Gears of War: E-Day Gameplay Reveal Deep Dive | Official XBOX Podcast

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Everybody, welcome to the official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox, or today, inside The Coalition Studios in Vancouver, Canada, where we're going to get our first deep dive look at Gears of War: E-Day. Let's check it out. This week, we learned a ton about Gears of War: E-Day at the Xbox Game Showcase and the Gears Focus Direct, which followed right afterwards. But I will say one of the things we always hear from players in the comments, they love to see pure gameplay video to really get a feel for what is coming their way. And, well, that's what we have for you right now. And even better, in order to help us break this down, we are joined from people who are making this game. Aryan, Nicole, Matt, how are you doing?

ARYAN HANBECK: Great.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Great.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah, really good.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So it's always been a little while since I've been here. It's been -- I think it was 2019. We were -- for Gears 5, we brought a bunch of people up here, and it's great to be back. But one of the things I will say is I'm seeing familiar faces, and I'm seeing new faces. How have things been up here at The Coalition? What's evolved and changed over the past seven years?

MATT SEARCY: I mean, it's been a journey making E-Day, and it started really after we finished Gears 5 and Tactics. We shipped a bunch of things just afterwards. And around that time, we were looking at what the next game was going to be. But also right around that time, the world went into a big change. The pandemic hit. So, at our studio, we had a chance to reflect on Gears and the franchise. We talked to fans. We sort of explored what the game meant to us. At the same time, we had this crew that had been building games together for a decade or more, and specifically Gears. So we had deep affinity, obviously, with the franchise. People love it, but also a bunch of experience. And then, through the pandemic, we did this reflection on the franchise. We picked our direction on E-Day, and we had this cool influx of new energy and people that joined the studio, along with some of the people that have been working together for so long. So yeah, lots of change, lots of familiar faces, lots of awesome energy, and driving towards this vision we had for E-Day, and finally getting to near the finish line and getting to show it to people.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That's awesome. One of the things, as I was walking into this room, I noticed a mural which seemed new, and the one that says, "Never fight alone." I'd love to know what that means to The Coalition.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah, there's a lot of new murals. It's fantastic to see us kind of put that up into the studio because we've really elevated over the past few years as kind of a mantra inside the team. It's kind of always been around for Gears. It's been a tagline sometimes, but it actually was in a design doc way, way, way back, and it really was kind of meant to describe co-op play. But over time, it's just taken on a lot more meaning for us in terms of why we build Gears, the stories that we tell in our games, the values that we have as a team, and how we work as a team and how we support each other. And then also kind of what's going on with our fans and how they relate to the game and the stories. And ultimately, it's just about having each other's backs and getting through life. And it's a really nice rallying call to everything that we do, and it kind of brings everything home in terms of what Gears means to us and to fans and, yeah, just what we're making.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: How is the team feeling here in this final stretch before launch this fall?

ARYAN HANBECK: I think the team's feeling pretty good. This is kind of the time where we've put in a ton of effort, but the finish line starts to show itself. And I think that's really invigorating because you start to realize that all that hard work we've done, it's going to come out soon, and people will get to see it finally. So I personally, I'm feeling pretty invigorated. Like I said, we have been cranking for a long time. I'm sure fans are wondering what took so long. But we just -- I think as you start to see the product coming together, you start to get the sense of whether you fulfilled all the promises you made four or five years ago in pre-production. I think we've done that. So I'm quite excited. It's an exciting time right now.

MATT SEARCY: And it's exciting for us, and for me, because now we are going to apply Never Fight Alone to watching together as we see this new gameplay video. So what do you say? Should we jump in?

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Let's go. Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: This is The Coalition Emergency Broadcast System.

SPEAKER 3: They're still coming. They're everywhere!

SPEAKER 2: There are reports of multiple tremors causing minor damage across Kalona.

SPEAKER 4: Look out!

SPEAKER 5: Stay strong. Don't let them surround you.

MATT SEARCY: Cool. So we're in. And what's really cool about this very first moment in the demo is this is quite early in our game. This is the moment these Gears Bravo Squad pick up a gun for the first time. So we give you a snub off this police car, and the shit has just hit the fan. So you're seeing the chaos as a player the exact same way Marcus and Dom and everybody else is seeing it.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. And it was really important for us as a first gameplay reveal to drop you right into that first night of chaos, right into the invasion, and pay that off.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah, for sure. And another thing to notice is just the challenge we had were we had to build a city that's actually alive. In every other Gears game, all the shit's already happened, and the cities are all destroyed, which is so much easier to build. But the amount of detail we've got to cram in so that players will actually credibly believe that this is a living, breathing city that we're about to rip apart.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: We actually saw a survivor running away.

