Gears 5 Arcade is designed for people who hate Gears multiplayer

The Coalition debuted Gears 5's new Arcade mode during a livestream overnight.

The 90-minute stream showed off two maps, both running Gears 5's Arcade mode in TDM. Arcade is one three modes available in the Gears 5 tech test going live this weekend, alongside King of the Hill, Escalation and the Bootcamp training mode.

Arcade is a completely new mode that aims to make Gears 5 multiplayer accessible to players who traditionally avoid Gears multiplayer. The mode borrows from hero shooters by assigning passive skills to its roster of characters, as well as unique loadouts and upgrade paths. This is The Coalition's way of diversifying the action and preventing matches from devolving into Gnasher shotguns 24/7.

Outside of some changes to sliding speed and distance, as well as spawn behaviour, Arcade doesn't mess around too much with Gears multiplayer. The biggest difference from the main modes, however, is the skulls system. By earning kills or assists you rack up skulls, which is a currency used to buy power weapons.

Skulls persist between lives, but power weapons are lost when dropped and when you're killed. The different power weapons have different skull costs, and you're able to re-buy them as often as you want, provided you can afford it.

It looks fun in a different way from traditional Gears multiplayer. You can watch the full stream archive below, though expect some stream hiccups midway through.

Gears 5 is out September 10 on PC, and Xbox One.