How The Gears of War: E-Day Creative Team Updated The Prequel - "How Players Remember It"

Published Oct 1, 2026, 9:56 AM EDT

Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com

Gears of War: E-Day is a big swing for the series. The first mainline game in the franchise since 2019's Gears 5, E-Day is a prequel that revisits one of the franchise's most important days. The game isn't just a modern update of the series, though. The dev team used Unreal Engine for the new game, which brought in plenty of new elements without undermining the franchise's legacy.

It's a big turn for the series, and the team was excited to explore it. Coalition Creative Director Matt Searcy and Art Director Aryan Hanbeck sat down with Screen Rant to discuss Gears of War: E-Day, the challenge of making the game feel fresh while staying consistent with the older games, and the biggest surprises they encountered during development.

E-Day Is All About Taking The Series Forward, Even As A Prequel

In the Gears of War lore, "E-Day" is considered one of the grimmest moments in human history. It was when the Locust first broke through the surface of Sera, setting off a grisly war that would take seventeen years to resolve and cost countless lives. It's always been a benchmark of the game universe, but one that had never truly been seen firsthand.

According to Searcy, that was a big part of why they wanted to move backwards in the timeline instead of forward -- but it wasn't the only reason. "It was a multi-part process that got us to E Day. The first was moving to Unreal Five. Even before we knew we were making E-Day, we knew we were going to make a new game with new technology."

"We were going to build something that could be like a new Gears game being built in 2025... we started talking about the pillars of the franchise, what makes Gears feel so unique. We wanted to tell a story that was really like in touch with the heart of Gears. As we started looking at different concepts for that story, the one that excited us the most was E-Day. It's a story we've wanted to tell. It's something fans have wanted to see."

Aryan Hanbeck added that for the art team, that shift in focus was a perfect opportunity to play in the franchise sandbox. "As an art director, I love the darker side of Gears. That's just part of the aesthetic that I gravitate towards. E-Day is one of the darkest moments in the lore, so that was super exciting. That wasn't the reason we did it, but that was exciting. We got to tell a darker story. We got to change the art direction to support that. It was exciting!"

The biggest challenge for the team, according to Searcy, was balancing the ideals of what the series has been and finding ways to improve on what it could be. "I think we took a little something from every Gears game. We asked ourselves what it would look like to make Gears in 2025 on the pillars of the original game.

"We've been working on crafting Gears games for over a decade. We understand the mechanics of it. We understand the craft of it. What would it look like to build that game now? What would the combat mechanics look like? What would our ambitions for cinematics look like? I think you're going to see a lot of touchpoints from all the Gears games.

"There's real inspiration from [the first two games] in terms of the tone, the dread, the themes. It's about highlighting the things that make Gears feel unique in the first place but still be a whole new game. We built on everything that's come since the original Gears game in the industry and made something that felt like a modern interpretation of those original games."

That focus on bringing back the vibes of the past without being beholden to them extends to the narrative and characters like Dom Santiago, who returns in full force for the game following his tragic demise in Gears of War 3. Carols Ferros reprises the role and was ecstatic to revisit the character from a new angle.

"I can kind of confidently say that my reputation precedes me because I've been playing the character for so long. I've been very careful and very caring about how he came across in [the original] three games, but also the prequel in four, and the multiplayer in five. There's something to keeping his authenticity intact, and also legitimizing whatever story we're telling.

"It's been a joy to have a character that I played for so long, who I understand profoundly. I understand how we get to all these different milestones and tentpole moments in the franchise and how he feels about all of them. E-Day was an exciting way to share more of who this guy was before we knew him.

"I've known who he was before E-Day, and that's what I was trying to communicate... I care about my characters profoundly, and it means a lot to me to have an opportunity to share who they are at every point of the game. This was a profound opportunity for me to show everybody who he was in that period of E-Day. I had to find him too, so it's a joy to have other people find him there."

Gears Of War Gets More Than Just A Fresh Coat Of Paint For E-Day

Gears of War has reshaped itself in plenty of ways over the years, especially once it shifted forward in time for Gears of War 4 and 5. Those games shifted the timeline forward and introduced new characters, including a new generation of the Fenix family. "We had ambitions about what they would look like and sound like," Searcy explained. "But a lot of it, we knew because it was a port [of the old engine]. I've worked on some games from scratch that are new games, and you go on a journey to figure out what it is.

"Those other Gears of War games were built on top of the older ones. [Gears of War: E-Day] was such an interesting project because it is a new game. We wanted to feel like Gears, but we didn't just want to recreate anything. We were sort of playing with mechanics, playing with things."

"I think the jump is the big one. Jump surprised me the most. We tried doing a jump before. I think at the beginning of Gears 5 we tried that, and it just felt wrong with the way those mechanics were built. Because we were redoing the sandbox from scratch, we gave ourselves a little more leeway.

"We kind of got a jump mechanic that felt weighty, didn't feel like it was going to break the game, felt like it would add this new level of strategy. I remember sitting in a room with like a dozen or more level designers, artists, gameplay people. We all looked at each other and just had to figure it out from there on."

We wanted a game that felt like what you remembered playing Gears of War was like.

That embrace of the past and eye towards the future was key to the art design team's approach as well. "When we started thinking about what the story would be and where we wanted to take the visuals, we knew we were going to make this dark and gritty. We want everything to be imperfect.

"There's mud and blood on the camera, film grain, chromatic aberration, lens flares, everything stacking on top of each other, but it all toppled over at a certain point. We looked at it and realized people aren't going to accept this. They're going to think we don't know what we're doing. We need to be a little bit more mindful... we're doing things a little bit more purposefully, so we don't tip it.

"If you tip it past that line, people just go, 'oh, the rendering didn't do the right thing, the art direction wasn't right '; it can ruin the experience. Right, and that's certainly not what we wanted. We wanted a game that felt like what you remembered playing Gears of War was like. Finding that was really important."

Looking past Gears of War: E-Day, the team admitted that they're mainly focused on the new game before envisioning where the series goes from here. However, they noted that the event spans multiple days of invasion. "There's a ton of space in the lore, things we can tell between now and what people know about that era. It's an exciting time for us to get this game out, there's a lot of room to manuver for what we want to do next."

Gears of War: E-Day

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