We already knew that Gears of War: E-Day was going to run at 60fps with hardware ray tracing in its campaign, but what we didn’t expect was how The Coalition is using Unreal Engine 5 to bring the world it has created to life.
A new tech demo, showcased below, is the source of our amazement, featuring Marcus Fenix walking around a small slice of the city of Kondora. He visits a derelict store, and it’s there that the new lighting systems come into play. Shadows and reflections look ever so natural, and the Xbox Series X’s ray-tracing chops are shown off in all their glory. The demo presents a multitude of scenarios, each of which has different elements in the environment reactions naturally to your actions, while the light from even shards of glass bounces off them just as you’d expect it to in the real world. Even the lights from Marcus’s armor cast their own shadows!
Things are equally good when you’re out on the streets or when the fog from an E-Hole casts a red hue on the area around it. The volumetrics are spot-on, and we’re going to be watching this one again once we’re done telling you about it. Of course, it remains to be seen if the entire 14-hour campaign can sustain such a level of quality, and if the ray tracing is going to have to give way to the multiplayer modes’ 120 fps target, but we see no reason to believe that it’s going to be a solid showing all around when this one drops on October 6 this year for Xbox and PC.
