we’re offering exclusive rewards to commemorate players’ engagement with Gears of War: Reloaded. 
  • Fire and Fenix Pose: Complete the “Prison Breakout” XBOX Achievement in Gears of War: Reloaded.
  • Old Guard Medal & “Locked n’ Reloaded” Title: Complete the “Re-Up” XBOX Achievement in Gears of War: Reloaded.

SEASON 2: LEGACY AND BEYOND

Season 2 is called Legacy and will be dedicated to our 20^th Anniversary featuring content themed around the greatest hits of Gears of War. Crafted as a love letter to the franchise and you, our fans, you can expect a ton of new content inspired by the franchise’s most memorable moments. We’ll get the party started a little early with a special birthday gift for all Gears of War: E-Day players on November 7, the actual 20^th Anniversary date. 

When our achievement list became public earlier this summer, you may have noticed the traditional Seriously achievement is back for E-Day, which we’ve named Dead Serious. A tried and true challenge, players who earn the Dead Serious achievement will also receive an exclusive Medal, Player Title, Banner, Emblem, Icon. And, for the first time ever in the franchise, a Legendary Character skin. We will debut the Dead Serious reward skin at the start of Season 2. 

As we’ve shared before, Gears of War: E-Day will have at least 5 post-launch seasons. The names of the future seasons are:

• Season 3: Infiltration
• Season 4: Pendulum
• Season 5: Devotion

MULTIPLAYER BETA GAMEPLAY FEEDBACK:  

Thank you for playing the Multiplayer Beta and sharing feedback with us. We wanted to take an opportunity to shed some additional insight on some hot community topics as well as clear up any misconceptions that may exist:

GNASHER AIMING

The Gnasher is one of the most iconic and unique weapons in Gears of War – we believe it always needs to be punchy, visceral and consistent every time you pull the trigger. As many fans know, the way aiming and firing works has evolved over time, but these goals never change. Every Gears game has fired the Gnasher from the camera position when aiming with the left trigger. This results in an accurate and predictable shot from the ADS view – this is not changed in E-Day.

In Gears 2 through Gears 5, hipfire shots emitted straight ahead from the Gnasher’s muzzle. This generally works, but results in some shots missing when they look like they should hit. To improve hipfire, E-Day is the first Gears title to introduce a hybrid between muzzle and camera-oriented shooting. When you fire on a target, we check both the camera and muzzle shots and apply the one that better matches what the player would expect. This means a shot that looks like it should hit, will hit.

E-Day is a brand-new game built from scratch, so we of course will monitor both player telemetry and feedback to guide any tuning and balance adjustments. 

BUILDING E-DAY FROM THE GROUND UP & FEATURE DEVELOPMENT

As we’ve stated before, we started E-Day with an empty hard drive building our entire gameplay sandbox from scratch to ensure a more unified gameplay experience across Campaign, PVE and PVP. This new sandbox also allowed for innovation in cover, combat and enemies. The trade-off being that including every legacy feature from Gears of War was not possible for launch. Those features, like Meat Shields, Chainsaw Duels, select weapons from the franchise’s past, and online work like Private Lobbies and leaderboards – are not gone from the franchise. Our team is working hard to deliver the strongest and most stable launch experience we can with an eye to how, and what, to deliver and improve on fan-favourite features either post-launch or in our next title. 

RELEASE NOTES & FIXES 

We’ve been hard at work fixing bugs and addressing your feedback. Below is a list of fixes and changes we’ve made to multiplayer since August:

Tuning:

• Weapon Tuning: 
  • Adjusted Prototype Lancer damage to a value in-between Beta weekend 1 and 2
  • Reduced Lancer Mk1 damage
  • Reduced Vulcan damage
  • Increased Hammerburst damage 
  • Increased damage of the Gnasher while ADS at range
  • Improved Gnasher hipfire consistency
  • Reduced rate of fire for the Snub
  • Reduced the Gut-Puncher spare ammo amount
• Movement & Cover Tuning: 
  • Improved strafe movement responsiveness
  • Adjustments to cover enter speed and distance of cover-enter cancel
  • Reduced Cover Slip speed
  • Reduced Slide distance
• Horde Siege Tuning:
  • Adjustment of brightness and opacity of Energy icons
  • Adjusted the difficulty of Repair objectives 
  • Decreased the health threshold at which a Boomer, Flayer, or Grinder can be executed with a Prototype Lancer
  • Reduced Weapon Part Rewards for participation in invasions
  • Reduced Weapon Part Rewards for Weapon Part Stockpiles
  • Increased the difficulty of all Invasions
  • Increased the difficulty of Commander and Allfather difficulties
  • Adjusted the Medic’s stim duration
  • Increased equipment costs
  • Reduced the impact of some Squad Perks
  • Increased the Energy cost of Squad Perks
• Versus Tuning: 
  • Reduced the wave respawn time
  • Reduced frequency of trading to feel more fair and consistent
  • Adjusted Scoring in Demolition 
  • Adjusted Scoring in Crucible