MATT SEARCY: Oh, yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I'm not used to seeing other people.

ARYAN HANBECK: Some get away. Some people get --

MATT SEARCY: Some get away; some don't. There's so much stuff going on in this very first moment. There's Wretches climbing up the train tracks. There's one on the bottom of the subway. You get a sense of not everybody -- the characters and even what we wanted here was that people can't take in how much just craziness is going on in this city as the monsters attack.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah, I think another cool thing is -- well, maybe not cool, but no matter how hard you try, you can't save everyone in this first street. You're just walking through. You might be shooting a couple of Wretches off people, but there's three or four other ones eating people beside you. So that's a pretty important feeling because they're pretty underpowered right now, and the invasion is pretty heavy-duty.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Marcus and Dom are at the bar having a drink.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah, you're seeing Marcus and Dom in there. They're casual.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I know, I'm not (inaudible). By the way, I will say the brown jacket, you know.

ARYAN HANBECK: Right on point.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I would not take a photo next to him. It wouldn't look so great.

MATT SEARCY: You would look skinny next to him.

ARYAN HANBECK: That was a really fun exercise, try to figure out what these people would wear. We all know them in their armor, but we don't know them as casuals.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: They're still larger than life, but maybe it's like a football player without their pads.

MATT SEARCY: Totally. Yeah, Gears are always ripped. They're always kind of bigger than everybody else. It's just part of it. But it was a really fun exercise to go, "What would Marcus wear to a bar?" And there's some really cool details. His COG tags are under his nice, tight V-neck. And also, he never takes off his bandana. Little details like that.

ARYAN HANBECK: He's got a chain wallet.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: He's got a wallet chain.

ARYAN HANBECK: It felt like that would be appropriate for Marcus.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Backing it up, you mentioned this is Bravo Squad. Who am I seeing here besides Marcus and Dom?

MATT SEARCY: Right. So we have Marcus and Dom, obviously, and two new characters. So Megs Carter, who's a veteran of the Pendulum Wars. She's from Kalona. She's working in the emulsion refineries now. She's sort of returned to the brotherhood she had before. But she's the person who's seen the most in battle. And then we've got Lucas Reyes. He's a rookie. He's a comms officer who actually never made it to the front. Very confident, and he had sort of dreams of glory, but never made it there. And these four people in this first moment, they just happen to be in the same place, but these are four Gears who, when it breaks out, they run towards the threat while everyone else is running away.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So I see Active Reload is back, which, thank you. It hasn't always been in the middle of the screen like that, has it?

MATT SEARCY: It's never been in the middle of the screen. Yeah, obviously, this is a game built from scratch. It's a new game built to feel like Gears, but it is new. So there will be some things that feel very familiar, some things that are new, and some things that are just a little bit different and evolved. And one of them was Active Reload. It's such a staple of Gears games. It adds to the tension of reloading your weapon, how you manage your weapon, whether or not you're going to jam it, get extra damage. And honestly, it's so central to the experience that sometimes we find new players lose it in the top corner. And it's part of your aim experience. And it makes the most sense to put it where you're aiming, where you're firing. And there's some cool new stuff tucked in the active reload. I don't know if everybody caught it.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: No, no, what is it?

MATT SEARCY: So you can see in this demo, when we use a Gnasher in there, some of our weapons now have single shell loading. So you can see each shell load in the Active Reload bar. And actually, you can interrupt your reload to fire a shell immediately and basically trade off having a smaller clip to get your shot out at a time of urgency if you need it.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That's useful.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: To Matt's point, the other thing that when you see in a demo, we take some things away from the screen just so you get this kind of full-screen experience of the game.

MATT SEARCY: For cinematic purposes.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Totally. So obviously the omen is back, in terms of like how damage --

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: As you're taking damage.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yep. You see your weapon up at the top. We've kept that for the demo. But just, you know, we wanted to show the game full screen so you kind of get that cinematic immersive experience, but all those kind of signature things are obviously back.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Okay. Let's jump into this next scene, then.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Okay.

SPEAKER 6: Let me see what I can do.

SPEAKER 7: I'm at the pharmacy. I need backup!

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: These cars remind me. I feel like there's pictures of my parents leaning against cars that look like this.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. That's kind of on purpose. One of the things we thought about a lot at the beginning of this journey was what the style of the city was going to be. And we're kind of going back in a way to fill in a hole in the story of the lore of E-Day. So this sort of nostalgic vibe felt right. And to go with that, cars that felt like they were from the '70s. The city has a -- New York in the '70s was sort of our inspiration. So it just felt right. Everything feels a little bit older and a little bit clunkier, which kind of aligns with the Gears vibe anyway.

