Gears 5 will support 3-player splitscreen on PC

At AMD's "Next Horizon Gaming" E3 press conference, we got a few minutes of Gears 5, as The Coalition's Rod Fergusson and Mike Raynor came on stage to talk tech. While most of the time was spent going over information about Gears 5 we already knew, and talking up AMD's hardware, this was a cool tidbit to have confirmed: Gears 5's new Escape mode will support three-player splitscreen on PC.

Given how robust the Gears of War 4 PC version was, and Microsoft's renewed focus on PC gaming, this isn't a huge surprise. But it's still cool, since splitscreen is often a feature in console games that's left out of PC games. Sure, splitscreen on a monitor isn't necessarily a great experience, but these days a whole lot of us have big 1440p or 4K screens on our desks, connect our PCs to our living room TVs, or use in-home streaming to put our games on the big screen.

Mike Raynor, The Coalition's technical director, also dropped a few more details about the PC version: it'll support 4K and ultrawide resolutions, HDR, and uncapped framerates. And he spoke a bit about the next-gen Xbox having similar AMD hardware to what's inside many PCs:

"It's really fantastic for us, because we have similar feature sets on Xbox and PC. We can spend more time making the game and less time on siloed development where we're working on one platform over the other. It allows us to spend more time polishing the game and it looks great and performs fantastic on both platforms."

Gears 5 is out in September.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).