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Campaign Acts and Chapters
September 14, 2026 at 01:07 AM
Confirmed the campaign runs to five acts, added the per-act achievement table, and confirmed Insane as the top difficulty tier
The Campaign of Gears of War: E-Day is divided into Acts, and each Act is subdivided into Chapters. The campaign runs to five Acts. That count comes from the published achievement list, which tags thirteen of its entries to a specific Act and stops at Act 5. Beyond the count, only Act 2 has been shown: the campaign preview build opened at the start of it, and Chapter 2 of that same Act takes the squad to Oria Stadium.
The preview build ran roughly an hour, covering the whole of Act 2 Chapter 1 and the opening stretch of Chapter 2. It is the only run of campaign beats published in any detail: one act, seen partway through, not a table of contents for the game. The bridge is also the section made playable to the public at gamescom 2026.
Beat | What Happens |
|---|---|
Assembly at City Hall | Bravo Squad reports for duty at Kalona's City Hall, converted into a COG base that is part triage and part command centre, and gives details and next of kin to Captain Akila Grey. |
Strategy briefing | Kalona's exhausted mayor and Colonel Trench clash over priorities, the mayor fighting to protect the city's civilians, Trench taking military command. |
The tourist map | The squad grabs a tourist map of Kalona as a makeshift guide. The pamphlet becomes the player's actual in-game map. |
Securing the bridge | An early objective is access to a bridge. Wretches rush across its underside and an adjacent squad nicknames them Crawlers on the spot. Boomers turn up too, hulking artillery carriers that can devastate a Gear in one shot. |
Oria Stadium | Chapter 2 moves to Oria Stadium, a landmark turned forward operating base, where the squad links up with Tai Kaliso and Theta Squad and the Chainsaw Lancer prototype changes hands. |
An optional detour | Chapter 2 carries an optional side mission where the squad can stop to help another team. |
The rail station | The objective after the stadium is a nearby rail station, ending in a brutal multi-level fight. |
Two chapter titles have circulated as readouts of the cards shown on screen: Act 2 Chapter 1 as "Bravo Squad", and Act 2 Chapter 2 as "Hold the Line". Neither has been officially confirmed, and no chapter title outside Act 2 has surfaced at all.
Five. The Achievements list published on September 9, 2026 tags achievements to Acts 1 through 5 and no further, which is the first published statement of the act count. It supersedes the earlier three-act reading, which came from the campaign being framed as one city over three days and was never officially stated.
The tags are unevenly distributed, which is the only structural hint they carry.
Act | Achievements tagged to it | What else is known |
|---|---|---|
Act 1 | Emergence Begins, We Must Improvise, The Bigger They Are… | Nothing published. The preview build started after it |
Act 2 | The Scorched Legion, You Want What On the Front of a Gun?!, Got to the Choppa | The only Act shown publicly. Beats are in the table above |
Act 3 | Get Back You Eight-legged Freak, Twice the Pride, Double the Fall, …The Harder They Fall | Nothing published |
Act 4 | End of the Line, The Only Good Bug is a Dead Bug | Nothing published |
Act 5 | Nothing Left but the Fight, For My Boys | Nothing published |
One achievement sits outside the act structure entirely: FNG is awarded for completing Boot Camp, the short training course. The campaign covers a little of the before, the during and a little of the aftermath, and more of that spread is said to surface as it progresses, but no act is described in words anywhere except Act 2.
Difficulty is customisable by adjusting individual gameplay settings, and changing certain settings shifts the current tier to match. That system is confirmed. The four tier names below were read off the preview build’s screen. Two of them have since picked up outside support: a developer referred to playing on casual while describing how much of an encounter a player notices, and Insane is named directly in two achievement requirements, which confirms it as the top tier. Normal and Hardcore remain observed rather than published.
Tier | Description Shown |
|---|---|
Casual | A forgiving experience for players who want to focus on the story and exploration. |
Normal | A balanced challenge. |
Hardcore | Every skill will be put to the test. |
Insane | Punishing difficulty leaves no room for error. |
Two achievements ask for all Acts on Insane: one for the run itself and one, worth 75 points, that adds every side mission and every hidden item on top. The full list is on Achievements.
The same screen was described as exposing the components behind a tier, each adjustable on its own: player health, player damage, active reload difficulty, recoil strength and the number of lives. Those are unconfirmed as well. Documented menus are on Settings and Controls.
In co-op each player's difficulty can differ from everyone else's in the same game, so a mixed group need not settle on one setting. Player counts are on Co-Op and Split-Screen. Boot Camp, the short training course that is one of the two onboarding modes, has been described as reachable from the same screen, which is not officially confirmed either.
Anything about Acts 1, 3, 4 or 5 beyond the achievement names tagged to them. The act count is settled; the content of four of the five acts is not.
A full chapter list. Only two titles have circulated, both unconfirmed, and both from Act 2.
An official campaign length. No figure has been published by the developer.
How collectibles work. Three separate categories exist by name, Secondary Objectives, Hard Cases and Collectibles, but no system, count or location has been described. See Campaign.
Whether the Normal and Hardcore tier names and the individual difficulty components are final.
