Microsoft has announced that Gears 5 is receiving a plethora of new content starting on 10th November – also the Xbox Series X/S’s release date.
In an interview with IGN, Gears 5 principal lead producer, Zoe Curnoe, explained what the new additions will mean. The new content will start out with the addition of a New Game Plus mode in which players can replay the game with robot, Jack, carrying over all his upgrades from the first playthrough. That should help out a fair bit when it comes to playing on harder difficulty levels as Jack’s abilities are pretty handy in a fight.
And talking of difficulty modes, the update will also include two more of these – Ironman and Inconceivable. Anyone who’s played previous Gears of War games will know that both of these are pretty painful to get through, especially if you’re going solo rather than playing in co-op. Ironman will require you to play through the whole game without dying once so good luck with that.
On a lighter note, the update also offers new character skins for Kait, Del and JD, as well as some new weapon skins. Mutators will also be added allowing you to turn on Big Head mode and other silly bonuses.
Players can also swap out Marcus Fenix for Dave Bautista, WWE star and actor, with a new voice over too. Finally, multiplayer on Xbox Series X and Series S will reach 120FPS and there will be cross-play between Xbox One players and PC gamers. It’ll be the ultimate battle between keyboard/mouse and controller. Probably.
This won’t be the only update for Gears 5 either. Come December, Gears 5 story DLC called Hivebusters is set for release. Not many details have been confirmed yet with no sign of whether it’ll be free or paid DLC, but we do know that it introduces a new co-op mode which has a three-person Hivebuster squad deliberately getting themselves captured by the enemy in order to destroy hive strongholds from the inside. We’ll have to wait and see what the story side of things adds.