Gears Of War: E-Day Modernizes Movement Without Going Full Parkour

Popping Locust heads and active reloading has never looked better than in Gears of War: E-Day, but this prequel is also making some big changes to how you’ll move through the campaign. Movement has received a massive overhaul in the prequel, as Marcus Fenix and the rest of his squad can get around all manner of obstacles to reposition themselves while in combat. The game technically has a jump button for getting over larger obstacles like display cabinets, but don’t expect Gears of War: E-Day to turn the series into a platformer.

Speaking with GameSpot, The Coalition studio creative director Matt Searcy explained how Gears of War: E-Day fuses the traditional sticky cover-based systems established in previous games and evolves them to feel more organic. This was on full display in the Xbox Games Showcase, as the gameplay preview for Gears of War: E-Day showed Marcus Fenix moving between chest-high structures, mantling over taller structures, and using the environment to his advantage in surprising ways.

“How you move in, out, and along cover is a lot more natural,” Searcy said. “We still kept cover like it was in Gears, and having that heaviness was important. But being able to move in and out, being able to transfer between different cover shapes more smoothly–you’ll see us even interacting through car windows or through shelves–so there’s a lot more organic sort of interaction with cover. It’s such a core part of the game, we wanted to be able to expand it. You can slide under a car and blow up a guy, it’s a really cool move.”

“The mobility for us was more of a way to evolve the gameplay mechanics than a narrative device. Jumping in Gears, we will never be a platforming game. We don’t have levels that are about jumping to get to somewhere. For us, we saw it as a way to add a new dimension to flanking. Just being able to climb onto that high mantle–which you can either do from cover or you can jump onto–and then, just jumping across to another place and flanking someone, it opens up all of our levels.”

Gears of War: E-Day launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 3–but there’s no PS5 version–and an open beta kicks off in August.