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The Coalition decorated its testing lab with Gears of War merch old and new during its campaign preview event. The signature piece is this life-sized model of the game's hero, Kait Diaz.Sam Machkovech
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Some merch tie-ins from games old and new.Sam Machkovech
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That's gold, Jerry. Gold.Sam Machkovech
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Do not touch.Sam Machkovech
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Key art from the new game, along with its source pencil sketch.Sam Machkovech
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Some custom character masks flanking a few gameplay stations.Sam Machkovech
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A zoom on one of these.Sam Machkovech
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Sadly, this isn't a new weapon in the game.Sam Machkovech
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I asked The Coalition to pump in the Bodycount song from Gears 3's promotional push, but they did not oblige. Ah well.Sam Machkovech
VANCOUVER, British Columbia—Gears of War 5, which launches on Windows 7, Windows 10, and Xbox consoles starting on September 6, is not yet in a reviewable state, in terms of how we typically talk about video games' value. But based on what I've already seen of the sprawling game (the sixth of its series), that may already be a moot point.
After a six-hour gameplay event at Microsoft's Coalition studio—and hours more spent testing its online versus options in a July beta test—I've come to a conclusion that I can't shake off. The Xbox Game Pass subscription service now has its official, signature game: the something-for-everyone blockbuster that lands less as a "must-buy" product and more as a no-brainer action game to sample. If you're already paying for Xbox Game Pass ($10/mo on console, or $5/mo on Windows 10 for a limited time), Gears of War 5 arrives with a Baskin Robbins counter of surprisingly varied action options, all easy to try with a tiny, silver spoon.
Start with an open-world twist to the campaign, which hews to the "cover-shooter" formula of old while injecting just enough new ideas. From there, sample a thoughtful expansion of the "Horde" co-op mode. You can also dive into multiple flavors of online versus battling and an admittedly unproven "Gears of Duty: Zombies" option, too (dubbed "Escape"). On top of those, The Coalition has built one of the most compelling new "helper" characters I've ever seen in a shooter, one tailored specifically for people who might otherwise prefer not to play, for both its campaign and Horde modes.
Is that combined package worth a $60 purchase? Maybe. At the very least, aiming less for the $60 sale and more for the Xbox Game Pass content proposition is already a good thing for a series that I was seriously ready to shrug off. Call Gears of War 5 anything you want, but it sure isn't "lazy."
It's not all gushing praise
The above introduction sounds pretty positive—and for good reason—so I'd like to offer some reality-checking notes before diving further.
First off, Microsoft's timing on promoting this game, arguably its biggest holiday Xbox exclusive, is bizarre. We expect "big campaign reveal" blowouts at events like June's E3. Instead, Microsoft and The Coalition left us scrambling to put together impressions only 11 days before the game unlocks for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, on September 10.
Coalition studio head and Creative Director Rod Fergusson argued that this PR timeline is an intentional reaction to how crowded the gaming marketplace is in 2019. "When we did Gears 4, we started the hype fire 18 months before launch, constantly reheating and reheating. It's better to save a bunch of stuff up to allow us to be loud right before the very end."
My experience with the games industry, on the other hand, makes me suspicious of another possibility. The development team didn't hint to it, but I wonder if the game's many moving parts (so many moving parts) didn't necessarily snap into place until very late in production. I acknowledge some of that suspicion between the bits of praise below.
Additionally, this game does not see The Coalition breaking the Gears series out of its most familiar elements. Here's the checklist: third-person combat; constantly ducking behind chest-high cover; previously seen weapons, including the usual half-gun-half-chainsaw Lancer; and a lot of enemies returning from prior entries. If you hate this kind of gameplay, a lot of the Gears 5 package will leave you unmoved. (With one exception, hinted at above.)
But if you, like me, were ready for The Coalition to shake this series up with fundamentally new ideas, there is enough new here to get disenfranchised players back on board.
