It’s been five years since the last Gears games, and while Gears of War: E-Day was announced at Microsoft’s last big Xbox Showcase, there’s no word on if and when The Coalition will be continuing work on the story left behind in Gears 5. That game’s executive producer, Rod Ferguson, recently shared what his plan was for the sequel at the time, and it’s not at all what I was expecting.
One of the final open-world exploration sections of Gears 5 revolves around exploring an old space program that belonged to the UIR in order to re-launch a Hammer of Dawn that can be used to fight off the resurgent Locust. It’s one of the most beautiful sections of the game, complete with impressive sandstorms, striking industrial ruins, and Mars-like red sandscapes. Ferguson said on the latest episode of IGN’s Podcast Unlocked that this was The Coalition tipping its hand to what he had in mind for Gears 6.
“At the highest level, I was just getting us off [the planet of Sera],” he said regarding early planning docs for the sequel. “So Gears 6 was to leave Sera, and so that was something we were building to. If you watch the story, if you pay attention to the story in Gears 5, you kind of come across that UIR rocket technology and that kind of stuff we were laying the seeds and the groundwork that by taking over this UIR territory, we’ve also kind of inherited their space program. So what I wanted to do with Gears 6 was to get you off Sera to encounter what that could mean for the rest of the galaxy or at least the rest of the solar system.”
Ferguson, who left The Coalition in 2020 shortly after Gears 5 launched and is currently leading Diablo IV at Blizzard, said that space exploration would have been less like Mass Effect than the Sputnik era of the 1950s space race. Presumably, travel would be slow, costly, and strategic. It no doubt would have introduced new alien enemy types as well, potentially introducing some interesting sci-fi mysteries about the origins of human and Locust life on Sera.
The industry veteran suggested those ideas, which didn’t sound like anything more than a pitch document at the time, were scrapped as The Coalition works instead on mining Gears’ past with a prequel centered around Emergence Day, the franchise’s version of the Invasion of Normandy when millions of Locust came out of holes in the ground to attack humanity, eventually leading to the use of weapons of mass destruction that ended up crippling Sera’s surface-dwelling nations.
Gears 5 also ended with a cliffhanger related to a choice about which main character to rescue, the consequences of which would seemingly get hashed out in Gears 6. It sounded like the plan was for the most popular choice among players to become the canonical one. Though, at the rate the franchise is going, it could be years before fans get to see that play out in a game.