October 2026 will be one of the busiest months of the year for the gaming industry. Already on Tuesday, October 6, gamers will have the opportunity to play a large-scale prequel to the cult Gears of War franchise. The shooter Gears of War: E-Day will take players 14 years before the original game, with young Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago at the center of the story, writes UNN.
Details
Gears of War: E-Day takes players back to the series’ origins and tells the story of the day humanity first encountered the Locust invasion. The events take place 14 years before the original Gears of War, with young Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago at the center of the story. Players will have to survive the first hours of Emergence Day, when an ordinary city turns into a battlefield within minutes.
The first game in the series was released way back in 2007. According to the plot, which unfolds on the planet Sera, humanity was at war with itself over an energy resource—Imulsion (a glowing underground liquid). The Coalition of Ordered Governments won this war. Just a few days after the long-awaited peace treaty was signed, hordes of monsters—the Locust—suddenly attacked from underground. On the very first day, a quarter of the planet’s population was killed.
In desperation, the Coalition activated the Hammer of Dawn satellite weapon. The weapon burned down major cities and destroyed billions of people and Locust, but it did not solve the problem: the monsters hid deep underground.
Fourteen years after Emergence Day, former Sergeant Marcus Fenix, who was serving a prison sentence for desertion, is freed by his friend Dominic "Dom" Santiago.
Marcus is assigned to Delta Squad. Their goal is to infiltrate the Locust underground tunnels and activate the Lightmass bomb to destroy the enemy’s lair.
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The new installment will use Unreal Engine 5, allowing the developers to significantly enhance the detail of the environments, lighting, and characters themselves. The familiar cover-based firefights remain at the core of the series, but E-Day makes them more dynamic thanks to additional verticality and movement options.
It should be noted that the game will be released only on PC and Xbox Series S | X, meaning it will not be playable on PlayStation. The developers of Gears of War: E-Day consider Xbox exclusivity an advantage, as it allowed them to focus on a single hardware platform and achieve high graphical quality at 60 FPS with hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
For The Coalition team, Microsoft’s decision to return to an exclusives policy became a source of pride. Creative director Matt Searcy and art director Arjan Henbeck believe that the opportunity to present such a project confirms the studio’s technical expertise.
According to the creators, working with a limited range of hardware made it possible to avoid spending resources adapting the game for numerous platforms and to get the most out of Unreal Engine 5. The technologies used include MegaLights, which makes it possible to illuminate scenes simultaneously with hundreds of dynamic light sources, and Lumen global illumination.
"This way, we can ensure high quality," the developers noted.
According to them, the impressive graphics, smooth animation enabled by the motion-matching system, and photorealistic cutscenes rendered in real time became possible because quality was prioritized over the goal of releasing the game on every competing platform.
Minimum requirements:
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit 22H 19045.7291;
- processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Intel i7‑6850K / i5‑10400;
- RAM: 12 GB RAM;
- graphics card: Hardware Ray Tracing capable GPU is required. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 / NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 6600 / Radeon RX 9060;
- DirectX: version 12;
- disk space: 115 GB of available space.
The following specifications are recommended for a more comfortable gaming experience:
- OS: Windows 11 64bit (25H2);
- processor: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 / Intel i5-11600K;
- RAM: 16 GB RAM;
- graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 / NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060ti / AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT / Radeon RX 9060 XT;
- disk space: 115 GB of available space.
The game's price in Ukraine starts at 2,299 hryvnias. By the way, gamers who pre-ordered the game were given the opportunity to play it a week before release, and, according to SteamDB, on the first day of early access, the peak number of players online exceeded 20,000 — nearly twice as good as the result achieved by Gears 5.
For comparison: in Gears of War: Reloaded, released in 2025, fewer than 5,000 people were playing simultaneously at its peak.