This Week in Gaming: Gears of War E-Day Launch Day, PAX Aus Preview, and a Big Cloud-Gaming Month

Monday, October 5, 2026 — This is the week the fall gaming calendar stops being theoretical. Tomorrow morning, Gears of War: E-Day launches on Xbox and PC — one of the year's biggest launches, and the anchor of a stacked month. On Friday, tens of thousands of people descend on Melbourne for PAX Aus 2026. And if you don't have the hardware for any of it, NVIDIA is quietly having one of its best cloud-gaming months ever. Meanwhile, in esports, the two biggest storylines of the season — VALORANT's world championship and Asia's medal-stage games — both reached their pivot points within 48 hours of each other.

Let's get into it: the launches, the show, the cloud, and the competitions, in that order.

The big one: Gears of War: E-Day arrives Tuesday

Twenty years after the franchise started, Gears of War comes home. E-Day — The Coalition's prequel set on Emergence Day, fourteen years before the original game — launches Tuesday, October 6 on Xbox Series X/S and PC, and it's day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass for subscribers. (Premium Edition buyers have been playing since October 1.) It follows a younger Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago through the Locust invasion that started everything, rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, with solo play, two-player split-screen, four-player online co-op, and an expanded Horde Siege mode.

The reviews are strong. The Xbox version sits around 88 on Metacritic with overwhelmingly positive notices, OpenCritic has it in the high 80s with roughly nine in ten critics recommending it, and it's the best-reviewed mainline Gears since Gears of War 3 — a step up from both Gears 4 and 5, which landed in the mid-80s. The consensus: the cover shooting is the star, tightened with a new jump-and-slide movement system, and the campaign set pieces are genuine highlights. The split is mostly about story and pacing, not the gunplay — a few outlets wanted more from the Marcus-and-Dom relationship at the center of it.

One caveat worth knowing: most of the early reviews are campaign-only. Multiplayer servers weren't live during the review period, and online modes have always been half of what a Gears game is — so treat the current numbers as a strong-but-incomplete verdict until launch week fills in the other half. For the bigger picture on what this launch means for Xbox — and the stakes inside The Coalition itself — our launch-day story has the full context, and the Game Pass angle lives here.

The rest of this week's launch slate

E-Day isn't arriving alone. STAR WARS: Galactic Racer lands the same day, October 6, also drawing strong early numbers — it's the kind of same-day double-bill that makes tomorrow feel like a proper launch event, not just one game's morning.

Thursday, October 8 brings two very different flavors of horror and mystery: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, and Order of the Sinking Star, a puzzle game from Jonathan Blow — the designer behind Braid and The Witness — which is exactly the kind of game that will either quietly become your favorite thing of the month or drive you gently mad. Friday adds the Dragon's Dogma II: Dark Arisen expansion for Capcom's open-world RPG. And the free-to-play MMORPG AION 2 went live today, October 5 — our launch-day story has everything worth knowing before you roll a character.

PAX Aus 2026: this weekend in Melbourne

Friday morning, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre opens its doors for PAX Aus 2026, running October 9–11 — and this year's expo is anchored by Nintendo's biggest Australian showcase, including the first Australian hands-on with Nintendo Switch Sports Resort ahead of its October 22 launch. SEGA, Square Enix, and Activision are all bringing major playable titles, and the keynote lineup includes World of Warcraft's Holly Longdale, DOOM composer Mick Gordon, and SAROS's Gregory Louden. The full PAX Aus preview — every playable, every keynote, every booth worth your time — lives here.

GeForce NOW's big October

Here's the under-the-radar story of the month: NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is adding 25 games in October, and it's one of the strongest cloud-gaming lineups in a while. The highlights track this week's launches closely. Streaming now: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, plus Minecraft Dungeons II, Nivalis Nights, Bookshop Simulator, Megastore: Tidy Up Together, and Planet Coaster 2 — with Minecraft Dungeons II and Planet Coaster 2 available via Game Pass.

October 6 brings Gears of War: E-Day and STAR WARS: Galactic Racer to the cloud on launch day. October 8 adds Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, Order of the Sinking Star, and Silver Pines; October 9 brings Permafrost; October 13 delivers Deep Dish Dungeon, Planet Zoo 2, Total War: SHOGUN 2 Complete Edition, and Valor Mortis; October 14 adds Among the Trolls, over the hill, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2; October 16 closes the announced slate with Beyond These Stars and Tenebris Somnia, with Dimraeth, Graveyard Keeper 2, Solasta II, and Tyr arriving later in the month.

