Gears of War 6 was going to going to take us to a brand new planet

This was revealed by the former boss of The Coalition. The idea never materialized, but who knows, it might be used in future installments?

The last mainline Gears of War title is actually Gears 5 from 2019. That means it's already been over five years since we got anything from the series, or four years if we count the Gears Tactics spinoff.

It was widely rumored that Gears of War 6 would be announced during Xbox Games Showcase back in June, but that didn't happen, and instead Gears of War: E-Day was unveiled. Surprisingly, it's a prologue instead about how the war on Sera started and is set 14 years before the first Gears of War.

It wasn't always planned that way, however, and now former The Coalition boss Rod Fergusson reveals that the original vision was something else entirely. When he recently visited the Unlocked podcast, he took the opportunity to tell us that there was actually a sixth installment of the Gears of War saga in the works, which was scrapped.

The idea was that the series would leave the planet Sera for the first time to explore another planet in the same solar system, which would have allowed for a whole new story, with new characters and new enemies. And in fact, Gears 5 does contain traces of this:

"At the highest level, I was just getting us off [the planet of Sera]. So Gears 6 was to leave Sera, and so that was something we were building to. If you watch the story, if you pay attention to the story in Gears 5, you kind of come across that UIR rocket technology and that kind of stuff we were laying the seeds and the groundwork that by taking over this UIR territory, we've also kind of inherited their space program. So what I wanted to do with Gears 6 was to get you off Sera to encounter what that could mean for the rest of the galaxy or at least the rest of the solar system."

He also reveals that The Coalition had not decided on the ending for Gears 5, and that the idea was that the most popular choice among players ultimately would be the one considered canon.

Fergusson co-created the original trilogy for the Xbox 360, before leaving Epic Games to work at Irrational Games. He only spent a few years there, before getting another chance to work on Gears of War at The Coalition (originally called Black Tusk) after Microsoft bought the series. Fergusson continued to work on the series until 2020 when he left Xbox Game Studios to become the head of Diablo at Blizzard, which means he is now working for Microsoft again.

Would you have preferred to explore new planets in Gears of War 6, or are you grateful that The Coalition is reversing the tape and letting us meet a young Marcus Fenix and experience how the horrors started?