Welcome to What’s Up, your weekly update on all the latest news, game updates and more in Gears 5 and beyond.

Here’s What’s Up in Gears this week:

‘Tis the season to be gibbing – Gearsmas is back!

Progress on Title Update 3.1

New Escape Hive: The Detour

Weekly Store Content

Gears Tactics coming April 28, 2020

Gearsmas Begins!

‘Tis the season to be gibbing, which means it’s time for Gearsmas in Gears 5! In this year’s Gearsmas festivities, we’ve got a whole lot of presents up for grabs and the return of Jingle Juvies.

Earnable Content

This Krampus doesn’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice – he’s coming for any COG he can get! Earn the Krampus Scion* by getting 200 Kills in Free For All, trackable in your Tour of Duty Medals.

*The Krampus Scion is actually based on the Warden, but to ensure players can access the skin instantly without the need to unlock a Character first, we’ve assigned this Character Skin under the Scion Character.

It wouldn’t be Gearsmas without some Ugly Sweaters, so why let your weapons miss out on some festive cheer?

Earn the full 18 weapons from the Ugly Gearsmas Weapon Skin set by completing 100 Waves of Jingle Juvies during the Gearsmas event.

Login Rewards

On top of the sweet new earnable rewards, the Gearsmas gifts keep on rolling down the chimney with four additional goodies just for logging in.

Gearsmas Jack Character Skin

Gearsmas Bloodspray

Gearsmas Mark

Gearsmas Banner

Simply hop onto Gears 5 from the launch of Gearsmas until January 2nd at 10am PT to claim your Gearsmas presents.

Horde Special Event

Is there anything that says Gearsmas more than a choir of yelping Juvies?

Jingle Juvies is a 20 wave Horde event that features a lot of Juvies sporting antlers and boss waves featuring a lot of Juvies PLUS standard enemies.

Unfortunately, this year some of the Juvies have misunderstood the whole bauble thing and attached Frags to their back instead. Translation: Get ready for a LOT of Poppers!

Versus

For Versus, some of you may be wondering why Snowball Fight isn’t making its usual appearance this year.

With the very recent release of Free For All, we feel it’s best to keep the focus firmly on this new mode over the holidays – where we’ll be joined by new and returning players who may have yet to try FFA in Gears 5.

We have some ideas on where we might take Snowball Fight in the future, but for this year, it’s taking a break to let Free For All shine.

Free Boost Days

Whether you’re joining us for the first time or firing up your Xbox to escape your family for a while, we’ve got you covered with Free Boost for logging in on December 25th and December 26th.

Gearsmas Timing

Gearsmas will begin shortly after the release of Title Update 3.1, which contains some urgent fixes for community reported issues (more on that below). Once Title Update 3.1 has rolled out, Gearsmas will be turned on ~3-4 hours after the initial release and will run until January 2, 2020.

Title Update 3.1

Following the release of Title Update 3, we are working on an urgent update to address three key issues flagged by the community:

Visual corruption in two FFA maps – The Pit and Nethercutt

Unintended “teammates” in FFA

Horde: Crashing while joining games in progress

We are close to finalizing a Title Update to address these issues as quickly as possible with a goal to release this update as early as possible this week.

Until we have finalized and completed the certification process, we do not have an exact ETA to share at this time – but the team are working diligently to get 3.1 launched as soon as possible.

UPDATE: Title Update 3.1 will launch tomorrow, Tuesday December 17th.

We’ll keep you apprised of any updates as soon as we have them on Gears5.com/Status and @CoalitionGears on Twitter.

Escape Hive: The Detour

This weeks’ new Featured Escape Hive is known as The Detour. Head down an increasingly tough corridor of doom in a perilous first act with multiple exits and endless enemies.

The further you make it down the hallway before exiting the act, the more COG tags and better equipment you’ll gain. How far can you make it?

UPDATE: The Detour will now launch on Tuesday, December 24th to provide an additional featured week for the Ice Queen Hive.

Weekly Store

This week’s Weekly Store is getting in the Gearsmas Spirit with new Gearsmas themed items and a Hivebuster look for Baird!

Hivebuster Baird Character Skin

Nutcracker Shepherd DB Character Skin

Gift Wrapped Weapon Skin

Hivebuster Baird Character Skin* – 500 Iron

Nutcracker Shepherd DB Character Skin* – 500 Iron

Wrapping Paper Loadout Weapon Skin Set – 500 Iron

Pink Camo Full Weapon Skin Set* (18) – 300 Iron

Shield Mark – 50 Iron

*Reminder: Purchasing a Character Skin does not include access to the Character. Use of Character Skins requires the base Character to be unlocked before associated skins can be used.

There’s some important points to note about this week’s Store:

This new rotation of Store Content will only become available once Gearsmas is deployed shortly after the release of TU3.1 – not with the standard Tuesday reset.



Previous purchasers of either the Pink Camo Lancer or Gnasher, previously sold individually in the Store, will be granted the full Pink Camo weapon skin set at no extra cost. We expect to complete this deployment shortly after the release of TU3.1.



Gearsmas Store content (Nutcracker Shepherd, Wrapping Paper Weapon Skin set) will also be available next week through a temporary Gearsmas Store Tab until January 2, 2020.

Gears Tactics Coming April 28, 2020

New year, new Gears!

After almost a year and half since we first announced Gears Tactics as part of the “Year of Gears” at E3, Gears Tactics hit the stage at The Game Awards with a first look at the tactical, visceral combat you can expect from this new entry into the turn-based squad shooter genre!

Developed by The Coalition and Splash Damage, Gears Tactics is set 12 years before the first Gears of War. In these early years of the Locust War, you’ll be outnumbered and fighting for survival as you recruit and command a squad to hunt down Ukkon, an evil mastermind who makes monsters. (Rise of RAAM readers may remember this infamous Locust!).

Gears Tactics launches on April 28, 2020 on the Windows Store and Steam and will be available the same day with Xbox Game Pass for PC (Beta). We’ll be talking more about Gears Tactics next year in the run-up to launch, but in the meantime, you can chow down on some juicy first details here.

Signing Off

That’s it for this week’s What’s Up. Coming this week, we’ll have a few new articles including more information on the recent Movement Updates for Gears 5 as well as further updates on the release of TU3.1 and Gearsmas.

Until then,

TC.