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Dominic Santiago, usually just Dom, is one of the four playable leads of Gears of War: E-Day. He is voiced by Carlos Ferro, who has played the character since the original game in the series. This page covers only what has been confirmed for this game.

At a Glance

Where He Starts

Dom is a young Pendulum Wars veteran, home on a Sera that has just declared peace, and at an armistice memorial in Kalona with Marcus Fenix when the ground opens. The two are in a bar in plain clothes when the first tremors hit.

The connection between the two men runs through Dom's older brother Carlos, who died in combat just before the war ended and who was Marcus's best friend. That loss leaves the pair distant at the start of the game, and the campaign treats the repair of that relationship as an origin story in its own right, alongside the origin of the Locust War.

The studio has said it drew on existing published material for Dom's family life while building this version of the character, and has noted that he had a full family including two children. Most players coming to the game know the pair only as the two friends who fought the Locust War, so the pre-war life is treated as new ground for the audience rather than as established knowledge.

First Contact

Dom carries the line the team uses to mark the turn in how the squad understands what they are fighting. After the first Wretches and the first unarmed Drones, the moment the creatures start shooting back and speaking, he tells Marcus that they shoot, they make weapons and they talk. That is the point where the invasion stops reading as a monster attack and starts reading as an army. The escalation itself is on Enemies.

Dom is also the squadmate shown pulling a raging Drone off a downed Marcus during the gameplay demo, which is how the mechanic is meant to work in co-op: a downed player can be freed by a teammate or the Drone can be shot from range.

In the Announce Trailer

The 2024 reveal ends on Dom. Marcus falls through a floor into an emergence hole, and a young Dom reaches down to pull him back up, over an instrumental reworking of the song used in the original game's advertising.

Related Items

The Exfil Dom skin ships with flavour text describing the character as a member of a Special Tactics Group Commando detachment trained in survival techniques behind enemy lines. That copy is skin description rather than campaign material, and the developers state that multiplayer cosmetics are not always considered canon, so it is recorded here with that caveat rather than folded into the biography above.