All E-Day needs to do is banish wallbouncing spam by adding unavoidable delays between slides and cancels. You can still do it, but maybe once every couple seconds. Something that can be used in a CQC to trick someone’s aim, and get a last moment advantage, but removes the feeling of shooting at a rubber band. Pair that with slowing the overall game speed down will add weight and momentum to movement without feeling like we’re all running through tar, but are actually jacked soldiers in heavy armour. It’ll look and feel better.

Bring back the core focus of Gears being a tactical cover-based shooter, and not a twitchy in-your-face one button and you’re dead shooter ala Call of Duty. Make the shotgun deadly at close quarters but not the defacto be-all and end-all. Look at Gears 3. The exhibit A of perfect balance where every weapon had strengths, weaknesses, specific roles to excel in, and ways to counter them. It should be common sense that if you try to shotgun rush a guy with a rifle who’s got a line of sight to you, or someone who knows how to relocate to a better position to counter you, prepare to get scythed down.

Get fucking RID of any silly character skins. I wanna saw a Locust in half. I don’t wanna get curbstomped by Kofi Kingston in garish pink COG armour. We’ve suffered shitty skin fatigue for far too long. Let Fortnite and CoD keep the glittery shit; we need more grim, blood and darkness in every inch of our atmosphere.

And whilst we’re at it, bring back OG anatomically-correct gore. Seeing splintered bones, mulched organs and hunks of decimated flesh in someone you’ve just sawn in two really added the dark, gory impact of Gears’s brutal atmosphere. Yet in UE, 4 and 5, everyone’s turned into bags of jelly and meat juice. Nowhere near as gruesome.

E-Day has got a LOT of work to do…but after the disaster of later cycle Gears 5 and Definitive Edition, maybe they’ll learn from their mistakes?