MATT SEARCY: I mean, it is a different time period. So pulling elements of Earth nostalgia and Sera nostalgia together was a really great way to make us feel like we'd gone back in time to a world that frankly nobody's actually seen. We've never shown pre-E-Day Sera before.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And now we know the price of gas was much lower. That's right.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: That's right.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And the other advantage is most of these cars from that era are really blocky. And that obviously helps with cover.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. I will say, actually, one of the cool things that you just get a glimpse of in here and maybe a bit more in our dev direct is building E-Day in a city, we chose to put it in one city, ultimate Gears playground. In a game that's all about cover, you get just this huge range of options: cars, buildings,

ARYAN HANBECK: Planters.

MATT SEARCY: -- destruction. Yeah, planters, trains, all sorts of things that make sense. And then we rip the ground up, and we make all these organic shapes. So you can actually see in that sequence there where the Corpser comes out of the ground -- one of our new cover types, we have low ground cover. So you can see Marcus slam in all the way down to the ground and take this low stance and crawl along it. So we have some cover that's a little more hectic, a little more dangerous. And, of course, you'll see in other footage a lot more versatility in how we move, a lot more fluidness, mantles, vaults, all sorts of things. So we were able to open the range of cover types, create more organic spaces that you can move and flow through without losing that fundamental part of Gears, which is cover is life. That's how you live.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah. It's just not all waist-high cover.

ARYAN HANBECK: Exactly.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: That's right.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: I think the other thing that this shows -- and I'll throw it to Matt -- is you get to see slide. You get to see Marcus slide.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, right there.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. So there's -- yeah. There's a couple moments in here. So we've added slide to the game. The movement for E-Day is a -- is built from scratch. There's nothing that we ported from past Gears. First thing we did was try to make sure we hit what Gears feels like, how it feels to go into cover, keep the heaviness. But it was important to us that we added more fluidity. So there are some obvious changes. The sprint cameras has moved out so that you get a little more visibility. You can run a little bit more. And tying to run, we added slide to the game. And slide lets you sort of tie in that fluidity to a bunch of cool opportunities. You can slide into cover, obviously. You can slide under some things, under trucks, and through gaps and things. Or you can see sort of in this demo, we slid past a planter and then kind of popped ourselves into cover really fluidly. It's an addition to the core of Gears. We've got that core center of movement around cover and choice. And then we try to layer these new movement mechanics sort of around it to just give you more options and really an experience that just feels like Gears, but more modern, I guess, more dynamic. Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: From the reaction, I'm assuming they had never seen a Corpser before because I think they're like, "What the fuck is that?"

ARYAN HANBECK: I think that's the first one in the game.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. That's the first full view.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: I mean, you see the arms of it kind of come out when the sky train goes down. But yeah, there's a lot of, "What the fuck is that? What the hell was that?"

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. We get to experience the Locust the way the squad does. So there is a lot of -- in this game, there is a lot of, "Holy, what the shit."

NICOLE FAWCETTE: What else would you say?

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. There's -- I mean, this demo does jump time just a little bit through a mission. Obviously, we're kind of cutting out, but there is a cool little sequence you see there where rookie -- Lucas spots the legs first when the train collapses and tries to call them out, and nobody else saw it. And then it comes up later.

SPEAKER 8: Do you see that? There's something big. [inaudible 00:14:12]

SPEAKER 9: Just keep moving. We need to keep moving (inaudible).

MATT SEARCY: I think we have a beat in that mission earlier where he was like, "I told you. Giant fucking spider legs."

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: We also saw the retro Lancer, I guess, in this era, the current Lancer.

MATT SEARCY: That's right. Yeah. Not retro. Just Lancer.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Just Lancer. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw you kept the -- for me, one of the most satisfying, you do the charge and the --

MATT SEARCY: The impaling. Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Impaling. Yeah.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. One of the things you see there when you did that execution is that Marcus gets covered in blood when that moment happens. So we've put in a few extra things to allow you to see kind of the world touches you as a player and you touch the world. And you can see that on the player themselves. We do that throughout the campaign as well with blood and dirt. So in different moments, the blood level on the character will go up, and then it'll go down. Same with dirt. So in previous Gears, we've always had super shiny armor, and it looks really good, and it looks great in HDR and everything. But I think this is just another level of sort of believability that just kind of removes that barrier, and people feel like they're more immersed in what's going on around them.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Feels super satisfying when you're doing Gnasher shots and you're just getting covered.

MATT SEARCY: Covered head to toe in blood, yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It's always been a game that people have used the term "visceral," and now you're got visceral. [inaudible 00:15:31]

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. For sure.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Is this one of those things, I know The Coalition is known as being perhaps the best Unreal Engine, the best chops in UE out there.

