Xbox announces Gears of War: E-Day

It’s a mad world once again. At its Xbox Games Showcase at Summer Game Fest, Microsoft revealed the latest entry in the sci-fi shooter series: Gears of War E-Day. It’s being developed by The Coalition, Xbox’s internal studio dedicated to all things Gears. The game doesn’t currently have a release date, but it being built on Unreal Engine 5.

The announcement trailer harkens back to the classic “Mad World” commercial for the original Gears. Fittingly, E-Day is set 14 years before the first Gears, and “tells the story of the first Locust emergence on Sera.” It once again stars Marcus Fenix and is being billed as an origin story.

This will be the first title in the series since Gears 5 in 2019, which was part of a plan from Microsoft to turn the franchise into a multimedia franchise on par with Halo. So far, that hasn’t exactly planned out, though there was a strategy spinoff called Gears Tactics in 2020, and Netflix announced plans for both a live-action film and an animated series set in the Gears universe. (There was also a Funko Pop-styled mobile game that shut down in 2021.)