Gears of War Developer Announces Move to New Engine, No New Titles For “Some Time”

The Coalition, the current team working on the Gears of War series, announced today that they’d be changing engines, embracing Unreal Engine 5, and outlined how it will affect their current pipeline.

“As we look to future games, we’re excited to start shifting our resources to next-gen development using Unreal Engine 5,” The Coalition’s blog post reads. They continue, citing how the original Gears of War helped spearhead HD gaming at 720p on the Xbox 360, saying that the studio is “excited to continue that tradition by developing on UE5 for multiple new projects in the coming years.”

Gears of War, at the time developed by Epic Games (who also made the Unreal Engine), was in fact the first game made in Unreal Engine 3 to be released way back in 2006. The series has frequently been a showcase for the capabilities of the engine as it has advanced, and will now presumably continue in that function when the next Gears game is inevitably made on Unreal Engine 5. We won’t be seeing that game, or any other UE5 game from The Coalition, for a while though.

“Shifting to a new engine is a big undertaking, so we want to be clear that we will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time,” their announcement reads. This news isn’t a surprise, game engines are notoriously tricky tools that take a long time to grow familiar with, let alone be comfortable using to develop a major commercial product.

In the meantime, The Coalition will continue supporting Gears 5 through the year with “store updates” and content drops, though after that it seems development will wind down as the studio moves onto its “multiple” next-gen projects.