ARYAN HANBECK: Perhaps.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I'm trying to get to something -- I don't want anyone to feel bad. Okay. The best with the Unreal Engine. Are these things that are now possible because of your mastery of Unreal Engine 5, or is it just an art choice that you've chosen to do?

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. I think some of this stuff is just an evolution of what we've done before. For example, the blood and dirt, I don't think there's anything inherently in the engine that's allowed us to do that now. So there's a whole bunch of stuff where we just -- we've done this a few times now, and now we're one-upping it. But there's definitely tons of stuff we've done in this game that is tied to the tech that's available in Unreal.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. I think the evolution of -- there's some stuff that for sure is just creative direction deciding to do E-Day. I think the biggest thing we benefited from is the city. We made Kalona so we could experience this global event in our lore at a very intimate scale and see the story of one place. And as a result, we basically built a whole city. The identity of the city, the detail, the people, right down to this micro destruction and everything that's going on there, so you get that. But we literally built Kalona. You can pull the camera up in the engine and look and the city is there. And so every time you're in a level and you're looking somewhere else, it's the actual location of that other place, which I don't know that we could have done that before. And I think that's probably -- there's a long list of technology that's come with UE5 or we built here that has kind of allowed this whole package. But that's the thing that's benefited the most.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: And not just build a city, but build a city to destroy it.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. And rip it apart. Build a city and rip it apart. Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. It's not a static set. You're going to -- you're going to experience this world.

ARYAN HANBECK: You're going to see it fall.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: You're going to see it fall. You are going to see the spectacle moments. You're going to traverse back into areas that were intact, and there'll be smoking ruins. And you'll see kind of that loss. And that really helps kind of deepen the story and deepen the sadness and the gravity of what happened and what Emergence Day was.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. I think that was an important thing for us, was to make the city feel like another character in our game, so that when you see it get destroyed, you actually feel something. It's not just a set. It's actually a living, breathing character in our game that now is getting taken away despite your best efforts.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: In previous Gears games, everything's already destroyed. It's just constant rubble. It almost -- you become immune to it after a while.

ARYAN HANBECK: You never get to see it destroyed.

MATT SEARCY: You're walking through the history of a place that was -- that fell a decade ago.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: There's more to pick apart in this scene. So let's play it back one more time.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

SPEAKER 6: Let me see what I can do.

SPEAKER 7: I'm at the pharmacy. I need backup! These things are all over me.

SPEAKER 10: More tremors.

SPEAKER 7: Any Gears out there? Anyone that can hear me?

MATT SEARCY: This is a cool moment, actually, because you see the police department there. It's part of this idea the first night, they're just looking for help wherever they can. But this moment, where the Corpser rips through the ground, I think, is a really awesome example of how we treat E-holes. We have the systemic ones that you close with frag grenades, but we also have these spectacle ones that just open up and sort of dump enemies out in the space and collapse parts of buildings and cover you with smoke, which is just such a cool way to flood the city with this chaos.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. The other thing that's new for us with E-holes is sort of this color red. The red light that pours out of every E-hole. We sort of made this commitment early in pre-pro that red would be the E-hole color. We try to avoid using red anywhere else as much as we could. And we'd keep it as primary and strong as we can, which is kind of a bit of a challenge because it's not an easy color to work with. But basically, whenever you see red like this in the game, it's either an E-hole or it's danger. And I think after a while, that just subconsciously taps into the players, and when they see it, they're just going to know there's danger ahead. Of course, red is already associated with something bad or stop, you can't go, or danger. So it just kind of worked together. And it floods the space with red light, which is really cool. You get a real big change, and you can't really do that kind of stuff if you don't have the power in the engine to let you do it.

MATT SEARCY: One of the cool things in that moment where they pour out to you, and you see across this demo, we're seeing the beginning of this invasion that we unroll through E-Day. And so the very first enemies we see here are Wretches, but they're not armored, the way you normally see Wretches in Gears games. And that's because we're seeing sort of that first wave of shock troops come through the city. Almost like attack dogs, the way the Locust use them. So one of the cool opportunities we had creatively was we get to go back to the Locust but reintroduce them to Gears fans. What would it be like to see a Wretch without armor come out and be used as this sort of massive monster invasion force? But we're introducing these enemies to the characters in the game, so they're reacting. And anybody who's coming to a Gears game for the first time is getting to experience the Locust the way Marcus and Dom experienced it, like seeing a Wretch for the first time, seeing a Drone for the first time, seeing them pick up a gun for the first time. That stuff's all in the first night of E-Day, which is really cool.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. They kind of go from, "Are these animals?" to, "Are these monsters?" to, "No, they're tall. They're -- they say, "Die, ground walkers." They shoot you.

