Safe Gears, GTA 6 nudity questions, and AI pushback

This Week in Videogames' Ralph Panebianco reviews The Coalition's Gears of War: E-Day, released 6 October on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series. He treats it as a retreat to safer ground after the divisive reaction to Gears 4 and 5: a prequel set on Emergence Day, with Dom and Marcus leading a new squad. His central complaint is that the game has no real plot. Its acts feel tonally identical, events resolve and are followed by more events, and the roughly fifteen-hour campaign comes across as rudderless.

He credits the writing's bleak, earnest treatment of war, trauma and expendable soldiers, and the presentation. The opening cityscapes look like the rumoured (and disputed) $400 million budget, and the sound effects are crisp enough to work as gameplay information, though he finds the score disappointing. The optional semi-open hub of Kalona has weak rewards. Panebianco lands on a game that is deeply cathartic to play but squanders a pivotal moment in the series' history.

CounterpointDefenders would say the relentless fight is the story, a reading the reviewer himself calls generous, and some fans who liked the Gears 4 and 5 cast would dispute that going back to the old squad is an improvement.

Polygon's Oli Welsh uses his Patch Notes column to describe Rockstar's campaign as having reached its arty-magazine phase, with a Love magazine cover story. IGN also published the full 10,000-word transcript of its August gameplay demo, and IGN's Rachel Weber denied seeing the protagonist's penis in a shower scene. Leaker Cyberleek then broke its silence with footage that Welsh says confirms the character is rendered nude. This follows last week's confirmation that the game will include sex scenes.

Welsh asks why Rockstar can explore sex when last summer's wave of adult indie games was delisted by Steam and itch.io under payment-processor pressure. Citing a thread by UK commentator George Osborn, he argues the difference is age rating. Physical releases, even a code in a box, are rated and verified as legal, while storefronts like Steam and itch have no such framework and are easier to pressure. His conclusion is that more regulation and paperwork would protect more expression.

CounterpointIndie developers and storefront operators may balk at mandatory rating paperwork, which adds cost and gatekeeping for small studios, and the columnist concedes it is an odd place to land for a piece about censorship.

Previously: Cyberleek was asking for crypto payments in exchange for leaking a playable build. — Sunday October 11 edition.

In his Dungeon Master column, PC Gamer's Fraser Brown argues that the genre's power fantasy of the competent chosen hero gets dull, and that he wants more friction and failure. He says games usually want players to succeed even when they set up obstacles, citing The Blood of Dawnwalker as an example. He credits tabletop games like Mothership and Call of Cthulhu with embracing misfortune. He sees more CRPGs moving that way, naming Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Zero Parades and Esoteric Ebb.

His case is that failure should produce more story, not a punishment or a death screen. He cites a Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 quest in which a botched theft left his side as underdogs in a tournament, making the win feel more meaningful. He lands on roleplaying as improv, with a permissive game master or set of systems that says 'yes, and' and finds interesting outcomes for dumb choices.

CounterpointPlayers who come to RPGs for mastery and competence would say friction can turn into frustration, and Brown himself admits the appeal of a holiday from his own incompetence.

Polygon's Corey Plante responds to news that Xbox is handing the next Halo game to Activision, and to a Rebs Gaming leak saying Activision is weighing a hard reboot doubling as Master Chief's origin story. He argues this misses the point of Combat Evolved, which drops players into an ongoing war, and could overwrite Eric Nylund's 2001 novel Halo: The Fall of Reach. The book follows John as one of 150 children considered for the SPARTAN-II program. After the augmentation procedures, 30 of 75 candidates die, 12 are left severely disabled and 33 become active Spartans.

Plante says the book's strength is showing others who know the Chief as John, which makes his stoicism read as armor rather than blankness. He ties this to Halo: Reach, which he rates among the franchise's best because it surrounds the player with a full team. His conclusion is that any new prequel should follow the book's example and center the Spartans as a family.

CounterpointThe reboot is a leak, not an announced plan, and supporters of a fresh start would argue it could let new players in without decades of lore and let a game show a childhood that a novel only describes.

PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor praises Yahtzee Croshaw's Fully Ramblomatic, the successor to Zero Punctuation on the Second Wind YouTube channel after the Escapist's collapse. He reads the series' flippant British tone as a sign of care, since writing a witty description takes more work than a plain one. He cites Yahtzee's line about giving Palworld creatures guns, and says the occasional praise stands out because it is as well observed as the criticism. He admits the internet is full of cynicism, but argues the industry deserves some disrespect now and then.

CounterpointViewers weary of online cynicism may not want more of it, and Macgregor jokes that Yahtzee is wrong about Knights of the Old Republic.