Revision 4

Kalona is the fictional city where the whole of Gears of War: E-Day takes place. The campaign, every Horde Siege map and all six Versus maps are set in or around it. Narrowing a planet-wide catastrophe down to one place was a deliberate early decision: at global scale the human impact stops registering.

Built as One City

Kalona is not a series of disconnected levels. It is built as a single integrated city in the engine, and the camera can be lifted in the editor to see the whole thing at once. The practical consequence is that when you look at another district from inside a level, you are looking at the real location of that place rather than at a painted backdrop.

That continuity is what makes the destruction land. You revisit areas that were intact and find them smoking ruins. The studio set out to make the city feel like another character in the story, so that losing it registers as a loss rather than as scenery changing. Building it from the ground up as a real city was the method: the team wanted players to understand what it was to live in Kalona before watching it come apart. The set pieces and landmarks are built to be memorable, and those landmarks change as the campaign progresses.

The city is also new to the series rather than a return to established ground. The studio describes Kalona as a destination built specifically for this game, so its layout, its landmarks and its history all begin here.

Confirmed Locations

Individual campaign settings named so far include a bar, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a subway and a sky train. Full map descriptions are on Versus Maps.

Design References

The studio is based in downtown Vancouver, between the stadium district and Yaletown, looking out over a stadium, a working waterfront and the mountains behind it. Kalona is fictional, but its geography was drawn from what the team sees out of the windows. For the era, the reference was 1970s New York, which is where the city's slightly older and clunkier feel comes from.

The Retro-Tech Rule

The city sits before anything the series has previously shown, so the technology is deliberately dated. There are no flat panel displays anywhere: televisions are cathode-ray sets with wood panelling, cash registers are mechanical, vending machines are period-appropriate. Cars are blocky 1970s shapes, which also makes them useful cover, and the team refers to the whole aesthetic as retro tech.

A City at Peace

Kalona is shown alive before it is destroyed, which no earlier game in the series has done. Peacetime signage is scattered everywhere: victory celebrations, peace time discounts in the grocery store, veteran centres and recruiting centres. The game does not spend hours walking around in peacetime, but the echoes are visible throughout the first night.

Building a living city was also the harder technical problem. Earlier games in the series began after everything had already been destroyed, which is easier to construct. Here the detail had to be dense enough for the city to read as inhabited before it could credibly be torn apart.

The City Under Attack

Kalona is where cover comes from, and the variety is the point: cars, buildings, planters, trains and the organic shapes left when the ground is ripped up. Sinkholes swallow vehicles and whole buildings, and micro-destruction chips away at cover across a range of materials. Emergence holes can open anywhere and flood the space with red light. Beneath the streets, Locust tunnels are extensive enough that the COG has to map them, which is the entire premise of the R.I.G. devices in Horde Siege.

Setting the game in a city was itself a cover-shooter decision. Cars, buildings and debris sit everywhere, so cover options are spread across the whole space with a lot of variety in what is available. The mechanics that use them are on Movement and Cover.

The fight is never confined to the street the squad is standing in. Other COG units run their own assignments down distant streets and across the buildings around you, so the battle for Kalona plays out in several places at once rather than as a series of set pieces staged for one unit.

Civilian life is shown interrupted rather than already gone. The clearest example is a train overrun by Locust and full of civilian casualties, left where it was caught.

The Tourist Map

Navigation is handled in fiction. Early on the player picks up a tourist map of Kalona as a makeshift guide, and that pamphlet then serves as the actual in-game map.

Who Runs the City

Kalona still has a civilian government trying to function while the city is being torn open. The mayor is exhausted and fighting to protect Kalona's civilians, which sits badly with Colonel Trench, the hard-line COG officer who takes military command during the emergence. A strategy briefing between the two is built around that clash of priorities: one side is trying to save people, the other is trying to run a war.

The published material does not name the mayor, so the office is recorded here without one.

Unconfirmed Geography

Wider geography for the city and its region circulates from other sources with no support in official material for this game. Only the locations listed above are recorded here.