MATT SEARCY: They fucking talk, Marcus. There's a line Dom has in the -- yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: (Inaudible) So it's really cool to do that progression.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. One cool little tidbit about those Wretches is they look like a skinnier, malnourished version of a real Wretch. And the thinking was we wanted the beginning to feel a little bit like a zombie movie. There's just armies of them coming. And so we thought is what if they took all these Wretches, put them in cages, didn't feed them, turned them into hungry, rabid attack dogs, and then released them all into the streets? So that's sort of why they look like that. And then, as you go forward, you start to see the bulked-up Wretches. Then they have armor. So you get the full range.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I never was scared of Wretches before. I was like, "This is where I -- "

MATT SEARCY: Oh, they'll rip your head off.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, they do?

MATT SEARCY: Oh, yeah.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah.

MATT SEARCY: If you DBNO and a Wretch jumps on you, it'll rip your head off.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

ARYAN HANBECK: They got claws.

MATT SEARCY: And teeth.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: And teeth. Lots of teeth.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I think there's a line in here. You hear someone yell, "They're fucking eating people."

NICOLE FAWCETTE: They're eating people.

MATT SEARCY: Which they also do.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yes.

ARYAN HANBECK: There's one up close and personal right here.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. So we -- as I mentioned, this demo kind of jumps through a level, but we get -- we're sort of tracking this storyline where they meet the other Gear that's out in this part of town for the first time. So what's cool when we get to the grocery store here is obviously, we find Maco, who's one of our new characters. And he's got a Vulcan, a classic Gears weapon, but he's all alone out here. He's been holding this place.

ARYAN HANBECK: He runs out of ammo.

MATT SEARCY: Runs out of ammo. It's just a thing that happens with him several times. Yeah. And we get to see sort of this moment, the first moment in the story of Bravo finding the other Gears in the city, reconnecting, and sort of becoming a squad that's part of a larger force.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. It's really cool. Little by little, you start seeing there's other soldiers out there. There's a little bit of a command coming together to try to fight back as much as they can. And that's really fun to see that evolution throughout the campaign.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This is a really big arena here. I feel like they're coming in from all different sides.

MATT SEARCY: We have much bigger arenas than this.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Oh, okay.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Because it almost feels like a Horde map to me, where they're coming in from all different directions, and you can't just hunker down in one place and survive.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah, I mean, E-holes are iconic for a reason. They're cool. They've got a cool idea, but functionally, they're just a great spawn closet. As a video game mechanic, it means your enemy can pop up anywhere. We can change the front lines. They've obviously got strategy in with them. You can see one of the squadmates chucks a grenade in and closes it in this one. So it's just awesome to bring it back. And getting to imagine the (inaudible) this grocery store was so cool because, I mean, obviously, an awesome Gears map. Obviously, we got to flex our destruction, our lighting, our reflection systems. And it's also pulled straight out of a Gears book, out of lore. So this moment that we build up to in here about this grocery store and a bayonet snapping and the reveal of Tai is us sort of -- we had to tweak a few things to make E-Day work, but wherever we needed to tweak the lore a little bit, we tried to really respect what's out there. And so even this dialogue is straight from the scene in the book where this actually happens.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: We kind of call it a lift and shift a little bit. It was really important for us not to make any unnecessary retcons and keep true to kind of what was out there in the extended media. And we needed to introduce the Lancer into this game. We couldn't have a Gears game without the chainsaw Lancer. This moment actually takes place like a year later in the books. But it's such a fantastic -- such a fantastic scene with a character we all love, Tai, and to be able to bring him into E-Day and bring him into this moment --

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And introduce him.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: In this way, the most quintessential Gears way ever. I think it just all came together perfectly. And hopefully, those hardcore fans forgive us a little bit for taking that. But we really wanted to be able to show this on screen as well.

ARYAN HANBECK: Also, I think people are going to be stoked to see a chainsaw because, as soon as they see this, they're going to go, "Oh, hold on a second. Something's happening." This is leading up to something.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. And it is, the invention of the chainsaw Lancer did come from a hardware store. Chainsaw. And it's so fantastic to kind of see that origin story play out so crisply and amazingly.

MATT SEARCY: Viscerally.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Viscerally.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

ARYAN HANBECK: That's another great example of Tai getting covered in blood after that execution.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. Yeah. And you get Marcus on his back foot, and there's a bunch of great things in that scene.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. So one thing that's kind of cool, that's a really small detail in here is just, we're coming out of the Pendulum Wars into peace for the first time. We don't get to spend a ton of time in Kalona before that happens, but what you get to see all over Kalona is the echoes of that. So in our signage, you're seeing victory celebrations. You're seeing --

NICOLE FAWCETTE: "Peace time discounts."

