Gears Of War: E-Day – The Coalition Talks Locust, Development Pressures, And Building ‘The Best F***ing Gears Game’

Note: We do touch on some very minor spoilers from the first chapter, so keep that in mind when reading through the conversation. Alright, without any further ado, let’s get into it!

Pure Xbox: What challenges did your team face when taking the Locust, an existing enemy we’ve been killing for a long time, and making them scary again?

Searcy: So, I think for us, the first thing we did was treated it as a reintroduction to the Locust. We knew people have been fighting against them for a decade, and we wanted to make them feel scary.

We started by just concept arting. We didn’t want to lose what made them look iconic, we just wanted to up the dread. So, even things like taking the armour off the Wretch to see what it might look like when it was just a starved dog that eats people, that was kind of the approach we took. We wanted to take the iconic element and then make it a little bit more brutal.

Then we think about what it would be doing that first night before we even get into guns and fronts and army, and that kind of led to how we approached the beginning of the game.

The first act is the first night, and we took a little bit of time with it before we slammed the armour on you and gave you all the weapons and everything, so that you could experience the reintroduction of the Locust the way that Marcus and Dom are feeling it.

Lyle: Yeah, we’re looking at this game as reintroducing that origin story of Gears with E-Day, and we wanted to give people that feeling of nostalgia, but also that terror again as well. And we knew that just having all the enemies work the same way as they did previously wasn’t going to be enough – it wasn’t going to give people that surprising moment.

So, for a lot of the enemies that we’re reintroducing, we tried to add some kind of little twist to them, and I think in the best cases we’ve drawn from something in the old games to bring that forward. So on the Wretch, for example, one of the Wretches does this shriek attack that will stun you, disorient you, and add this new element of chaos to the to the combat. And that was drawn from Gears 1 in the cinematic. The Wretch does this shriek. It doesn’t actually do anything in gameplay, but it’s something that we wanted to turn into an actual gameplay element that you could encounter in the campaign.

Then there’s the Seeder – we wanted to show players what it’s actually like to fight a Seeder that’s not just a static element in the environment. So, it’s able to flip upside down out of the ground, use its jaws to grab you, and you have to actually get it from under the ground to defeat it.

So basically, showing new dimensions and elements of the enemies that were hinted at in the previous games, and you were never able to actually fight against.

Pure Xbox: Yeah, I did like that. They turn around on you and you see this horrid little face, and you’re thinking, am I looking at its butt?

Searcy: I think we even slipped a line of dialogue where everybody’s confused about which end is his butt and which end is his face because that’s what’s iconic about that creature.

Pure Xbox: How would you describe the thinking behind Bravo Squad’s initial encounter with their first proper Locust Drone?

Searcy: That was inspired by the first Berserker moment in Gears 1. So, the first time you ever catch a glimpse of a Berserker, right? You see the shadow of him around a hallway, and he rips – I think it’s a stranded, and he rips apart – and so we wanted to give the drone, the first drone you ever saw, the same vibe as seeing the Berserkers.

So you know they’ve been fighting for 14 years. That was like an “oh sh*t” out of me moment. In this game, the first drone is the “oh sh*t” out of me. And so we took an inspiration from that and said, how do we create a scenario that might feel the same?

Pure Xbox: With the Xbox Series consoles entering into their twilight years, how did you decide Emergence Day was the right story to tell? And do you think the current-gen console hardware was enough to realise the city of Kalona in all its glory?

Searcy: I think we didn’t really target hardware as much as we were looking at the engine. When we started the project, the first decision we made before we even knew what game we were making was we knew we were going to go to Unreal Engine 5, and we knew that we were going to start from scratch because to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 5, we needed to sort of rebuild everything, so that started us talking about the pillars we wanted to build around and all of that.

And because we build for many PC specs, the way we treat Xbox is we do light up Xbox. We take full advantage of the hardware that we have there, and we treat it like one of our specs. Right? We treat it as something we optimise a little bit more for. So, I think because we’ve done it at The Coalition so many times, we mostly focused on how we wanted our engine to work.

When we started looking at what game we could make, E Day made a lot of sense, both in terms of the gameplay sandbox we were rebuilding, but also we realised the kind of density we could get in the world.

Of course, there’s elements of destruction and the Locust. You can kind of find ways to do that. You know, I’m sure it’ll be even better on the next hardware. But I think the density of the city is the thing that the current gen hardware and UE5 really helped us pull off in a way we never could have before.

Pure Xbox: How do you balance trying to appeal to new players and series veterans, and how early on in development do you start trying to figure that out?

Searcy: We did it right from concept. We picked E-Day because it was the story we wanted to tell. But as you build something, you find out what it’s good at, and very early on, we figured out that E-Day was going to be really good at being a game that all types of Gears fans could play.

By which I mean, if you are the hardest hardcore Gears fan, you’ve read all the books and played all the games. There’s so much lore in here that will pay off. You know, you’re getting to see E-Day, which is a story you wanted, but there’s tonnes of lore that will pay off connecting to details in the world and the books and all sorts of other things. If you’re a casual Gears fan and and you’ve either played recently or maybe you haven’t played since the original trilogy, it’s pretty easy to take your landmarks and get back into it, and and we can kind of play off all of those memories.

