At this year’s Xbox Showcase, players learned that the next chapter in the Gears franchise would take things back to the beginning. Gears of War E-Day will take place 14 years before the first Gears game, showing players firsthand the day the Locust horde invaded humanity’s home planet of Sera.
But that wasn’t always the plan according to Rod Fergusson, the former lead on the series. The original plan was a traditional follow-up to 2019’s Gears 5, which would’ve taken the series into the great beyond above.
Fergusson revealed during an appearance on IGN’s Podcast Unlocked that the next game in Microsoft’s third-person shooter franchise was meant to get players off the planet.
“I was just getting us off Sera,” Fergusson said. “That was something we were building to.”
Fergusson said that developer The Coalition had been planning for this next step as early as the last game.
“If you pay attention to the story in Gears 5 story, you'll come across the UIR [Union of Independent Republics] rocket technology,” he explained. “We were sort of laying the seeds in the ground that by taking over this UIR territory, we’ve also inherited their space program.”
Taking things into space was less about turning the Gears franchise into Star Trek, and more about shaking things up for the nearly 20-year-old series.
“I wanted to get you off Sera to encounter what that could mean to the rest of the galaxy or at least the rest of the solar system,” Fergusson said. “Not that you'd be hopping — again it was old Russian Sputnik type of tech. It wasn’t like ‘We’re just going to start Mass Effect-ing this.’ It was really about getting you to a new place to encounter what this looks like in a new setting and raise the stakes.”
He says that he wrote up this plan for the next step in the series before leaving to join Blizzard in early 2020 to oversee Diablo. However, it’s clear that the team decided to put that plan on ice for now.
This revelation that Gears 6 was the original plan isn’t much of a surprise for those who played Gears 5. Gears 5 ends on a significant cliffhanger that many fans hoped to see resolved sooner rather than later. Finding out earlier this year that a proper follow-through on those events is likely years away is disappointing, even if the replacement is taking the series back to its roots.
Despite his vision not coming to fruition, Fergusson said he’s excited to see what The Coalition does with E-Day. Despite the original trilogy referencing “Emergence Day” regularly, players never got to see what that fateful event looked like aside from a single cutscene. Fergusson said Epic Games refrained from depicting E-Day during the Xbox 360-era because the hardware couldn’t do it justice.
“That sense of an invasion of the size that you wanted,” he said. “We felt like we just couldn’t really pull off with the tech that we had at the time.”
He’s also looking forward to being just a fan of the series for the first time since its inception.
"It's a little surreal to have something come out about Gears that I haven't been involved in," Fergusson said. "I spent 15 years with Gears of War and basically every game that was made, I think like 9 or 10 total, I've been involved in all of them. So the idea there's something coming out that I had nothing to do with, it'll be interesting to see it as a fan.”
Gears of War: E-Day is set to release sometime in 2025. The game is expected to lean more into survival horror than previous entries, according to team leads on the project at The Coalition.