MATT SEARCY: "Peace time discounts" in the grocery store. You're literally seeing -- yeah, veteran centers, recruiting centers. So we weren't able -- we got to pick up a gun and shoot in this game. So we're not spending hours walking around the city in peacetime, but you get to see the echoes of what could have been the hope and everything that's lost even in --

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I love those TVs, by the way. I think we might have had one when I was little, wood paneling.

MATT SEARCY: Big CRT with the wood paneling.

ARYAN HANBECK: A lot of that retro vibe. All the technology in Gears has always been sort of Vietnam-era tech, we say, or retro tech. There's no LCD panels. They're all CRTs, and you see the cash registers are all old school. So I think all that -- there's vending machines. Everything just has that sort of retro vibe, and that kind of really comes together to create a style that has a through line throughout the whole game.

MATT SEARCY: So one of the things that we get to show in here, too, is an unarmed Drone. So similar to the Wretches, we wanted to bring -- introduce Drones even in a new way. And we have skipped ahead a little bit in here, but you see, actually, in the game, before they ever see a Drone pick up a gun, they just see a Drone try to rip you apart with its bare hands. We wanted to really emphasize that, "Yeah, they can use weapons, but they're just terrifying monsters that want to rip the limbs off of people."

ARYAN HANBECK: And these unarmed Drones, they just -- they show up, they do their little scream, and then they come right at you. So they're not taking cover. They don't have guns. They're just charging right at you. Yeah, they're rushing at you.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So that was not like a canned moment. That's an emergent thing. If the player was a little bit faster on the Gnasher, you could have ducked and tucked.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Somebody fumbled his reload on purpose.

MATT SEARCY: Somebody might have -- I might have fumbled the reload maybe on purpose for a demo reason. I know how to reload, everybody.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That would never happen in the game.

MATT SEARCY: Everybody on the internet who is saying "get good," it's a demo. There's things we have to do. But yeah, honestly, that moment is the moment that those are designed for. If you're not watching your flank, or your buddy's not watching your flank -- it's a co-op game -- if one of those guys spawns, they'll take you straight to the ground. But every Drone has this kind of in them. If you're DBNO, one will jump on top of you and try to rip you apart. We have some Drones who, if they DBNO, they will -- or drop their weapon, they will go into that rage state and come for you. So it's sort of an extension of DBNO as a mechanic, pulled in with the Drones. You saw Dom come up and save Marcus there. So they can come pull you off. You can shoot the Drone from afar. So everything we build is about trying to get that, obviously, the vibes of Gears, Locust, Brutality, but also always thinking about how our mechanics can make the gameplay in co-op. It's all about the squad. I mean, it's all about never fight alone. That statement goes all the way down to what the smallest mechanic in the game about how a Drone feels when it tackles you and takes you to the ground.

ARYAN HANBECK: One thing to look at here with the close-up of Marcus, we always have close-ups in our game just to kind of flex where our character fidelity is. We would never have been able to do this kind of camera with where we were before. So, obviously, that has a lot to do with the engine. Technology's moved a lot. Nanite, there's a bunch of things that have come together to allow us to get this close. We really revamped completely the way we capture our character performances, the way we model their likeness, all the pore detail, all that stuff, the groom. You're seeing groom in gameplay and cinematics for the first time. It's all based on a little geometry cards, and that looks fine, but it can only take you a certain way. So we're definitely -- there's a lot of firsts that you're seeing with the characters, and that shot of Marcus getting choked out is a good example of that.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This kind of reminded me. I got a little bit of a flashback of General RAAM lifting up Minh in the original.

MATT SEARCY: We've got some good callbacks in this game. I think people are going to find a lot of really cool -- we all have our favorite moments from Gears across all the games. And a lot of them are echoed in here. We're not trying to one-to-one them, but the E-Day is like a -- for us, was a journey on talking about the vibes and moments in past Gears games, and like I said, we're going to build a new game from scratch, nothing ported, like all from scratch. But how much of that, the way it plays, the nostalgia, the way it feels, the story beats, the characters, the vibes, the music, the look, everything. So I think people will find, like you said, like, "Yeah. There's a callback," to that moment with RAAM. They're all over the place in this game.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: It's like a homecoming. It's like a getting back to the roots of what makes Gears so special. And you kind of find it across the entire game.

MATT SEARCY: So, obviously, I've said a couple times, we kind of rebuilt everything from scratch. There's just more fluidity, more mantling, all that stuff. But one of the biggest additions we made to the game is the idea -- well, we added a jump button to Gears, which in the past has been really tough to figure out, but we worked hard on it and we found a way to just blend it into our movement, keep the heaviness. It's not a platforming game. We're not going to give you giant levels where you have to jump, climb, jump, climb. But you can see even just in this little moment in the grocery store, it opens up flanking routes. You can get -- you can now jump up, get on top of trucks. I get on top of the freezer here, pop over to another place, drop behind somebody. Still risk reward. You might -- you can't see always where you're going. You might drop into a place and get surrounded. Your buddy's got to get over there and pick you up. I think in the dev direct, you see little clips of some of the larger arenas, and they have a couple stories of verticality. They have multiple routes. And across the game, we were just able to sort of expand and tweak how you see the battlefield.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: What button is the jump button?

