After witnessing Hellblade 2's visual fidelity, I'm stoked to see The Coalition's Unreal Engine 5 magic in Gears 6 (2024)

Xbox studio Ninja Theory finally launched their long-awaited narrative action-adventure Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 yesterday and it's objectively one of the best-looking, if not the best-looking game of this generation.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game delivers an incredible level of detail thanks to engine features like Nanite, a real-time global illumination system called Lumen and Metahuman for lifelike characters. In addition, Ninja Theory's world-class motion capture studio helped them create realistic animations which elevate the brutal combat experience to another level.

I was pretty much in awe of Hellblade 2's visuals from start to finish, thinking about whether we've hit the ceiling when it comes to visual fidelity in video games or if there's another talented team out there that can set the bar even higher.

That's when another Xbox studio came to my mind - The Coalition.

The Coalition are the studio behind Xbox's beloved franchise Gears of War, which is known for its iconic characters, and stories but more importantly for this opinion piece, games with an unprecedented visual quality.

Gears 5 which was released almost five years ago is still one of the most beautiful games you can play on Xbox consoles and PC but even earlier instalments like Gears of War 4 and 2015's remastered version of the original Gears of War have survived the test of time, offering visually stunning setpieces, high-resolution assets and character models.

So, this got me thinking that The Coalition's upcoming Gears 6, which is rumoured to be one of the biggest announcements at Xbox Games Showcase on June 9, could be the game that pushes Unreal Engine 5 to new limits, raising the bar that Ninja Theory set with Hellblade 2.

The Coalition are masters of Unreal Engine. The studio worked closely with Epic Games on the jaw-dropping Matrix Awakenes demo and have been collaborating and providing feedback to Epic about their experiences with the fifth iteration of Unreal for years.

They also provide help and feedback on almost every Unreal Engine project within the Xbox Game Studios group to make these first-party games proper technical showcases for Xbox consoles.

With such experience, knowledge and expertise in Unreal Engine 5 workflows, this Vancouver-based studio are undoubtedly well-positioned to deliver their most technically advanced game to date on Xbox.

Just think of all the diverse worlds that The Coalition can bring to life with the new tech, all the different biomes and dynamic features like accurate weather simulations and even environmental destruction that are now possible more than ever before. There's no doubt that the team can play around with many interesting concepts and ideas in terms of graphics and gameplay too.

The truth is that we still know nothing about Gears 6 but you can bet The Coalition's aim is to make a game that will squeeze every bit of power from the Xbox Series X console. It's probably safe to assume that the studio will once again push for 60 FPS to be the standard output just like they did with Gears 5 but we certainly would not mind if they offered an optional 30 FPS or 40 FPS quality mode with additional ray tracing features and higher resolution and level of detail.

Furthermore, it will be interesting to see if Gears 6 expands on the semi-open world design of its predecessor with a full-blown open world or goes for a more focused, linear experience like classic Gears of War games.

I think it's the former that The Coalition are aiming for, given that Unreal Engine 5 solved the issues that the engine had with an open-world design which is why we had so few open-world games on Unreal 4.

DON'T MISS:

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• Microsoft have already greenlit Hellblade 3, it's claimed
• Microsoft is bringing Copilot AI for games to explain how to play them
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 scores 82 out of 100 on Metacritic; media praise visuals but criticise outdated gameplay
• Phil Spencer wanted Gears franchise to be more horror, says Cliffy B