Welcome to another What’s Up Gears fans! Every Thursday, we’re here to bring you the latest and greatest news, community content and more from the Gearsiverse.

Here’s What’s Up this week in Gears:

  • New OSOK trial playlist settings coming next week
  • OSOK Horde balance changes live now
  • Next Challenge Character reveal this Tuesday
  • 4XP King of the Hill will be next week's Featured Playlist

Coming Up in Gears of War 4

THE ULTIMATE OSOK EVENT UPDATES

The Ultimate OSOK Event runs throughout the weekend until Friday 8th March.

Time to brace yourself hardcore OSOK fans because you’ve waited some time for this surprise.

One Shot One Kill...ONLY

You can keep shouting “NO WAY!” out loud over and over. We’ll wait.

We good? Good. We are excited to share we will be introducing Headshots Only OSOK for the first time in Gears of War history for a short trial run beginning this Tuesday, March 5th.

Before we dive into the details, we want to stop to emphasize why we see this as a trial run.

While we know you hardcore OSOK fans out there have always wanted to see this, the downside is that this creates one of the highest barriers to entry skill requirements of any playlist.

That can be a great thing – but it may not be a great thing for the silent majority of players playing OSOK today who we don’t hear from in the community. Additionally, Gears has never had headshot limited gameplay before so, out in the wild, it may not be great in practice.

In other words, we want to give this long-requested OSOK change a fair shot without the guarantee that this is the future of OSOK. It may live as its own variant of OSOK, it may become the new normal or it may not live at all. We’ll use your feedback and our data combined to help us come to a decision that’s best for everyone.

Now those details we promised you:

  • Start: Longshots Only
  • Starting Ammo: Maximum
  • Headshots: One Shot, One Kill
  • Body Shot Damage: Reduced by 99.84%
  • Melee Disabled
  • No Downs means no Meatshields!

Unfortunately, we do not have a way to disable CCC moves (Mantle Kick, Vault, Yank) as part of these changes. With development focused on Gears 5, adding functionality to enable playlist-specific disabling of this feature is unlikely to make it to Gears of War 4 but, regardless, we’ll be closely monitoring your feedback for any future considerations around OSOK.

Classic OSOK will be updated to Headshots Only OSOK on Tuesday, March 5th and end on Monday, March 11th. The OSOK Versus Challenges will still end as planned on Friday, March 8th.

OSOK Horde Balance Changes

We’ve been having a blast watching you all take on OSOK Horde this past week. OSOK Horde has a very different meta to any Horde experience that comes before it, and it’s been so fun to see the Horde experts out there in the community begin to figure it out.

If you haven’t played OSOK Horde yet, it’s a headshot centric 25 wave Horde mode with buffs to headshots and precision weapons (Longshot, Marzka, Boltok, EMBAR and Torque Bow) but debuffs to Fortification health, Power drop rates, non-precision capable weapons and body shots. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Over the weekend, we found some of the weapons were not living up to the OSOK promise for as many waves as we’d like on Insane difficulty. As such, we made a few buffs beginning on Monday for a few weapons:

  •        Longshot: Significantly increased headshot damage
  •        Torque Bow: Significantly increased headshot damage
  •        Boltok: Slightly increased headshot damage

We’ll continue listening to your feedback as we work to make the mode the best it can be. Thanks for playing!

OSOK Event Challenges

You have just over one week left to complete OSOK challenges and get TONS of rewards! Find all the information here or claim rewards for your completed Challenges at My Rewards.

Featured playlist

This week’s Featured Ranked Playlist is Dodgeball, but next week it’s King of the Hill!

Rather than the usual Monday start, Ranked KOTH 4XP will begin on Tuesday, March 5th due to an incoming Game Update.

GAME UPDATE

Next week, we will be deploying a small game update for Gears of War 4. This content-only update contains the Season 6 Diamond Master Emblem and our yet to be revealed Challenge Character for this Season.

You’ll get to see our next Challenge Character variant very soon – Tuesday 5th March in fact - ahead of the Challenge going live later in March. Keep your eyes locked on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the big reveal. You won’t want to miss this one!!!

RETURNING GEAR PACKS

There will be no returning Gear Pack this week in Gears of War 4. We know you’re keen to fill those gaps in your collection, and the good news is that we’re cooking up a Series 3 Craftables drop for the first time this year.

While that means a little Gear Pack hiatus, the wait at the end will be worth it. For now, you can keep banking those hard-earned Credits!

Come In, Control

Join us later today at 3PM PT/ 6PM ET for our Gears Weekly Live Stream from right here at The Coalition.

This week, we are giving away a FREE skin from a never-released-before Weapons Skin Set. You don’t want to miss it. Play Gears 4 with us, chat with fellow Gears fans, get your questions answered and some additional surprise weapons skins during the show!

See you online at https://live.gearsofwar.com

TC, out.