Listing image by Sam Machkovech
A campaign I actually want to play
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Though Microsoft provided these images, and they clearly look like they're captured from the highest-end PC imaginable, I can confirm that these are all from real-time cut scenes. The character renders really do look this impressive in game (though obviously less so once the camera pulls away to action portions).
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JD has been through some serious stuff since we last saw him. But I didn't see what that was about during the preview event.
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Dez and JD square off about Kait's troubling developments.
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Kait lets this amulet do the talking in asking Marcus for a favor.
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Out of all the images in this gallery, this is the most clearly "sweetened" one, but it still does a good job showing off how the blood-red sand portions of Act III look pretty phenomenal in action.
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Baird returns as a doctor of sorts.
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Kait, Jack, and Dez prepare to ride through the ice.
Most of my time at this week's Vancouver event was dedicated to the game's campaign portion, which appears to be made up of four acts. Members of the press were allowed to test parts of acts II and III, so we have no sense how long the introductory or conclusion portions of the game last, nor do we know whether they're anywhere near as sprawling and awesome as the parts we did play.
It's a tricky way to sample a campaign—no sense of the plot's introduction, and a fast-forward to major spoilers—but for the sake of this spoiler-free preview, I can piece together the basic thrust. The co-op campaign stars Kait Diaz, who debuted in Gears 4 as one of Marcus Fenix's successors. Here, she takes center stage years since the last game's events in search of answers to her mysterious past. (We're reminded in a "previously on Gears" video that the last game ended with a vague hint to her unusual origins.) That search leads her to a potentially tide-changing assault on the Swarm hives that have bred the world's current monsters (which evolved from the more familiar Locust foes).
The focus on Kait as a troubled hero is the breath of fresh air that Gears' writing has needed since its peak in Gears 3. Marcus has graduated to a Gears elder statesman, in terms of offering guidance and wisdom either as a sidekick or a voice in a headset. His grumpy brand of assistance is a much better foil for the younger main characters than in the last game.
Speaking of, the last campaign's whiny JD Fenix is pushed aside as a bit character, all for the better. His own trauma, disillusion, and secrets contribute to some welcome plot tension, which Kait and her primary squadmate Dez must contend with. But Kait's mix of heroics and personal torture make her journey really compelling to follow. Her vulnerability comes from her relationships with beloved family members, not from token gendered stories, and it's handled with some surprising grace. (Not to mention some clever and messed-up situations that push her to her limits.)
What's more, Kait and Dez shine the brightest in their between-mission banter, which straddles the fine line between "we have experienced serious trauma" and "the only way we're gonna survive is if we laugh." The last game never nailed that balance, always erring on the side of tonally deaf humor happening after a major character suffered a setback or loss. Here, however, I grew to really identify with Kait and Dez as military allies. Even in limited preview form, their bond is already darned impressive, and mostly for subtle reasons.
Skiff from a rose on the gray
There's a reason for more between-mission banter this time around: the Skiff.
Though some of the campaign content I encountered was straight-line fare, much of it required boarding and riding the Skiff, a wind-driven ski-boat, across a giant, open world. (Thus, your cast of soldiers will have a bit longer to chat between battles than in previous games.) I saw two open-world zones during my preview time, in the frozen wilds of Act II and the burnt-sand expanses of Act III. My first impression of this change to the Gears formula was admittedly ho-hum.
When my characters first boarded the Skiff, the game served a brief tutorial, then showed me two possible destinations in the distance. One was clearly marked on my map as a campaign mission, and the other wasn't. I could ride around on open, vast plains, then dock freely and hop off to run and shoot, but there wasn't any payoff to being on foot anywhere besides the clear landmarks. So I rode to both, and each served a standard-issue Gears combat arena. Are they just padding out the time spent between missions with this open-world traversal thing?
In the course of riding the Skiff and exploring a mix of primary and optional missions, however, something clicked. For one, the Skiff is a blast to whip around on. I love the wind-swept quality of the game's particle effects and the gentle drifting of its archaic body while speeding across the game's open plains. Also, the amount of time riding on that pleasant Skiff between objectives fits neatly into the accordion-squeeze pause of combat that co-op players might seek.
