Microsoft’s big Xbox game showcase was back with a vengeance for summer 2024. The more than an hour-long showcase delivered plenty of release dates, and Xbox game announcements, including a 2025 release window for Fable and some new gameplay, alongside a November launch date for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, some more Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gameplay, and even a first look at the Perfect Dark reboot.
But as The Verge reports, the two biggest surprises of the event were Doom: The Dark Ages, followed by the reveal of Microsoft’s latest entry in the sci-fi shooter series: Gears of War: E-Day later in the show. It’s being developed by The Coalition, Xbox’s internal studio dedicated to all things Gears. The game doesn’t currently have a release date, but it being built on Unreal Engine 5.
The announcement trailer harkens back to the classic “Mad World” commercial for the original Gears. Fittingly, E-Day is set 14 years before the first Gears, and “tells the story of the first Locust emergence on Sera.” It once again stars Marcus Fenix and is being billed as an origin story.
This will be the first title in the series since Gears 5 in 2019, which was part of a plan from Microsoft to turn the franchise into a multimedia franchise on par with Halo. So far, that hasn’t exactly planned out, though there was a strategy spinoff called Gears Tactics in 2020, and Netflix announced plans for both a live-action film and an animated series set in the Gears universe. (There was also a Funko Pop-styled mobile game that shut down in 2021.)
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