The fine print, as always with cloud gaming: you still need to own each game on a supported store — Steam, Xbox, or Battle.net — or have an active PC Game Pass subscription for the games that support it. Streaming dates can trail store release dates, and paid tiers now cap monthly hours. But if your PC groans at the thought of Unreal Engine 5, this is a genuinely good month to let NVIDIA's servers do the heavy lifting.

Esports: VALORANT Champions Shanghai sets its bracket

VALORANT's world championship has its final eight, and the storylines are delicious. On Sunday, LOUD swept Global Esports 2-0 (Split 13-8, Sunset 13-9) and T1 swept FUT Esports 2-0 (Sunset 13-10, Ascent 13-10) to claim the last two playoff spots at Champions Shanghai 2026. T1's qualification marks the organization's first top-eight finish at a VALORANT Champions event in its third appearance.

The field: four Americas teams (100 Thieves, NRG, G2 Esports, LOUD), three from Pacific (Paper Rex, T1, Nongshim RedForce), and one from EMEA (Team Vitality). The notable absence: the entire host region. All four Chinese teams — including EDward Gaming — were eliminated before the playoffs, so the Shanghai crowd will be cheering for borrowed teams through the finals.

The playoffs run October 7 through 18 in a double-elimination bracket. It opens October 7 with NRG vs. T1 and Paper Rex vs. LOUD, continues October 8 with 100 Thieves vs. G2 and Team Vitality vs. Nongshim RedForce, and the grand final is set for October 18. Every series is best-of-three until the lower-bracket final and grand final, which go best-of-five.

Asian Games: South Korea goes back-to-back in League of Legends

Across the East China Sea, the Asian Games 2026 in Aichi-Nagoya wrapped up its esports program with a familiar flag on top of the League of Legends podium. South Korea swept Chinese Taipei 3-0 in the October 2 final — an undefeated 8-0 run across the tournament — to win its second consecutive Asian Games gold in the discipline, following the Hangzhou title.

The roster story is the human one. Faker, Zeus, and Keria were on both gold-medal teams; for Faker it's now a record three Asian Games appearances with two golds (plus a demonstration-event silver from 2018), even though he started only one game of this tournament — against India — with Zeka handling mid lane duties in the final. Canyon, Zeka, and Gumayusi won gold in their Asian Games debuts, earning the military exemptions that Korean law grants Asian Games gold medalists. South Korea closed the Games with five esports medals in total: two gold, one silver, two bronze — the first gold having come in the fighting-game team event across Tekken 8, The King of Fighters XV, and Street Fighter 6.

And there's more League of Legends on the calendar tonight. The Demacia Cup Global Invitational — this year's expanded, cross-regional edition featuring 12 teams that missed Worlds — runs through October 17 with a 1.5 million CNY prize pool (~$223,000 USD). Monday's Round 2 saw Team Vitality, Natus Vincere, and JD Gaming all sweep to 1-1, and Tuesday's Round 3 brings BRION vs. NAVI, JD Gaming vs. LGD Gaming, and Team Vitality vs. RED Canids. For the teams that watched Worlds from the outside, this is the biggest international stage left on the 2026 calendar.

Chart watch: Minecraft Dungeons II's Switch 2-heavy debut

One retail footnote before we go: in the UK, Minecraft Dungeons II — launched September 29 — debuted at No. 2 in the boxed charts behind EA Sports FC 27, with a remarkable 70% of its sales on Switch 2. Xenoblade Chronicles 2's Switch 2 Edition entered at No. 25 on its physical release, Lies of P: Complete Edition arrived at No. 22, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond climbed back to No. 9. The Switch 2, a year in, keeps showing up as the platform where games overperform.

The week ahead

By next Monday, we'll know how E-Day's multiplayer holds up, who the breakout of PAX Aus was, and whether the VALORANT playoff bracket played to form. It's the kind of week where you should check back daily — the newsroom will — because this month is moving fast. If you're only playing one thing this week, it's E-Day; if you're only watching one thing, it's the VALORANT quarterfinals. Everything else is bonus.