Marcus Fenix and squadmates fire on Locust troops beneath a burning bridge in a Gears of War: E-Day campaign screenshot

Gears of War: E-Day VR Mod Targets Full Campaign on PC

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Marcus Fenix and squadmates fire on Locust troops beneath a burning bridge in a Gears of War: E-Day campaign screenshot
Gears of War: E-Day’s campaign, which the mod aims to make fully playable in VR. Image: Xbox Game Studios / The Coalition, via Steam.

Gears of War: E-Day has been on sale for just over two weeks, and a fan-made PC VR mod for its full single-player campaign is already in development. The modder behind it, known as rockonthehill, posted a first trailer on October 18 and says the mod will be FREE at release. Road to VR reported the project on October 21. There is no release date yet, and no public download.

The project matters because of the game it targets. E-Day is the first new mainline Gears of War game since Gears 5 in 2019. A working VR conversion of a big-budget third-person cover shooter would be one of the more ambitious entries in this year’s run of unofficial PC VR mods.

What the Gears of War: E-Day VR Mod Does Today

The mod is described as an early work-in-progress build. According to the creator’s trailer post and Road to VR, the following features already work:

  • Full stereo rendering, so each eye gets its own correct view rather than a flat image on a virtual screen.
  • Full-body IK (inverse kinematics), which maps the player’s head and hands onto a visible in-game body.
  • Manual reloads and manual weapon switching, in place of button-press animations.
  • Two-handed aiming, so rifles are steadied with both controllers.
  • Cover combat, keeping the series’ core cover system usable in first person.
  • King Raven gunner seat, so players can operate the helicopter’s mounted gun during on-rails sequences.

Planned additions include using the Lancer’s chainsaw bayonet without canned animations, physical melee, collision for hands and weapons, and a working scope on the Longshot sniper rifle. Rockonthehill says these will appear in the next feature video. Until then, they are goals, not features that have been shown working.

What It Will Not Do

The scope is narrower than the headline suggests. The mod covers the single-player campaign only. Rockonthehill says online co-op is not part of the plan, and nothing suggests support for the Horde Siege or Versus multiplayer modes. That matters, because The Coalition’s game is built heavily around co-op and live multiplayer seasons.

Several practical details are still unknown: which headsets and PC setups will be supported, whether both the Steam and Microsoft Store/PC Game Pass versions will work, and how the mod will hold up when the game is patched. There is no public GitHub repository yet. Road to VR expects the project to be a fork of Praydog’s UEVR, the open-source framework that adds VR support to Unreal Engine games, but that has not been confirmed. E-Day runs on Unreal Engine 5, which makes UEVR the obvious starting point.

The Game Behind the Mod

Gears of War: E-Day launched on October 6, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, through both the Microsoft Store and Steam. It is also included with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Premium Edition buyers got early access from October 1. Xbox lists the Standard Edition at $69.99 and the Premium Edition at $99.99. The Coalition developed the game with People Can Fly. It is a prequel set 14 years before the original game, following Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago through the first Locust emergence.

The game’s visual ambitions also set the performance bar for VR. Nvidia says E-Day uses Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen global illumination, Nanite geometry and MegaLights ray-traced shadows, with DLSS 4.5 at launch. Xbox targets 4K at up to 60 fps on flat screens. PC VR has to render two views at a typical 72 to 90 Hz, so players should expect heavy GPU demands and lowered settings, even on high-end hardware. On Steam, the game holds a Mostly Positive rating, with 71% of 7,078 user reviews positive at the time of writing.

Part of a Larger PC VR Mod Wave

E-Day is the latest major flat-screen game to get community VR work this fall. Earlier this month, CircuitLord’s Titanfall 2 VR mod shipped free with full manual reloads, and its installer then went through eight builds in a single week, passing 60,000 downloads. The Diablo II: Resurrected VR mod released 22 versions in six days and added native OpenXR. Road to VR attributes part of this pace to AI-assisted coding, which has lowered the barrier for modders adding VR support to games that were never designed for it.

The Gears project is earlier in development than those mods. Titanfall 2 and Diablo II had public builds when we covered them; E-Day has a trailer and a feature list. Its ambition is also higher. Turning a third-person cover shooter into a first-person, motion-controlled game means rebuilding interactions such as cover, chainsaw executions and vehicle turrets, not just moving the camera. Windows Central argued that the early footage makes a case for an official first-person Gears spin-off. Microsoft has announced no such project.

What to Watch Next

Three things will show whether the mod is close to release: the promised feature video with chainsaw and melee support, a public repository or installer, and a list of supported headsets and game versions. Anyone planning to try it will need the PC version of the game and a PC VR setup. Our guide to the best VR headsets of 2026 and our Steam Frame vs Quest 3 comparison cover the main PC VR options.

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