As much as the Gears of War series has changed and evolved over the years, the signature horror that defined the original felt relegated to the past. Fortunately, The Coalition is going back to it with Gears of War: E-Day, a prequel set shortly after the emergence of the Locust.
It’s an exciting proposition, especially with the developer confirming a return to the original’s horror roots. Interestingly, art director Jerry O’Flaherty provided an apt comparison, calling the first game the “Alien” of the series while subsequent entries were more like “Aliens.”
“Agreed,” he said when asked by FRVR about E-Day channeling the first game’s horror. “It felt like… a franchise is gonna do what people do. I just felt like the first one had more of a horror [theme]. It felt like a horror with monsters, and then it quickly became a monster game, which is fine, people fricking love 2, 3, 4, but it was a little bit of a smaller, more isolationist nature to that horror game.
“If Gears 1 was Alien, the rest of the franchise was Aliens. It was a lot more, you know, there was a hiding of the bad guy, there was just the tension and the horror that you were pulling out of every location, and I loved that… I loved the horror aspect of what we did in the first one.”
While Epic Games (which developed the original trilogy) pushed Unreal Engine 3 with Gears of War 1, it went for a more cinematic presentation with a “reduced palette” and lots of darkness.
“Very early on, we knew we wanted to push cinematic content. We were doing it from even before Gears was properly in development; we were having to make videos to show Peter Moore, and there was this constant little back channel feeding of stuff we were working on. It was horror. It was a horror game, and horror is going to be a reduced palette; it’s going to be a lot of dark.”
Gears of War: E-Day launches in 2026 for Xbox Series X/S and PC. The Coalition has confirmed it will unfold over the course of several days and offer a “new feel” for the franchise.
