This Week In Gears 5 is our quick-fire Monday update to fill you in on everything happening in-game for Gears 5 over the next week!

Here’s what’s coming up for the week of March 3rd – 10th:

Playlist Update

Beginning on Tuesday, March 3rd, we’ll be making some key changes to the format of our Quickplay offerings as part of an ongoing trial:

New Playlist Order (from left to right): Free For All, TDM & KOTH, Arcade, Co-Op vs AI

Classic Quickplay: TDM and KOTH only. Removed Guardian, Arms Race, Execution, Dodgeball.

TDM in Classic Quickplay: 1 round to win, 20 respawns (was 2 rounds to win, 15 respawns)

Our intention behind these changes are the following:

Improve our Quickplay offerings to get you to the experiences you want to play

Put our most popular modes front and center

We use data heavily to understand the behavior of our players. One of the things we’ve consistently seen since Gears 3 is that TDM and KOTH are both our highest populated / voted for modes. We want to put our best experiences front and center in Quickplay, making sure they are easy to discover and play in without having to necessarily dive into Ranked.

In addition, we hope the new ordering of Quickplay playlists will result in more players in FFA, giving you faster time to matches and a bigger spotlight on a mode we know many of you love. (Fun fact: Most players who are new to Gears go to the first menu option in Versus, which will now be Quickplay FFA!).

We know that some of you out there are die-hard fans of modes like Dodgeball and Arms Race, and that this is likely a tough pill to swallow for you. It was a tough call for us to make too. Ultimately, our goal is to make the game the best it possibly can be. To do that, sometimes we’re going to try some stuff and see what happens. We may get this right or we may not.

The plus side is both modes will continue to be available in Public Lobbies but also in Events, where we hope putting a spotlight on them for shorter periods will make them shine brighter thanks to more players and a consistently accessible experience vs fighting votes in Quickplay. Regardless, we’ll be out there reading your feedback as well as monitoring data to determine the full impact of the trial.

Versus Event: Dodgeball

With Dodgeball sunset in Quickplay as part of our new playlist trial, this week we’ll be hosting Dodgeball as our featured Versus event!

We’ve also taken one of your favorite parts of our Halloween Dodgeball event – the fast respawns – and added it to this playlist to keep the action flowing.

Supply Update: Maria Weapon Skins

We saw a great response to the Maria Weapon Skins (Loadout Only) during our Valentine’s Event – so much so that we’ve decided to complete the set and add the rest of the weapon skins to the Supply Pool! Craft or find them in Supply now.

Weekly Store

Desert Baird Character Skin

Desert Baird Character Skin* – 500 Iron

Animated Windflare Snub Weapon Skin – 400 Iron

Sad Blood Spray – 100 Iron

Pixel Locust Banner – 100 Iron

Jolly Roger 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.