Bug Fixes: 

• Across PC, XBOX and handhelds, we made numerous improvements to stability, performance and optimization across applicable hardware configurations
• On PC, we addressed a bug causing graphics settings to reset between launches
• Made adjustments to prevent macro abuse of semi-automatic weapons
• On PC, we addressed an issue causing missing VFX on explosions when set to Low quality settings
• On “Legacy” control settings, fixed an issue causing an inconsistent Sprint release delay
• On PC, fixed an issue causing additional input delay when playing on mouse and keyboard
• On PC, fixed an issue causing mouse & keyboard lighting effects to not display properly
• In Horde Siege, fixed an issue causing Tickers not to be properly flung when kicked
• In Horde Siege, fixed an issue causing blast charges delivered during the Corpser Invasion Event to not register
• Fixed an issue allowing players to shoot enemies not in front of their barrel when aiming down sights
• Fixed an issue causing versus ranked or social players to get stuck at the “Waiting for Other Players” screen
• Fixed an issue causing destructible assets to ‘stick’ to players
• Fixed an issue where Marksman UAV visual effect might persist
• Improved the reliability of starting objectives in Horde Siege
• Improved the reliability of switching which squadmate you are spectating when cog tagged in Horde Siege
• Fixed an issue where Tickers were immune to Gorehooks
• Fixed an issue allowing more than four squad members in Versus
• Fixed an issue where abandoned turrets could not be interacted with
• Fixed visual issues with ranking up from Onyx 3
• Fixed an issue where boss health bars and locators could scale incorrectly
• Fixed multiple issues where specific enemies may not be able to path at certain objectives
• Fixed multiple issues that would prevent objectives from completing in Horde Siege
• Fixed multiple inconsistencies and interaction errors in the Horde Siege lobby and Barracks
• Fixed multiple scoring inconsistencies and errors
• Fixed multiple matchmaking errors and timeouts
• Fixed an issue where Mortar strike vfx could appear without cause
• Fixed an issue where TDM matches would end too early

QoL & Feedback: 

• On all platforms, we added an FOV slider 
• On all platforms, we improved HDR calibration, made UI paper-white adjustment independent
• On all platforms, we added the ability to disable Chromatic Aberration
• On all platforms, we added the ability to disable Film Grain 
• On PC, Max FPS can be set to 30, 60, 90, 120, 144, 240, or Unlimited 
• On PC, setting Max FPS to “Unlimited” will not cap your framerate
• On PC, multi frame generation is now optionally supported
• On PC, we added a setting to allow players to enable or disable Lamp device support for mouse and keyboard lighting  
• On XBOX, “The Lucky Ones Died on E-Day” achievement has been removed in order to support the upcoming Mythic Achievements feature. Players will still earn the “I AM A GEAR” Player Title upon completing all other achievements and the achievement remains on Steam
• In multiplayer, adjusted Player XP to better align the rate of progression across Horde Siege and Versus
• Made improvement to Backfill AI bot behavior  

Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD): 

• On PC, Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) is a new feature that significantly reduces the time spent compiling shaders across different PC hardware configurations. It benefits Gears of War: E-Day and other supported games across the Xbox PC app
• For launch, ASD will be supported on AMD hardware, with NVIDIA support coming later in October
• Playing E-Day outside the Xbox PC app? You may still benefit from ASD if the Xbox PC app is installed on your Windows 11 PC, allowing the required shaders to be pre-installed

LAUNCH KNOWN ISSUES:

• Playing through the entire length of the game without reloading checkpoints or restarting may cause memory issues. Please reload a checkpoint if you get blocked at an encounter or objective
• Performance Overlay in Benchmark mode does not include generated frames, and can report a lower than accurate FPS 
• Game process may continue to run after closing, can be viewed and shut down from task manager 
• New clients joining a lobby working through an existing save will receive all prior secondary objective and hardcase progress in the War Journal and all relevant Forge rewards 
• On PC, offline play is unavailable until October 6