- Gears of War: E-Day Studio creative director Matt Searcy says players will “care about the fall” of the game’s singular urban setting
- Searcy says ‘environmental storytelling’ deepens game’s gameplay and exploration
- The game is linear, but players will have some freedom in how they explore and complete missions.
Coalition wants players to ‘care’ Gears of War: E-Daythe unique location of the city by deepening the exploration and environmental storytelling.
That’s according to the studio’s creative director Matt Searcy, who dove into all the juicy details about the prequel’s new mechanics and Kolana’s urban setting in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest 2026.
He said the team wanted Electronic day be different from the previous one Gears entries in terms of location, explaining this so that players care about a city that is going to be destroyed by the Locust Horde invasion.
“One of the big differences between Electronic day and others Gears titles, including Speeds 5is that rather than going from place to place, from desert to forest to glaciers, the whole game takes place in one city, so that has a lot of advantages now,” Searcy said.
“There are a lot of distinct neighborhoods in the city, so there’s tons of variety, so don’t worry, some of them won’t look the same. But we really wanted the city to look like a character in our game. For the first time in a franchise, you’re going to see something being destroyed, because it’s always already destroyed. […] and for you to care about the city falling, you have to care about the city, about this place, and to raise the stakes, we have to be able to go further.”
To translate this: Electronic day is limited to a single location, the city, allowing the studio to “go much further” in terms of world-building and “environmental storytelling”.
For example, players can travel through several areas of the city, such as downtown, historic and military districts, and encounter things like abandoned apartments and unfinished meals, showing that people left in a hurry.
Players will also explore areas before they are destroyed, then when they revisit them later, they will be visually different, with certain environmental assets and objects that will cue players if they don’t recognize them.
“Throughout the game, you start to feel the feeling that the characters are feeling, that the city is crumbling around us, and it’s sad,” Searcy said.
He later confirmed that the game is still linear and players cannot go off and do whatever missions they want, but the environmental storytelling helped deepen the exploration and gameplay of this “intimate journey”.
“You’re supposed to go to that place and do what someone tells you to do. [do]“, he said, “but how you make your way there, through that neighborhood, what you encounter; other people fight, survive, [you can] help them along the way.
“What you see in the rubble of the city, the environmental storytelling, it allowed us to get a lot more variety in our gameplay than how you play the game, but also tell all these stories about Kalona that you might not have gotten otherwise. [seen] if we went corridor after corridor and corridor.”
Gears of War: E-Day lwill launch on October 6 exclusively for Xbox Series X and Series S.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