Perhaps more important is how the game's combat arenas don't have to be as logically chained together as in previous, straight-line entries. After so many Gears games, shooting through an endless city with a half-dozen conveniently placed battlegrounds can feel ridiculous and inorganic. But what if players can ride on a Skiff a great distance and encounter a mix of massive towers, tucked away plane wreckage, and underground dives into the plot's seediest elements? We do still see a few traditional, longer missions, but there's something about hopping off the Skiff (which is required for most combat encounters), squeezing through a narrow passageway, and having new tension come from a combat arena looking nothing like earlier games—the kind that either winds around in a circle back to your Skiff, or leads to a crazy dead-end that then auto-warps you back to your bulky windcraft.
While I enjoyed this first-blush impression of the Skiff, I noticed some funky stuff in terms of mission placement and "open world" design that makes me wonder how last-minute its development truly was. The Skiff comes with a mounted gun, which "player two" can operate and shoot, but I didn't find any open-world combat in my test. I also didn't find emergent battling in the middle of the games' plains, akin to the likes of Borderlands or Destiny. I had to park at a waypoint to find any Gears-calibre action. Fergusson hinted to more dynamic, open-world combat in the Skiff portions (see the sidebar), so I hope his promise pays out in later campaign portions.
And then there's the issue of the game's outdoor scenes suffering from an insane number of invisible walls and awkward geometry blockades. At times, it's as ridiculous as stuff from 2011's The Witcher 2. It wasn't enough to torpedo my interest in the game, by any stretch, but a certain generation of games fan will absolutely be driven nuts by this sloppy edge of the campaign.
Tech details, bricked dev kits
That nitpick about invisible geometry aside, though, Gears of War 5 is an absolute stunner in action. On consoles, the massive draw distances, detailed character models, crowded battle scenes, and varied world geometry all add up to a more stunning package than what we saw in Gears 4. I would argue that Gears 4 has more iconic, breathtaking moments (particularly its dramatically lit nighttime thunderstorm scene) than what I've seen so far in Gears 5, but that's only by a hair, and there's still plenty of Gears 5 content waiting for me.
On PC, that performance profile is boosted by a tantalizing upgrade to shadow and particle systems. There's no getting around how greedy the game is in terms of pumping clouds of dust, snow, frost, and sand into its beat-by-beat gameplay, particularly while racing through open plains on the Skiff.
The Coalition has an ambitious performance profile in mind: 60fps on all versions of Xbox One, in 1080p resolution on standard and 4K on Xbox One X. We only got to see the premium console in action at the preview event, but that 4K/60fps mark seems to have been hit (with real-time cinematics slowing down to 4K/30fps). That 4K mark on XB1X, by the way, is the result of temporal reconstruction, so while it's not a purely rendered 4K resolution, it's certainly sharper than the popular "4K checkerboard" technique.
What's more, both platforms support split-screen local co-op so that three players can tear through the campaign at 1080p/30fps on normal Xbox One and 4K/30fps on Xbox One X. And in thank-the-lord-almighty news, The Coalition has announced that split-screen co-op is also coming to PC, so if your system is beefy enough, you could very well run three people on the same 4K monitor at 60fps and above.
Want more? How about nearly arbitrary monitor resolution support? Gears of War 5 will natively support the bonkers widescreen ratio of 32:9. I locked eyes with the preview event's demonstration monitor to see that this indeed worked in action, and it was absolutely breathtaking—like playing some insane widescreen racing game from '90s arcades. "I fought to include widescreen support," Coalition Technical Director Mike Rayner said in an interview with Ars. "We do a fair amount of work to scale to arbitrary resolutions. But it's totally worth it. PC players who invest in those monitors are delighted to see a game take advantage of them."
