We have an interesting rumor regarding Gears of War Collection.
Just as a reminder, there have been rumors of The Coalition making another collection of Gears of War remasters for some time now, to keep it up to date with the current console generation. Those rumors have picked up steam after Microsoft revealed they would start bringing their games to PlayStation.
While rumors that that collection is now also headed to PlayStation, it’s worth remembering that The Coalition and Microsoft have not yet even confirmed that the collection exists.
Twitter user Detective Seeds, who is better known for sharing game sales than rumors, shared this claim on Twitter:
“Gears of War collection should be releasing early to mid August. It is PS5 pro enhanced, but I have been told NO Multiplayer PVP, campaign focus only.
For further on Gears of War collection. The game is loaded onto PS storefront on the back end (this is the same with others I have said in the past). It shows 1 player and does not show support for additional players. I asked about co-op, but no clarification on that yet.”
It isn’t clear where Detective Seeds got this information, so we can’t verify how credible this claim is. But this rumor raises a lot of questions, in particular about Microsoft’s new distribution strategy.
As you may already know, Forza Horizon 5 is set to release on the PlayStation 5. The game is currently topping PlayStation 5 pre-order charts, nearly two months before its release.
Microsoft did not announce that the PlayStation 5 version of Forza Horizon 5 will only be single player. In fact, online multiplayer survival title Sea of Thieves was clearly ported to PlayStation 5 in the hopes that the bigger PlayStation 5 player base would make the game better for everyone.
If the Gears of War games are really coming to PlayStation with no multiplayer of any kind, it will be the first time Microsoft would have limited PlayStation gamers like that. It would also undermine the chances that this collection will sell well on PlayStation 5, which would make the entire enterprise of porting the games to the platform somewhat pointless.
Detective Seeds put forward speculation on his own rumor, saying:
“Yeah if this turns out to be the case, I am not surprised. Are the gears servers even up from the older games? i truly don’t know, but it seems the focus is to get this collection out so players can go through the story before E day”
For those who didn’t know, 2015’s Gears of War: Ultimate Edition came with remasters of those games on Xbox One, alongside access to the original Xbox 360 versions via backwards compatibility. All versions have fully functional online multiplayer and modern enhancements.
If this collection is happening, it isn’t likely that Microsoft will gate online access from PlayStation users. However, if Sony refuses to work with them again, they may have to enable online multiplayer on PlayStation 5 by logging in to Microsoft or Xbox accounts. This is how you have to play Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5.
In any case, we will just have to see how this works out when, or maybe if, Microsoft announces this collection for this console.