MATT SEARCY: Well, what's your control center? Yeah. I mean, every Gears game has added and subtracted mechanics because there is a limited number of buttons on a controller. There are trade-offs for sure. There are things that were in the original games that are -- you won't find here because we did build it from scratch, and we decided where we wanted to put buttons and certain mechanics. There are things for sure in the future we might look at bringing back as we layer in mechanics and stuff like that. But we wanted to really focus on what it would be like to take the pillars of Gears movement and combat and build a game around those pillars, but in 2026. What would that look like? What would that -- well, I was like, "When did we start and when did we end?" But what would it look like to build a game around those same pillars that the original Gears was built about, but do it today? Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: This is the exact moment that the Lancer becomes the retro Lancer, I feel like.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. There you go. Exactly.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: The moment of obsolescence.

MATT SEARCY: Except, of course, you can still get them and still cut guys' heads off.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And it's still really fun.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

MATT SEARCY: By the way, there's another tiny little thing tucked in here, which is Marcus has a couple of iconic scars in the other games.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yes. The lip scar.

MATT SEARCY: One of them he gets in prison, so you're not going to see him in this game. But one of them he gets on his lip right there. So all the Marcuses in the future, this was it. This is when he got it.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Drone's like, "Just I'm going to give you a little nick."

ARYAN HANBECK: There's one origin story left to tell, the origin of the durag.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah. We'll leave that for -- we'll leave that for --

TAI: Our roads converge again.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: We should talk actually about who is playing Tai because --

MATT SEARCY: Oh, yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: -- we have a new actor playing Tai Kaliso, Maateiwarangi Heta Morris, from New Zealand. He's the arm wrestling champion of New Zealand.

MATT SEARCY: Arm wrestling champion of New Zealand.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Is that how he got the role?

MATT SEARCY: He is Tai. He is Tai.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: This is his first game. He is a wonderful, wonderful human, and he really embodies Tai's spirit and his --

MATT SEARCY: And physicality. Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: And physicality. And just a fantastic all-around person.

ARYAN HANBECK: And tattoos.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah, and tattoos. So just really excited to kind of bring Tai into 2026. He's such a small part of Gears 2.

MATT SEARCY: But yeah, it's such a fan favorite.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Such a fan favorite. And we love him.

MATT SEARCY: And we were like -- it was an easy decision. It was like, "Who do we want to spend more time with?" Obviously Tai.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: So yeah.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. So we left a little treat at the end, obviously, just some smash cuts of things from across the campaign, which is, of course, just part of the game. But there's all sorts of stuff tucked in these shots.

ARYAN HANBECK: So much there.

MATT SEARCY: There's so much there. There's snippets of the -- even though it's all in one city, we get a huge range of environments, time of day. We go to the outskirts. You're seeing new enemies like the bile frog in there.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I was wondering. I was -- yeah. I feel like -- yeah, the spitting imulsion?

MATT SEARCY: He's spitting acid. So the cool -- there's lots of imulsion in the game. He's spitting acid. The cool thing about Locust coming from the Hollows is they enslave essentially Hollows creatures. So there's this untapped -- you want to imagine a creature? Exists in the Hollow. Frog that spits acid? Hell, yeah. And Gears is awesome at that stuff. We've had that Rockworms and all sorts of things in the past. But just this idea that anything could come out from underground. And we got to play with that. It's a nice mix of reimagining enemies we had and new enemies.

ARYAN HANBECK: There's definitely a few more that aren't in there.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Oh, yeah.

ARYAN HANBECK: Doesn't give everything away (inaudible).

NICOLE FAWCETTE: We didn't give everything away.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Just some brief teases.

MATT SEARCY: There's a couple other little just --

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Can we run -- let's run back through that again.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. There's a couple awesome little moments in here. You're going to see -- I think you'll see glimpses of new weapons. We have a Locust shotgun that fires raw imulsion and literally melts the skin off of people. Now, you see a Boomer execution in there. So if you get him to low health, you can actually take him down to the ground and cut his head off.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Has the Boomer always been that big? He's real beefy.

MATT SEARCY: No. I mean, he was in our minds. So now he is that big in real life.

ARYAN HANBECK: I think that's part of taking what we and fans remember and love from the old games and then adding a bit more to it. So I think the Boomer's 8 or 9 feet tall?