Rayner told Ars that the game's console jump to 60fps, from Gears 4's 30fps lock on console, revolved around a number of factors. A lot of that boiled down to "moving a lot of CPU work onto the GPU," he said, including core particle systems, destruction systems, and lighting systems. These changes, plus an investment in new asynchronous compute routines, resulted in a crazy issue, otherwise unheard of in the controlled space of console development: "Midway through development, a bug emerged that bricked a couple of our dev kits," he said. "We were going beyond the GPU profile. They hadn't seen that much power consumption come out of a game, we'd optimized that much."
Between that, a better handling on the mature Unreal Engine 4, "close work" with Microsoft's Visual Studio team, a dedicated mesh-management system via Simplygon, and a physics-system swap to Havok (now wholly owned by Microsoft), Rayner said that the team could not only double the engine's enemy count but also double the game's core simulation speed. Plus, somehow, The Coalition has pushed the engine to such limits that it's rendering every single one of its campaign cinematic scenes in real time, all while loading the next gameplay level's assets in the background.
Jack of many, many trades
One thing that emerges in the course of Gears 5 gameplay is a subtle increase in distant enemies, whether camped out on ledges or taking shots from bridges above. They're not a constant nuisance by any stretch, but they're noticeable enough to force the question: How exactly are you supposed to deal with those when you're a lumbering duck-and-cover soldier, used to the old games' rush-with-a-shotgun flow?
The answer is Jack. Oh, boy, is it Jack.
This robotic, floating droid is essentially the third player in the campaign. In solo mode, Jack will float around like another AI squadmate, occasionally shooting electric shock attacks or helping allies, but the active player is expected to maintain Jack's most powerful moves and its loadout of skills and perks. The droid's most useful quality is in dispatching distant foes. While aiming at a foe or location, tap your gamepad's Y button, and Jack will fly to that point and unleash a rechargeable ability, like an instant static shock or a proximity grenade. When you're not aiming, that Y button will activate a temporary perk like making all enemies visible, even those behind cover, or granting extra shields to the party.
In terms of solo gameplay, Jack is unobtrusive and easy to maintain. You'll save his best powers for a messy situation, then pop his Y-button abilities before running and flanking in the opposite direction—meaning, this still works as a tactical, hop-to-cover shooting experience. The droid doesn't dilute or water down the blood-pumping action. (It can also activate switches on the battlefield, which can do things like turn on steam valves to harm enemies, or pick up useful items and ammo drops and bring them back to players.)
But where Jack really becomes interesting is if a real-life player takes its controls. The campaign is built from the ground-up to work as a three-player co-op experience. Kait and Dez each work like standard Gears combatants, but Jack's impact on co-op will be ripped off by other game developers for the rest of time. It's a magical, floating, often-invisible orb, and its impact on combat is a lot less about firepower and a lot more about tactical awareness.
Jack's default state is invisible, so when you stand still or float in any direction, it will remain unseen. Jack only has one standard-fire attack: a wimpy laser with a very tiny striking radius. You have to be very close to enemies to hit them, and you can hold down the fire button to turn that hit (which lights the foe up and makes it visible to your allies) into a full-blown stun (which shocks the enemy into freezing still for about one second). Doing the latter, however, leaves Jack visible and thus makes it more susceptible to taking fire from enemies. Whoever controls Jack also manages its Y-button special powers, along with its full array of perks.
I eventually tested Jack, and I lit up within seconds. I could move around a battlefield incredibly quickly to pick up items, stun foes, and offer generally useful feedback to my squadmates via headset. I didn't need to aim at anything. I could instantly hover-leap over most obstacles on the battlefield. And I could do most of that without putting myself in the line of fire, if I wanted to.
As in... I could be really, really bad at video games and still be useful. My jaw hit the floor. Why has nobody else pulled off a co-op character like Jack? Forget the Super Mario Galaxy gimmick where a second player could aim a Wii-mote and point at shiny stars. This was a new level of newbie-friendly action access.
A tiny taste of Horde
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A peek at Horde mode in gallery form. Microsoft provided these images, though it's missing some stuff from the event's presentation.
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Difficulty is dynamic, and the more difficulty toggles you select, the higher-value card drops you can expect after a given match.
