Gears of War 5

Gears of War 5, now with the simpler rebranded name Gears 5, launched Sep 6th 2019 on Xbox and PC. Regular and Ultimate versions are on gamepass and gamepass ultimate respectively, cross play and cross save. The game is also on Steam

If you have a gaming PC or X and don't have gamepass ultimate you can currently get a 1 month trial for $2. TOTALLY WORTH IT. You can play this game and a bunch others for 30 days, cancel anytime, and have gotten your moneys worth. I'd recommend just getting 3 years of gamepass gold ($95 at costco, similar prices elsewhere online) and then convert that to 3 years gamepass ultimate.

Played 2 hours on my gaming PC today and really enjoyed it. I finished Gears of War 4 last weekend, haven't played GOW2-3 or 1-2, not sure, just played the remaster and 4. G5 feels like a straight up continuation of GOW4 so far, same chars weapons abilities etc.

Graphics are drop dead gorgeous though, especially on PC. I'm only running on a 1080ti at 3440x1440, no Raytracing or HDR, but it looks fantastic. I have it installed on my X as well to try out this weekend.

The game has a SHIT LOAD of content, from:

the campaign - 10 to 15 hours I'd guess, multiple difficulty options.
Escape mode, sp/coop gameplay
Horde mode ala tons of games
Versus mode arcade
Escalation



I was never a big Gears multiplayer guy but I figure launch weekend on a new MP game is a good time to get in

You can play the campaign solo, with 2 people, or 3 people and just friends or matchmake I think if you really want (but why). At least 4 difficulty levels, probably a 5th unlocks after you complete. Not really much to the campaign i think, the replayability is the multiplayer, horde mode, etc.

Zero issues with PC so far, and usually I have fuck tons of problems at launch with games crashing, weird artifacts, driver issues, etc so happy so far. Would highly, highly recommend the $2 game pass ultimate trial if you don't have it. Its a 55 gig download and install on PC plus a 3 gig ultra textures (if you want), about the same size on xbox.

Only problem i've heard about is people getting DC'd from servers when playing horde mode for long games and losing out on rewards (OUCH!) so don't do that for now, and multiplayer not matchmaking successfully for some people, I'd assume server overloads that get smoothed quickly.


NOTE: there are two levels of game pass. Regular, which gets you the game Sept 10th, and Ultimate, which lets you play the game NOW. I don't really know the difference, i'm sure its a one line thing

MP has a bunch of skins and stuff, you can get the terminator and sarah conner skins now

ninja is also streaming World of Warcraft classic (with 10k viewers) on mixer and NOT gears of war 5 so thats... uh... interesting

GOw5 is like the 5th game sorted by viewers on ultimate launch day so not sure whats going on there. Maybe they are waiting for regular launch day? Its also not top 20 on twitch.

i can play solo SP campaign just fine on PC right now so at least if you just wanna play alone in the dark you are good

once you convert to gamepass ultimate you cannot convert "back" afaik, so the rule is add ALL the possible time of gold/gamepass regular to your account FIRST, then convert to ultimate as its a one way trip. Once you convert you can still "add" gamepass/GWG time to your account, but you get it at a reduced rate: a 12 month GWG card would equal 8 months of gamepass ultimate for example.

Whereas if you did 12 months of GWG (or 3 years, the max) first, then convert you get 3 years of ultimate essentially giving you like a year for free.

game definitely gets even more gorgeous and crazy, game doesn't feel super bloated either for the SP like too many games do now