Craig Reid on BlueSky

For the English-speaking community: Stay together, Gears Fam. We all know how long we’ve waited for a new Gears — and more importantly, how long we’ve waited for a Gears game that genuinely feels worth getting excited about. If things go well, this can be the beginning of a new chapter for the franchise. Big streamers don’t own the public narrative as long as the rest of us stay honest about what we actually think. If you haven’t played the campaign yet, I don’t think you can objectively say the entire game is trash. If you don’t like the PvP or the PvE, that’s completely fair. Not every mode is going to work for everyone. But saying the whole game is bad simply because one part of it isn’t for you gives the loudest trolls more power over the conversation, and that can ultimately hurt the entire franchise. If there was ever a moment for people who genuinely care about Gears to speak up for what they believe, I think this is it. There’s also this constant modern “woke” discourse, along with the tendency — especially on the American side of gaming conversations — to turn almost everything into outrage. Sometimes it gets so excessive that it almost feels manufactured, especially around gaming media and social media narratives. Specially on the English speaking scope. For the Spanish side of things, the experience has been a little bit different. I’ve played the game. I wasn’t paid or sponsored to play it, and I can say that with complete confidence. After all these years, I genuinely believe the investment that went into Gears of War: E-Day is reflected in the experience. We couldn’t really stand behind Gears 4, Gears 5, Tactics, or Reloaded in the same way. But this time, I think we can at least try to put some of ourselves into supporting E-Day the same way this community has been doing over the past few months and years. On the marketing side, we’ve seen products sell out, and when I was in LA, I saw huge lines of people trying to get their hands on the game with a Gears of War logo on their clothes. That’s us. That’s the community. The Coalition clearly put everything they could into this, and I don’t think we should let people who seem determined to hate every game they touch dictate how the rest of us are supposed to feel about something that was genuinely made for Gears fans to enjoy. Personally, I don’t think I’m going to engage with posts that are only there to hate the game or call it “woke.” There’s no point arguing with people who aren’t interested in an actual conversation and decided years ago what they were going to think. I just believe that, after everything it took to finally have another strong Gears experience in our hands, this is one of those moments where the community should stand behind the franchise if we genuinely believe in it. We do this together or we die together. Because we are brothers to the end.