But the really nice thing about E Day is it’s an origin story, right? It’s not just the origin of the war with the Locusts, it’s also the origin of Marcus and Dom’s bond. So, I think we realised that all we needed was to make the game have all of those pieces in it, and it was going to naturally work.

We don’t think of it as trying to create a game for people who’ve never played Gears. We more think of it like there’s a bunch of Gears fans out there who don’t know they’re Gears fans yet, who like the things that are in Gears – either the tone, the themes, the gameplay, the visuals, whatever – and we’re hoping they’re going to fall in love with E-Day the for the same reason that we and all sorts of other people fell in love with the original trilogy.

Pure Xbox: How early on in development did you settle on the city of Kalona as the setting, and how important was it to have Marcus and Dom there when Emergence Day happened?

Searcy: Dom and Marcus came first. We knew we were gonna build a game around them, and we knew we were gonna build it on E-Day. And there’s just enough negative space in where they were on E-Day that we knew we could tell a new story, which was important to us. Kalona actually just had one little thread.

The cool thing about Gears as a franchise is, Epic even talked about this, there’s intentional negative space all over the place, right? So there’s a banner in Gears of War: Judgment that says “Remember Kalona” and we took that, and said, “Cool, what does that mean?” And there was no answer in the lore.

Three things kind of happened. We had that Kalona thread. We had Marcus and Dom, and then we made a decision to tell an intimate story because you can’t actually tell a compelling story about the scale of what was happening on Emergence Day, with millions of people dying on Sera, but we could tell the story about a squad in a battle in a place. And the original Gears games were really inspired by Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, and that’s how those war stories work, right? They can’t tell the whole story of some battle from World War II. They tell the story of a squad and where they were during that battle. So that’s kind of how we started manoeuvring those pieces around each other, and just sort of clicking the plot of the battle, the arc of the characters, the story of the city, and making them intertwine with each other.

Pure Xbox: Well, you’ve touched on Judgment, and I’ve noticed a lot of Judgment themes in E-Day. I was wondering what’s been your favourite thing from Judgment that you’ve brought into Gears E-Day?

Searcy: The Breechshot.

Lyle: Yeah, I was gonna say the Breechshot too. When I think back to Judgment, there’s a lot of things that I liked about it, but that weapon, just as like a quicker-firing, headshot beast kind of weapon, it’s just really fun to play with, and we use it a lot in campaign, both on the enemy side and the players’.

Searcy: It fits the Gears world so well. Sniper rifle with a giant blade to attach to it. You know, obviously a lot of E-Day is inspired by Gears 1 – Gears 1 and 2 especially – and you can see it’s dripping with that tone and inspiration. But all of the Gears games had something interesting because every Gears game has tried to add and do something or tell new stories or add mechanics, including Gears 4 and 5 and Hivebusters and everything else. So we took little bits and pieces of all those. But Gears 1 and 2 you can really feel are like the spiritual touchpoint for E-Day.

Pure Xbox: This feels like a really important game for Xbox as a whole, given that the 25th anniversary is in a month’s time and Gears is the closest first-party release to that anniversary. It’s also an Xbox console exclusive. How do you feel about that in terms of pressure, excitement, and all of the above?

Lyle: I mean, I think we just wanted to make a great game from the beginning. Because we were building this game from the ground up and sort of reinventing what Gears is, we’ve been really heads-down on how to make our passionate fanbase really happy with what they’re going to play, and also making it welcoming to all the new Gears fans. So, I’ve been blinders on, just trying to make a great game for seven-odd years now.

Searcy: I think we do feel a lot of pressure, but it’s our pressure, right? We know Gears and Xbox are very intertwined. They have been for 20 some-odd years. We look at our job as basically building the best f***ing Gears game we can build, and then because Gears is important to Xbox, that we’ll show up in the right place in the right time for Xbox.

This is a huge moment for us, honestly. At the Xbox Games Showcase this year, we got to start the show and end the show, which was really cool. Asha [Sharma, Xbox boss] just stood up there and talked about returning to Gears, and returning to Xbox. For our team, who’ve put in a lot of a lot of passion and a lot of work into this game, you build it whilst putting the pressure on yourself, and then those moments are very fulfilling as a studio to see it show up in a way that’s important for fans, but also in a way that’s important for Xbox.

Pure Xbox: Will chainsaw duels, meat shields, and frag tags ever make it into E-Day?

Searcy: Because we built Gears E-Day from scratch, we built from the inside out and we took out a lot of challenges. I think most people don’t realise how much work it is to rebuild just the core, and so we arrived at a place where we had some new stuff and some returning stuff, but the work to just get it all stood up and working at the level we needed for all three modes and everything – we kind of arrived at where we arrived naturally.

We love those things. We didn’t have them on a checklist and crossed them out. So I think there’s definitely a possibility they’re going to return at some point. We talk about them fondly, they just didn’t end up in the bubble when we got to where we got to.

We’d like to thank both Matt and Pax for chatting with us! Gears of War: E-Day is available for Premium and Ultimate Edition players, and will be joining Ultimate and PC Game Pass on October 6, alongside its full release on Xbox Series X|S.