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Also, you can expect a more heavy metal album cover logo as you crank it up.
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We saw nine characters in all during the preview, including six Gears series soldiers and three guests (two from Halo Reach, plus Terminator's Sarah Connor).
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Everything about the cards is a bit up in the air, as we didn't get to flip through or pick these out. But this is a hint to how they'll work. Equip up to five at once.
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According to the game's multiplayer leads: "Every time you receive new cards at the end of a Horde match, duplicates update your existing cards, only for your current character, only for skills you have unlocked. You'll never get a card that's useless. It's always relevant to you." (These cards cannot be purchased with real-world money.)
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Looks pretty Horde-like, yeah?
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The Fabricator returns from Gears 4.
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You can also spend currency between rounds on stats. The development team compared this to a MOBA, where you accrue currency during the match, and this is always wiped anew at the start of a new game.
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Duck and cover.
My Jack test technically came within the game's Horde mode, which I tested for an hour. For the uninitiated: Horde mode lets five friends group up and take on increasingly tough waves of AI enemies while defending a central base point, which can be picked up and moved around as needed. If all teammates die in a round, or the base point is destroyed, the whole game is over. Earn points within a match to spend on fortifications, turrets, decoys, weapons, ammo, and more, in order to even the increasingly difficult odds.
Anybody familiar with Horde knows that a single hour of its co-op mayhem isn't a great indicator of what to expect, since its sessions usually last nearly two hours a pop and are meant to be played repeatedly with a group of known friends. Plus, I haven't yet seen its economy in action.
Gears 4 introduced a new system of cards to the Horde mode, which you could slap on your soldier for various bonuses to specific weapons, specific maneuvers, and mid-game economy boosts. But earning cards for your favorite class or playstyle was an utter pain, since the cards were all random drops, and the only way to truly push the needle for cards you wanted was to pay for loot boxes.
The Coalition confirms that this loot box economy is now completely wiped from Gears 5's Horde mode (and from all modes and shops, even cosmetics). I'm heartened by how the economy this time is being advertised as "a linear progression," but that's not 100% true. You'll still receive random cards after playing Horde matches, but they'll now be limited to "your current character, and only for skills you have unlocked," Coalition reps said at the event. That's better than last time, at any rate.
Instead of selecting a bespoke class this time, you'll choose a hero, which comes with class-like designations—but also, unlike last game, only one player per match can be a specific hero. You can't have two Kaits and three Marcuses filling out a five-person Horde squad this time. Thus, Horde squads will have a more organic variety of gameplay styles by default, leaving one player to focus on building fortifications, one on running into waves of combat, and one to zip around as Jack. As someone who stinks at Horde mode, I loved being useful in the Jack role, in terms of shouting out new threats, ferrying distant items to teammates, and healing allies in a pinch. (But, again, there's a one-character limit, so expect a mad rush for online players to claim Jack.)
Hints of the rest
The other content didn't feature much at this week's preview event, though in one mode's case, I am already smitten. The game will ship with as many as 11 versus modes, though The Coalition is mostly loudly promoting "Arcade" and "Escalation." I tested both during the game's tech test this summer, and Arcade mode is my immediate preference, as it offers a cleverly tuned version of otherwise familiar combat. Run speeds are tweaked. Shotgun damage is turned down. Long-range weaponry becomes stronger.
These numerical tweaks all add up to a huge change: the series' classic "roll-and-shotgun" bombast no longer works as a default winning strategy. And since the campaign similarly favors more long-range attacking options, the shift feels appropriate.
Escalation, meanwhile, doubles-down on the game's aggressive, original tuning with a five-on-five combat mode that sees both teams weighing factors like limited pools of life and weapon spawn points. Your team can go crazy in a given round and respawn dead members repeatedly to capture control points, but that'll wreck your limited pool of respawns. So you may very well toss a round to save those lives and try again later. Doing that, however, will afford the winning team a preferential choice of new weapon on the battlefield so they can more likely pick it up and enjoy an advantage.
