Gears of War studio shifts to "next-gen development," but don't expect new games "for some time"

Don’t expect a Gears 6 announcement for “some time”, as The Coalition moves to a new engine.

Gears of War developer The Coalition has revealed that its future projects will be developed on Unreal Engine 5. This will likely result in a huge upgrade in the visual quality of its games, and that’s saying something considering how good Gears 5 already looks. The downside? This also means that we won’t be seeing any new projects from The Coalition for a while.

As the post on the Gears 5 website explains, “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”.

It’s worth noting that The Coalition doesn’t specify Gears of War projects here, which means we could well be seeing the studio branch out into other IP. It'd be interesting to see the team tackle an original project, but while there have also been rumours of an Xbox exclusive Star Wars game in the works, the studio has since squashed those rumours.

The post also confirmed that The Coalition is moving on to exclusively next-gen development, which means that its upcoming games will only be released for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Microsoft had committed to keeping its first party titles cross-gen for the first couple of years after the Xbox Series X launched, but these games are likely still years away from launch.

The Coalition isn’t just abandoning it’s Unreal Engine 4 games though. You can still expect regular updates for Gears 5 with Operations 7 and 8 already in the works. Each Operation will add new characters, maps, and special events.

See what else Xbox is cooking up in the meantime with these upcoming Xbox Series X games.