Gears of War: E-Day‘s Multiplayer Beta is entering its second weekend today, following a massive turnout during the first Beta, despite access being limited to those who pre-ordered the game or subscribed to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
The Coalition recently posted on the official Gears X/Twitter account, outlining a whole bunch of performance tweaks and balance tuning fixes ahead of today’s Open Beta, which is set to kick off at:
- North America: 12pm PDT / 1pm MDT / 2pm CDT / 3pm EDT
- UK/Ire: 8pm BST
- Europe: 9pm CEST / 10pm EEST
- Asia/Oceania: 4am (Fri) JST / 3am (Fri) AWST / 5am (Fri) AEST
If you’d like to get stuck in yourself, you can install the beta by going to the “Gears of War: E-Day Multiplayer Beta” page on the official Microsoft Store.
Here’s a closer look at what’s changed for the second weekend:
On this page: Gears Of War: E-Day Dev Announces 10 Improvements For Beta Weekend 2
Reminder: PC Players Must Install Beta Onto SSD
SSD Required: HDDs (slower mechanical drives) are not supported and may cause severe loading issues, missing assets, stuttering, and crashes.
Aim Assist Clarification
Missing clarification in Settings that Aim Assist only affects Campaign and Horde Siege game modes. Versus will not be affected. Text to be added at launch.
The “default” setting enables a standard level of controller assist in every mode, including Versus, as it has in past Gears games as well as most other shooters. The setting can also be toggled “off” completely.
The higher two Aim Assist settings – Snap Aim and Lock-On- only affect Campaign and Horde Siege modes. The text on the settings screen is missing an explanation in the Beta build, as mentioned in today’s patch notes.
Fixes And Improvements
- Prototype Lancer – Increased base damage and reduced perfect reload damage
- Hit Detection Delays – Improved hit detection delays players were experiencing in Horde Siege
- Anti-cheat protection – Improved anti-cheat protection and took enforcement action against verified cheaters
- Drone-Snub Error Code – Implemented mitigations for the drone-snub error code. As part of this change, we have updated our port requirement from UDP 443 to UDP 3074. If you continue to experience this issue, please ensure the required ports are open on your network. For more information, visit Xbox Live Network Ports
- Stability – Improved stability and reduced frequency of crashes across all platforms
- Connection Timeouts – Implemented mitigations to address connection timeout errors
- Matchmaking Improvements– Made further improvements to our Matchmaking system in Versus (Social & Ranked)
- Third-Party Controller Support – Improved an issue where some third-party controllers were not recognized upon game launch on Steam
- Account Linking – Improved issue where players were not able to link their Microsoft accounts
- Xbox Series S – Made further improvements to reduce hitching on Xbox Series S
If You’ve Played It, What Do You Think Of The Gears: E-Day Beta So Far? (467 votes)
- I’m loving it, it’s amazing!42%
- It’s pretty good, yeah26%
- It’s OK, not bad9%
- I’m a bit disappointed with it to be honest15%
- I really don’t like it so far!7%
Happy with the changes? And will you be playing Gears of War: E-Day this weekend? Tell us all about it in the comments.
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Craig is a Staff Writer and former Video Producer at Pure Xbox, where he covers the biggest games in the world of Xbox.