--- title: "Gears of War turns 20: The Coalition gives E-Day players General Raam free and dates Season 2 for December 1" url: https://badiyaa.com/gears-of-war-20th-anniversary-e-day-raam-free-season-2/ published: 2026-11-09T06:52:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-09T06:52:00+00:00 section: Gaming publisher: Badiyaa --- # Gears of War turns 20: The Coalition gives E-Day players General Raam free and dates Season 2 for December 1 A two-week anniversary event in Gears of War: E-Day on Xbox Series X/S and PC adds Guardian and a harder Horde Siege mode. Season 2, titled Legacy, follows 56 days after the game's October 6 launch. Gears of War turned 20 on November 7, and developer The Coalition marked the date by handing General RAAM, the Locust commander players killed aboard a train at the end of the 2006 original, to everyone who plays Gears of War: E-Day. There is no challenge to grind and nothing to buy. The studio says logging in is enough to claim him as a multiplayer character. The giveaway is the centerpiece of a two-week anniversary event, laid out on November 6 by Nicole Fawcette, the studio’s brand director, in a post on Xbox’s official blog. The same post put a date on the game’s next content drop: Season 2, titled Legacy, starts December 1. ## What the 20th anniversary event adds - **Guardian, in Versus:** the player-versus-player mode that the studio sums up as one “where only one leader makes it out alive.” - **For the Queen, in Horde Siege:** a variant of the co-op wave mode. The supply cache is switched off, so a squad has only the loadouts it walked in with. - **RAAM:** free to every E-Day player from November 7, claimed at login. - **New rewards:** promised for both modes, though the post does not itemize them. The event went live on Tuesday, November 3, at 8 a.m. Pacific, according to a report that cited the studio’s own post on X. Count two weeks from that start and the modes should rotate out around November 17. Treat that as the outer edge: the same report noted that the game’s Halloween event closed sooner than its advertised two weeks. Badiyaa has not played the anniversary modes; the descriptions here are the studio’s. ## Season 2: Legacy lands 56 days after launch [Gears of War: E-Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War:_E-Day) came out on October 6, 2026, for Xbox Series X/S and Windows PC, with premium early access from October 1. The Coalition developed it with People Can Fly, and Xbox Game Studios published it. Twenty-five remaining days of October, 30 days of November and one of December make it 56 days from launch to the second season. A season, in live-service terms, is a block of weeks in which a studio adds maps, modes and cosmetics to keep players coming back after the campaign credits. Legacy leans on nostalgia: Fawcette says it brings back fan-favorite maps, modes and character skins from across the series. Her one concrete example is Solemn Memories Dom, a skin that dresses Dominic Santiago in the suit from the well-known photograph of him and Maria in Gears of War 2. On price, the standard edition lists at $69.99 and showed a discount to $62.99 on the Xbox store panel attached to the post when we read it on November 9. The Premium Edition costs $99.99 and bundles five seasonal customization packs plus 1,000 Iron, the game’s paid currency. E-Day is also in the Game Pass library, and Xbox’s small print says online play, which covers both Versus and Horde Siege, needs a Game Pass plan that includes online multiplayer. ## From Xbox 360 in 2006 to Unreal Engine 5 The [first Gears of War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War_(video_game)) reached North American stores on November 7, 2006, as an Xbox 360 exclusive made by Epic Games and published by Microsoft Game Studios. Europe got it 10 days later. It sold more than three million copies inside 10 weeks, finished as the fastest-selling game of 2006 and helped popularize cover-based shooting. E-Day is the sixth main entry and a prequel, set 14 years before that first game on the day the Locust Horde surfaced. It is built in Unreal Engine 5. One thing has changed in the other direction: the series reached PlayStation 5 in August 2025 with the remaster Gears of War: Reloaded, yet E-Day itself is listed only for Xbox Series X/S and Windows. Fawcette’s post is as much a thank-you note as a patch preview. She writes of friendships that began in multiplayer lobbies, of couples who met playing Gears and later married, and of campaign runs shared with fathers and brothers. “Thank you for making Gears part of your lives, and for letting us be a small part of yours,” she tells them. The dates to keep: RAAM can be claimed now, the anniversary modes should run until about November 17, and Season 2: Legacy begins December 1. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Gears of War: E-Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War:_E-Day) - [Wikipedia: Gears of War (video game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_of_War_(video_game)) *Image: Sergey Galyonkin, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*