Gears of War: E-Day: release time, price, PC specs

Gears of War: E-Day, the first new mainline Gears game since Gears 5 in 2019, launches worldwide on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 8:00 a.m. Pacific (15:00 UTC) on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC through the Xbox app, and Steam. It is $69.99 to buy and included on day one with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Players who bought the $99.99 Premium Edition have been playing since October 1 through up to five days of early access. Below: unlock times in your time zone, what each edition gets you, the PC requirements, what is (and isn't) in the game at launch, and what critics have said so far. Prices checked on Steam on October 4, 2026 at 21:22 UTC; review scores checked at 21:25 UTC.

Gears of War: E-Day release time

Xbox Wire confirms a single worldwide unlock: October 6 at 8:00 a.m. PT / 15:00 UTC. That works out to 11:00 a.m. ET, 4:00 p.m. in the UK (BST), 5:00 p.m. in central Europe (CEST), 8:30 p.m. in India (IST) and midnight going into October 7 in Japan (JST). Pre-installing has been open since September 29 on Xbox Series X|S, the Xbox app on PC, and Steam, so you can download now and play the moment it unlocks. On PC, the game needs 115 GB of free space on an SSD.

Two small timing notes from The Coalition's own launch post: pre-order bonuses (the Exfil Dom character skin and Exfil weapon skin set) only apply to orders placed before 7:59 a.m. PT on October 6, and the studio says offline play on PC is not available until October 6.

Price, editions and Game Pass

There are three ways to get it, according to the official xbox.com page and Steam listing (both showing US prices on October 4):

Standard Edition, $69.99: the game, digital or physical. Buying it digitally on Xbox gives you Xbox Play Anywhere, which means one purchase covers both Xbox console and the Xbox app on PC, with shared saves and achievements.

Premium Edition, $99.99 (or a $30 Premium Upgrade if you already own the Standard Edition; Game Pass members can also buy the Premium Upgrade): up to five days of early access from October 1, the Bravo Squad Signature Weapon Pack, five seasonal cosmetic packs starting with the Emergence Pack at launch, and 1,000 Iron, the game's premium in-game currency.

Game Pass: the game is included at launch for Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass members, and Game Pass Ultimate also lets you stream it from the cloud. Xbox says it can be streamed through NVIDIA GeForce NOW as well. One catch from Microsoft's fine print: online campaign co-op, Horde Siege and Versus require a Game Pass subscription that includes online multiplayer. There is also a limited Collector's Edition sold through the Xbox Game Studios Shop and select retailers; quantities are limited and availability varies by region.

What the game is

E-Day is a prequel. It is set on Emergence Day, the day the Locust Horde first burst out from underground, 14 years before the events of the original Gears of War. You play as a young Marcus Fenix and Dominic "Dom" Santiago, the series' two longtime leads. Developer The Coalition rebuilt the game from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, with a darker, more horror-leaning tone and new movement such as jumping, vaulting and sliding on top of the series' trademark take-cover-and-shoot combat.

There are three main modes. The campaign can be played solo, in two-player split-screen (console only), or online with up to four players. Horde Siege is the new version of Gears' co-op survival mode: squads of four pick a class (Assault, Marksman, Medic or Breacher) and fight off waves of enemies on bigger maps, with several squads able to team up against world bosses. Versus is the 4v4 player-versus-player mode, with Ranked and casual Social playlists.

PC system requirements

The Coalition's final PC specs, as published on Xbox Wire and laid out by PC Gamer, have one hard rule: you need a graphics card with hardware ray tracing. Cards without dedicated ray-tracing hardware are not supported. All tiers below assume an upscaler is on (NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS or Unreal's TSR, which render at a lower resolution and sharpen the image back up), and all need 115 GB of SSD space.

Minimum (Medium preset, 1080p at 60 fps): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or RTX 5050, or AMD Radeon RX 6600 or RX 9060, with 6 GB of video memory; AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6850K or Core i5-10400; 12 GB of RAM.

Recommended (High preset, 1440p at 60+ fps): GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 5060, or Radeon RX 6700 XT or RX 9060 XT, with 8 GB of video memory; Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-11600K; 16 GB of RAM.

Ultra (4K at 60+ fps): GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XT with 12 GB of video memory; Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Core i7-14700K; 16 GB of RAM.

The game supports DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 and XeSS 3.0 at launch, PC Gamer reports. The Coalition also lists a field-of-view slider, frame-rate caps from 30 fps to unlimited, optional multi-frame generation, and toggles for film grain and chromatic aberration. A new Xbox PC feature called Advanced Shader Delivery downloads pre-built shaders so you spend less time on "compiling shaders" screens; it works on AMD graphics at launch, with NVIDIA support due later in October.

What critics say so far

When we checked on October 4, Metacritic listed a Metascore of 87 from 58 critic reviews, and OpenCritic showed an 88 Top Critic Average with 92% of critics recommending it. Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio cautions that most outlets reviewed only the campaign, because the multiplayer servers were not live for critics, so scores could still move.

On the positive side, Polygon quotes IGN's in-progress review (a provisional 9/10) praising the emotional weight and Marcus and Dom's backstory, and ScreenRant's 9/10 praising the shooting, story and the city of Kalona where the game is set. The critics were not all sold. PC Gamer's in-progress review calls the 20-plus-hour campaign a "slog" despite strong shooting, and GameSpot's provisional 7/10 says it feels too stuck in the past. Polygon's own take is that the campaign is intense but, after a while, exhausting.

What's missing at launch, and what's next

Because the game was built from scratch, The Coalition says some long-running series features did not make launch: meat shields, chainsaw duels, some older weapons, private lobbies and leaderboards. The studio says they "are not gone from the franchise" and it is looking at bringing fan favourites back after launch or in its next game.

Season 1, called Emergence, started with early access and runs eight weeks to December 1, with three two-week limited events (Halloween, 20 Years of Gears, and "Thanksgibbing"). Ranked Versus switches on a week after launch, on October 13. The Coalition promises at least five post-launch seasons; Season 2, Legacy, celebrates the series' 20th anniversary, with an in-game gift for every player on November 7. The known-issues list at launch includes possible memory problems if you play the whole campaign without ever reloading a checkpoint, so reload one if an objective gets stuck.

Should you buy it, upgrade, or use Game Pass?

If you already pay for Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass, there is no reason to buy the game outright on day one: it is included from October 6. The Premium Upgrade made the most sense for early access, and most of that window is now gone, so what's left is cosmetics and 1,000 Iron. If you want to own it, the $69.99 Standard Edition covers both Xbox and PC through Play Anywhere when bought from the Xbox store. On PC, check that your graphics card has hardware ray tracing (any GeForce RTX or Radeon RX 6000 series and newer) before paying, since older cards can't run it at all.