We have an interesting follow up to a rumor that’s been brewing all week about Gears of War Collection.
After rumors spread that this potential collection would be releasing on PlayStation 5, dataminers confirmed that they found the game in Sony’s servers. However, they also found something unexpected; the data indicates that the collection won’t have PvP online multiplayer.
As we pointed out in the earlier report, since Microsoft started working with Sony by publishing Minecraft on PlayStation, they have visibly ensured that PlayStation versions of their games get the same content that are available on Xbox, at least to the best of their ability. Sea of Thieves, part of the first four infamous games that were brought to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, visibly had online cross-play between PlayStation and Xbox players. This was a clear move by Rare and Microsoft to increase the player base of the game, and this did end up working to the benefit of all their players.
Today, Jez casually logged back into Twitter and dropped a few bombshells. When asked about yesterday’s rumor he said:
“actually, i too have heard no multiplayer”
He then corroborated that it will have online co-op. Jez was also asked about Horde Mode, and he claimed that he was still trying to verify this information.
Just so we’re clear, Jez has lines of communication in Microsoft that are both official and also off the record. He would have to be careful if anything he says would compromise either a source, or the trust that he’s earned within Microsoft. If he can’t talk about something, he will avoid the topic or say that he doesn’t know.
So, it seems that he was at least not discouraged to talk about what he knows about Gears of War Collection. And that means these claims that the new collection won’t have PvP may be very much true. In fact, Jez also didn’t say anything about PlayStation players being the only ones missing out. So it looks like PvP will be missing for this game on all platforms.
There could be several reasons that Microsoft and The Coalition skipped on PvP for this collection. One is that it just cost too much. It is possible that they are working on it now, but chose to delay it and release what they already have ready. Finally, it’s possible that they couldn’t coordinate online multiplayer across PlayStation and Microsoft, the same way that they did with Sea of Thieves. It could be that this time Sony said no, or it could be a technical issue that’s just too expensive for what it’s worth.
But lest we forget, Microsoft has yet to confirm that a Gears of War Collection even exists. If all this information is surrounding a project that is getting cancelled anyway, all of this speculation will be moot. So we’ll just have to wait for when Microsoft actually speaks up about it.
