E-Day FAQ

Full release was Tue, Oct 6, 2026, at 8 AM Pacific. Early access began five days earlier, on Thu, Oct 1, 2026, for Premium and Collector’s buyers and for a Standard copy with the Premium Upgrade.

Standard

$69.99

Premium

$99.99

Collector’s

$299.99

Standard and Premium are Xbox’s listed starting prices.

Premium adds

Five days of early access, 1,000 Iron, the Emergence Customization Pack, four seasonal packs and the campaign-only Bravo Squad Signature Weapon Pack.

Premium Upgrade

Adds the same to a Standard copy.

Every edition

The Exfil Dom Legendary character skin and the Exfil Legendary weapon skin set.

Yes. Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass include the game, with no purchase needed. Game Pass on its own did not include early access.

Season 1, Emergence, started with early access and runs until Dec 1, 2026, which The Coalition counts as eight weeks. It includes three limited events, Halloween, 20 Years of Gears and Thanksgibbing, each two weeks long, and their start dates have not been announced.

E-Day is on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam. Play Anywhere carries a purchase between Xbox and PC. No PlayStation 5 version has been announced, and none is ruled out.

Valve has not rated E-Day for Steam Deck, so its status shows as unknown. A third-party test by PC Guide found the Steam Deck LCD stays below 20 FPS on the low preset.

The campaign and Practice Space can be played offline if installed. Versus and Horde Siege require an online connection.

Campaign

Two-player split-screen, on console only, and up to four players online.

Horde Siege

Squads of four, with three squads on one map: 12 players in all.

Not known

Whether any other mode has split-screen.

Crossplay

Yes, Steam and the Xbox Store both list cross-platform multiplayer, and the Xbox Store adds cross-platform co-op.

Cross-progression

Yes, through optional account linking, which Steam says lets you carry progress with roaming saves.

Not known

Which platforms can play together.

Horde Siege is E-Day’s squad co-op mode: you pick one of four classes, fight waves of Locust, finish objectives inside the waves, then extract. Weapon mods replace the skill cards of Gears 5’s Horde mode.

Breacher fights at point-blank range, Assault holds the front from cover, Medic heals and revives, and Marksman fires from the backline. In our pre-launch ranking from Aug 15, 2026, Medic is first, then Marksman, Assault and Breacher.

Weapon Parts are the currency that unlocks weapon mods and mod slots. Side objectives earn them, Invasion events and Weapon Parts Stockpile pickups can add more, and you keep them only if your squad extracts by Raven aircraft. There are 176 weapon mods across twelve weapons; the campaign has them too, and Versus has none.

There are three mission types: Blitz, about 15 to 20 minutes with one or two objectives; Siege, about 20 to 40 minutes with several objectives; and Horde, 50 to 60 minutes and 10 waves with limited support. The 41 mission entries are listed by objective count.

What it is

A Horde Siege event mission that went live on Oct 8, 2026, described in the game as a hard defense objective with more bonus objective opportunities.

Encounters

A Defend and a Hold of three waves each, and both end with Vraahk.

Not known

What it pays, which map it runs on and when it ends, as of Oct 9, 2026.

Seven: Team Deathmatch, Conquest, Demolition and Crucible at launch, plus King of the Hill, Guardian and Warpath as rotation modes. All Versus modes are 4v4, according to The Coalition.

Ranked Versus opens on Oct 13, 2026, one week after launch, according to The Coalition’s Season 1 plan. Weekly challenges refresh the same day.

Matchmaking

A hidden skill rating picks your lobbies and puts you in a Skill Division, A to D, and squads matchmake on the highest rating in the group.

Your rank

Your visible rank, Bronze to Diamond, does not affect matchmaking.

Placements

The game does not say how many placement matches you play; we count five, because the Unranked badge’s five segments light one at a time. Our reading

Campaign

Difficulty changes you, not the enemy: Casual gives you 2.00× health and Inconceivable 0.40×, while the enemy’s own stats barely change.

Horde Siege

Four levels of its own, Rookie, Infantry, Commander and Allfather, and many match modifiers target the enemy. Infantry fits class levels 10 to 20, Commander 20 to 30, and Allfather is for max-level classes only.

Every weapon has one base set of numbers and each mode may change them. Horde Siege changes no damage at all, while in Versus six guns hit harder and four hit softer. The Gnasher, for example, is 80 damage a pellet in Horde Siege and 125 in Versus.

Not known. The game states damage per pellet, 80 in Horde Siege and 125 in Versus, and does not say how many pellets a shell carries. So this site prints no damage-per-shell figure and no shots to kill for the stock gun.

Steam. The Player Count page shows players online now and the 24-hour, 7-day and all-time peaks for E-Day and the other Gears games on Steam, plus Twitch viewers. Xbox and Game Pass publish no figure, so the page has none for them.

A dash means the game states no figure. We print a dash, not an estimate or a zero, because a zero is a claim and a blank is not. A line marked Our reading is one we worked out ourselves, not one the game states.

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