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Nine feet.

MATT SEARCY: He's over 9 feet tall.

ARYAN HANBECK: He can't go through doorways. He has to bust his way in, and it just looks awesome. That's why he's got to come down to a knee if you're going to take his head off.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah, and all these guys we were able to -- because we rebuilt it from scratch, we just -- we didn't want you to just fight an enemy the way you had in the past. So you get too close to a Boomer, he'll knock you and throw you back across the playing field. Of course, he's also going to yell "boom" and shoot. And actually, you'll see he's got a new -- this is the proto Boomshot. He's this big heavy Boomshot. It's different from the ones we've had in other games. But we were able to add little gameplay mechanics that essentially took what was cool about that Locust unit and create a more enhanced version of it that impacts how you play the game.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. A -- you see the Reavers, they're not just flying by you.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. They're not just turning in the middle of the ground. They'll fly and stick to a wall and crawl along it and drop off guys.

ARYAN HANBECK: They're going to fly and drop off guys.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah, they drop --

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Always they drop off guys. Yeah. So I mean, again, it's just it takes the imagining of Emergence Day and what you have in your imagination, and it brings it to life.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Aryan, Nicole, Matt, thank you so much for that tour of Kalona while it still remains.

MATT SEARCY: A little bit. A little bit of it.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It's just a little bit of that. I just want to talk a little bit before I let you go. It's the 20th anniversary of Gears. I still remember in 2006, before I ever worked in the industry playing with my buddy John Adams. We're playing E-Day together. I will find you. We will play this game together. But I'm just curious. What does that anniversary mean to you, and how has Gears remained so resonant for people after two decades?

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. It's a big deal to us. It means a lot to work on a franchise that's been around for so long. And I think it's exactly that. It's the memories you make with people. It's the experiences, whether you're playing the game in co-op and the game presenting these really fun moments that stick in your mind, perhaps like the first time you saw the Berserker or playing co-op together, playing versus, or playing Horde. Ultimately, a lot of it comes down to the memories you've made, as well as I think just a lot of the elements of Gears that are just so enduring -- the characters, their stories, Marcus and Dom, what they've gone through. The elements like the chainsaw Lancer, that over the top things. So I think there's a lot in Gears that just creates this enduring longevity that will be around for a long time. And it's really just, I think, an honor for us to be able to kind of steward that into the future.

ARYAN HANBECK: Yeah. I think for sure. It is an honor. But I think there's also kind of a personal, a little more personal side. A lot of the people that have been doing this for a long time that work in this building remember when Gears 1 came out. I remember when I was young in my career looking at the things they were doing at Epic, the art pipelines and the workflows. It was really industry-leading. It blew our minds. And we had to kind of like buy the books and look through the making ofs and stuff like that because information wasn't quite as readily available. And so to be able to sort of work on a game and add to that legacy and add to that franchise personally is a real honor and kind of a full circle moment.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. I think I don't necessarily think when we started with E-Day that we were targeting, "Oh, 20th anniversary." But we did feel in the studio all of us being huge fans, a bunch of us having worked on Gears for quite a while now and feeling that ownership and sort of importance of continuing the legacy, it did feel when the -- when it ended up lining up E-Day and this, it did feel like it made sense, that we had this vision of this game we wanted to make that was about -- making a game we wanted to -- a story we wanted to tell about those franchise icons, about kind of the emotional core of Gears. And obviously, every Gears game has taken some swings, and we wanted to take some too, and it just felt like an awesome time for us to line it up with that moment.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Well, thanks for bringing us new gameplay to look at. I'm very hyped up. The release date was announced. October 6 is when we're going to be playing this.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: But there's ways to get your hands on the sticks to try out that active reload before that. Can you tell us about what's going on?

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. For sure, we're going to have some betas this summer. Obviously, we want people to come and play, feel the game. Betas are a great way for us to test the game. That's what they're for. But it's a great introduction to the way the game plays, seeing bits of Kalona, and just a way to jump in and get back into Gears with your friends.

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Yeah. Make some more memories.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: What's the best way to follow The Coalition and Gears between now and then to find out the latest when those things go live?

NICOLE FAWCETTE: Gears of War on almost every platform.

MATT SEARCY: Yeah. We're going to have more stuff to talk about between now and launch, so we're excited to show things, and this is just the beginning.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: We cannot wait. So we will be tuned in. We will try to get you back, but you should go back and make the game and finish the game. We'll let you do that. And we will let you go as well. We have a ton more content coming out of the Summer Game Fest and from Xbox Games Showcase. So check that out wherever you're watching this podcast. Thanks, and we'll see you on the next one. [ Music ] [ XBOX sound ]