Reading Time: 2 minutes

Gears 5 To Release September 10 With 3 Player Co-Op

The wait is almost over. After teasing Gears 5 at last year’s E3, Microsoft has now revealed that its legendary title is coming to the Xbox and PC on September 10th. As we learned from the cinematic trailer that dropped at E3 2018, Gears 5 is “going back to where it all began,” and it features a new female character who will join the one and only Marcus Fenix. Their mission? To discover the origins of the Locust Army, which of course means you’re going to be smashing a lot of aliens along the way.

A new trailer for Gears 5 was shown off at Xbox’s E3 show alongside the release date announcement, and it’s a doozy. Playing to Billy Eilish’s morbidly appropriate single ‘Bury a Friend’, it focuses on Kait’s split allegiances and the pressure she’ll come under as a result.

Rod Fergusson, Studio Head at Gears 5 developer The Coalition, stepped up to talk about the game, saying: “We’re excited to announce that Gears 5 is releasing on September 10. And if you want to play four days early, you can, with our Ultimate Edition or membership of the newly announced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. In July, join us for our Versus Multiplayer tech-test, where you’ll be one of the first to play our all-new competitive game-play, Arcade.

“In August, at Gamescom, go hands-on with the all-new Horde Mode and see how character abilities can turn the tide on the battlefield. Here’s a brand-new way to fight the Swarm. In Escape, you play as one of three hive-busters. You and your squad infiltrate the hive, plant the bomb and escape with your life.”

Given how robust the Gears of War 4 PC version was, and Microsoft’s renewed focus on PC gaming, this isn’t a huge surprise. But it’s still cool, since split-screen is often a feature in console games that’s left out of PC games. Sure, split-screen on a monitor isn’t necessarily a great experience, but these days a whole lot of us have big 1440p or 4K screens on our desks, connect our PCs to our living room TVs, or use in-home streaming to put our games on the big screen.

Mike Raynor, The Coalition’s technical director, also dropped a few more details about the PC version: it’ll support 4K and ultra-wide resolutions, HDR, and uncapped frame-rates. And he spoke a bit about the next-gen Xbox having similar AMD hardware to what’s inside many PCs:

“It’s really fantastic for us, because we have similar feature sets on Xbox and PC. We can spend more time making the game and less time on siloed development where we’re working on one platform over the other. It allows us to spend more time polishing the game and it looks great and performs fantastic on both platforms.”

Microsoft’s press conference that Gears 5 will officially be releasing on September 10, 2019.