Gears 5 developer focusing on future projects
The Coalition is starting to features from Gears 5 as it turns its attention to new, unnamed titles
Power down those chainsaws and get ready to leave the planet to the wrath of the grubs – the Gears 5 developer is just about ready to give up on its last game and move onto something wholly different.
Microsoft Games Studios developer The Coalition has announced that it's removing the Map Builder feature from 2019's action-shooter hit, Gears 5, in order to allow the staff at the stuido to "focus on future projects".
If you were unclear, the Map Builder mode was designed to allow players to create custom levels for the Escape mode that came with the game (which had its own achievements and everything).
But what could the team be moving to work on? We heard back in 2021 that The Coalition was moving to the Unreal Engine 5 for production on 'multiple new projects' in the esteemed action series.
As series veterans will know, Gears has a long history with the Unreal Engine – the first Gears of War title was famously developed by Epic and showed off the engine's chops back on Xbox 360, and it stands to reason that whatever's next (Gears 6? Gears Tactics 2? Something else?) will be a benchmark game for the as-yet-unproven Unreal 5 engine. We've already seen the studio show off its experiments with the engine with some pretty impressive facial tech demos, and we imagine there'll be more of this tease-like material to come in due course.
Will the next Gears project launch before other Unreal 5-confirmed games, Tomb Raider or The Witcher 4? At this point, who knows.
If you are after those achievements, don't worry: any related achievements tied to the Map Builder will now unlock automatically once if you boot the game up with its newest update installed. This means you'll get both "I Made it All By Myself" and "Homegrown Hive" if you open the game from here on out.
If you happened to already have those achievements, well done! You will instead earn an exclusive banner or 10k in-game coins, respectively, for your efforts when you open the game.
Neither Microsoft nor The Coalition has formally announced any new projects at the time of writing, but we know that one of them appears to be a new IP.