Gears of War: E-Day launches today, Tuesday 6 October, at 4pm BST on Xbox Series, PC and Steam, and lands on Game Pass from day one. Premium Edition owners have been playing since 1 October, and The Coalition used those five days to push out a patch on the eve of release. The prequel covers Emergence Day, fourteen years before the original game, with a young Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago. Reviews have been warm, and Digital Foundry has explained how the studio squeezed it onto the smaller Series S.
At a glance
Gears of War: E-Day launches on 6 October at 4pm BST on Xbox Series, PC and Steam, and is on Game Pass from day one.
A patch released on 5 October fixes online, co-op campaign and Horde issues ahead of the global launch.
On Series S, The Coalition uses the SSD as an extra tier of memory to keep the game running.
Gears of War: E-Day joins Game Pass on 6 October
The timing comes from Mike Crump, head of The Coalition, in the launch post published on Xbox Wire: a global release on 6 October at 8am Pacific, which is 4pm in the UK. The game is out on Xbox Series X|S, on PC through the Xbox app and Steam, and via the cloud with Game Pass Ultimate and GeForce NOW. Gears of War: E-Day is included in Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from launch.
If you would rather buy it, Steam lists the Standard Edition at £59.99 and the Premium Edition at £89.99, the latter with five days of early access and seasonal packs. There is also a Collector’s Edition. The Vancouver studio co-developed Gears of War: E-Day with People Can Fly, a partnership announced in January 2025.
Early reception looks strong. Gears of War: E-Day holds a Top Critic Average of 88 on OpenCritic, with 91% of 71 critics recommending it, and a Metascore of 87 from 64 reviews, as of Tuesday morning. Video Games Chronicle sums up the campaign as “An absolute blast, even if it focuses on commotion over emotion”.
The 5 October patch, ahead of global release
Posted the day before launch on the official Gears of War site as the October 05 patch notes, the update opens by thanking early access players. The Coalition then lists stability, performance and hardware compatibility improvements without going into specifics. No file size or version number is given.
Several online snags are gone. Social Versus matches no longer hang on the waiting-for-players screen, the “Bilefrog-Kalona” error that signed out a split-screen player after suspending the game has been dealt with, and Xbox sign-in copes better when the console clock is badly off.
The co-op campaign gets the most attention. Players who join a session part-way through now receive the War Journal progress and Forge rewards earned before they arrived. Several objectives in Acts 2 and 4 that refused to complete have been repaired, including the Power Station defence in Act 4. Horde Siege and Demolition, where a bomb could get stuck mid-defuse, also get fixes.
This follows the 1 October update, which added a field-of-view slider and options to switch off film grain and chromatic aberration. Season 1, called Emergence, runs for eight weeks until 1 December, and ranked Versus opens on 13 October.
The Series S SSD as backup memory
The weekend’s other story is a technical one, and it matters to anyone playing on Series S. The console has 10GB of memory, against 16GB on Series X and PS5. To make Gears of War: E-Day fit, The Coalition treats the SSD as an extra tier of memory, a system built with the Xbox platform team, Digital Foundry has explained. Data that isn’t needed at that moment sits on the drive, and whatever the game needs is moved into RAM.
According to Chris Scullion’s report for VGC on the memory trick, which credits technical director Kate Rayner, the approach frees up around a gigabyte of usable memory. On Series S, only the Lumen reflections are dropped to hold 60 frames per second.
The launch comes at a tense moment for Xbox. Eurogamer reports that Juan Vaca, the game’s story director, was let go in September, weeks before release, in the same wave now hitting the Hellblade studio, as covered in our piece on the first layoffs at Ninja Theory. For Gears of War: E-Day, the real test now is longevity, with a first season meant to carry multiplayer through to December.
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