During the State of Unreal presentation in Chicago, Illinois, The Coalition's Studio Technical Director Kate Rayner presented the studio's technical objectives for Gears of War: E-Day.
The team reportedly "rebuilt everything from scratch" to achieve the desired believability of a city thrown into chaos by the devastating surprise attack launched by the Locust Horde against humanity. That perhaps explains why it took so long: their previous game, Gears 5, launched in September 2019.
Visually, for such a dark event in the Gears universe, The Coalition returned to a dark, gritty visual style where light and shadow play a major role. Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the studio was able to elevate the visuals to the next level. Rayner showed a scene from the Pay ’n Save superstore in downtown Kalona, the city where protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago are located when the invasion strikes. In previous games, a space like this was limited to three shadow casters in view, but The Coalition is leveraging the MegaLights feature that shipped late last year with Unreal Engine 5.7 to add hundreds of light sources, all casting shadows at 60 frames per second on Xbox Series X.
The store's TV display walls use animated area lights with light functions driven by the video itself, fully rendered on the GPU. Each TV casts eerie and unsettling dynamic shadows with soft penumbras across the scene. All these freezers have multiple area lights inside them to simulate the realistic lighting effect of the frozen food section of a grocery store.
Rayner then turned on a debug view, highlighting the hundreds of lights featured in the scene, from the small lights on Marcus' armor to the large spotlights on the ceiling. The Technical Director added that it would have been impossible to create a similar effect on current-generation hardware without MegaLights.
The environments in Gears of War: E-Day have been built with Geometry Collection destructible assets; these dynamic objects cast and receive light correctly, so destruction stays visually grounded the way you expect in the real world. During combat, bullets create a dynamic shatter point in the glass, and when it shatters, all the pieces collide with the environment using hardware ray-traced collisions with physically accurate translucent reflections.
Rayner also revealed that Gears of War: E-Day is the first game in the series to feature dynamic shadows on every single one of our muzzle flashes. Throughout the entire city of Kalona, players will encounter tens of thousands of shadow-casting lights.
Delivering E-Day with this level of visual fidelity has not been easy, the developer said, but iteration is much faster with hardware ray-traced Lumen compared to the baked lighting of yore. And with MegaLights, the lighters are no longer constrained by the number of real-time shadow casters, giving them the freedom to light the game with the same complexity as the real world. Lastly, Rayner reiterated that Nanite's micro-polygon rendering enables 100 times the geometric detail in the game's assets.
In case you were worried about PC specs, the ones shared last week do not appear particularly daunting. Indeed, the presentation ended with Rayner boasting the studio's "highly scalable engine" across Xbox Series S, X, and PC. The game is out on October 6, 2026.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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