Gears of War: E-Day is two months away, and we’ve got gameplay footage from one of its most interesting new modes.
Xbox asked us to take part in a preview multiplayer session, where we got to try out Horde Siege mode. This is a variation on the traditional Horde mode in previous Gears of War games, where this time 12 players are split into three separate squads.
All three squads share the same map and each squad has its own separate objectives. This means for the most part each team of four is doing its own thing, occasionally seeing other squads in the background.
At times, however, large map-wide events like Boss Invasions will occur, and squads will have to work together to take them on.
Our footage, which can be seen at the top of this article or on the VGC YouTube channel, shows the ‘Blitz’ variation of Horde Siege mode – a shorter version with only a couple of objectives – taking place on the Golden Quarter map.
It’s running on the PC version at the ‘Ludicrous’ graphics preset, with no other tweaks made to the settings. PC specs are NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64GB DDR5 6000MHz (2 x 32) RAM.
Players who pre-order Gears of War: E-Day will gain early access to an open beta from 6-10 August. A second open beta weekend will then follow later in the summer, in which everyone will be able to take part.
According to Xbox, the open beta will have the same content as the preview build we played, which means it will have one Horde Siege map (there will be three at launch), a Horde Siege cap at level 10 (instead of 30) and two Invasion Bosses (instead of four).
It will also include Versus play, with two Versus modes and two maps (the full game will have four Versus modes and six maps at launch). Players’ levels will be capped at 50 during the open beta, but in the full game the level cap is 100 with four re-ups.
Gears of War E-Day is available on October 6 on Xbox Series X/S and PC (as well as Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass). The Premium Edition gives five days early access, starting from October 1.