During the tech test, this mode proved quite watchable on livestreaming platforms, but in action, its zillions of pauses and selection waits felt utterly plodding. Since we didn't see any updates to this mode during our preview event, we don't know whether its general sense of speed and flow has since been improved.
"Escape," which I briefly saw at this year's E3, hacks the co-op conceit of Horde down to the bone. Its combat is whittled down to three simultaneous players and forces teammates to constantly run and reset their tactical positions in an overrun underground facility instead of hunkering down and building fortifications. I called it "Gears of Duty: Zombies" earlier, and that's what I'm going to keep calling it. I've never been charmed by Call of Duty's co-op zombies mode, but people sure seem to love it, and this sure looks and feels similar. Whether Gears is the right control and combat system for mindless, all-over-the-place waves of zombies, as opposed to pure FPS games like Call of Duty and Left 4 Dead, remains to be seen.
Fergusson told me that Escape was built at least in part as a response to data that pointed to lower user uptake on the demanding, lengthy Horde mode. "That's your Saturday afternoon, not a quick game right before dinner," he said. He calls Escape a "photonegative" of Horde, in terms of emphasizing offense over defense.
We also know that a map-building mode is coming to the game, but we were given zero hands-on with that, let alone any screens or videos to see how it might work. The game's multiplayer leads told Ars that Escape was originally built to deliver procedurally generated levels, but those random combat arenas didn't work as effectively as other gameplay tweaks to nail the right mix of familiarity and tension. The dev team was thus left with a ton of pre-built level chunks. What do we do with these? Someone ultimately suggested letting players use those chunks to make and share their own content, both for co-op and versus modes.
And I'd be remiss for not emphasizing a major post-launch Gears 5 philosophy: distinct silos of what costs money on top of the retail price (or an Xbox Game Pass subscription). "We respect money, time, and achievements as separate pools of effort," Coalition representatives said to Ars. Meaning: you can absolutely spend additional money within the game, but that will be limited entirely (yes, entirely) to cosmetics and only specific outfits, not random loot-box unlocks.
Everything else can either be unlocked by regularly logging in or completing achievements (including a new "Tour of Duty" series of constantly updated daily and weekly tasks spread across all game modes). And the game's "Operations" DLC plan revolves around new content "every three months" that will include new maps, modes, characters, features, and tweaks to the game's meta. These will be entirely free. "We are not charging players for a battle pass," the devs confirmed.
Xbox Game Pass as inspiration
In an interview, Fergusson insisted that his studio is free to make whatever games they want, as opposed to operating from a business directive. "Just make a great game," he said. "If I wanted to make a survival-horror Gears of War, I have the freedom to do that, so long as that decision is made on the team level."
I pushed back to talk about the changing sales proposition of Xbox Game Pass, which The Coalition knew was coming early in Gears 5's development, and he conceded its influence. "Game Pass inspired our approachability aspect," he said. "Millions of people have essentially free access to the game. You have to think about those players differently. They didn't spend $60 and are therefore going to weather some storm. 'I don't know how it works yet, but I spent $60, so I'm going to keep playing.' On the first point of friction, these players can go, 'I'm out, I didn't invest anything here.'"
This is the increasing attitude I'm hearing from game makers in 2019: that subscription services are changing how they build and present games to players with a completely different sense of cost and friction. And Gears 5 is, at the very least, a fascinating reaction to that new market reality. If you want to see what direction video games are going to go from here on out, in terms of hooking players with content-based reasons to resubscribe instead of loot boxes and content-based microtransactions, The Coalition's big new game should be the first case study you explore at length.
Thankfully, so far, it's also fun, varied, and even occasionally thoughtful. But we'll have more on that upon the game's launch on September 6 (for Game Pass subscribers and "ultimate" edition buyers) and September 10 for everyone else.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/gears-of-war-5-hands-on-a-new-blockbuster-for-the-game-subscription-era/
2019-08-30 07:01:00Z
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