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Gears 5 Campaign New Game+ Details
To put it simply, Gears 5's New Game+ is a more customizable experience coming to all versions of Gears 5 that won't need to be unlocked regardless of where you're playing. Here's a rundown of the new features you'll find for the campaign on November 10:
- Two new difficulty modes (Ironman and Inconceivable)
- Character Skins for Kait, Del, and JD
- Weapon Skins
- Jack upgrades carry over
- Mutators (Big head mode, etc)
- New achievements
Zoë Curnoe, principal lead producer of Gears 5, told IGN that Inconceivable is one level of difficulty higher than what Gears 5 originally included, but Iron Man is a special challenge.

"If you're familiar with that in games like XCOM, [which] maybe is the best example where you don't want to die ever -- you're trying to play through with one life [in Ironman mode]. That's really challenging and that's where bringing over your OP Jack is going to help you get through that. Or certainly playing through co-op if you're both in Ironman, that would be a really fun thing to challenge as well. So we certainly loved the couch co-op challenges for Gears," Curnoe said.

Then, as for skins, Curnoe said you'll be able to use any you've unlocked. The one anyone will be able to use, though, is a special skin for Marcus Fenix.

Batista Joins the Campaign
Batista, Dave Bautista's WWE persona, made his first appearance in Gears 5 multiplayer. After plenty of support and enthusiasm from Bautista and the community, Batista is getting his Gears 5 campaign debut as an optional skin for Marcus Fenix complete with a new voice over.

"He had his fan campaign on Twitter, vying to be the star in the much talked about movie ideas and things like that, but this is a great way of delivering that to fans," Curnoe said. "And of course he was super excited to participate when they did the skin for multiplayer. I think doing this in the campaign was just a natural evolution to say, okay, well the fans and him have said they want Batista as Marcus, so let's actually make it happen."

To feature Batista in the campaign, all players need to do is choose to equip the Batista skin for Marcus when starting a new game. Then, any instance you'd see Marcus, you'd instead see and hear Batista.

Operation 5 Brings Versus Changes
Gears 5's multiplayer has had a number of large updates called Operations since launch, and Operation 5 features a change that came directly from player feedback.

"What we've really done there is try to make a lot of the game more accessible, not only for people coming back, but also the people that are new to the game. We've done things like separation of characters in classes, which were funny," Alex Grimbley, Gears 5 executive producer said. "When we first launched the game, certain characters were tied to certain classes, which was a really cool system for us and there were a lot of people that really liked that system. But if we thought about how we want to kind of move forward, just giving players more choice was one of our key things. Giving the players the choice to choose which class they want to apply to which character is I think really powerful."

In past Operations The Coalition also introduced an earnable currency for the store, a new ranked system, and plenty of other maps and changes. Going forward, though, Grimbley said The Coalition has aspirations to make their Operations have stronger themes to tie any new content or maps together as an added bonus for fans of the franchise. They're also committed to developing more maps for each Operation.
Gears 5 Series X Update Brings New Game+, More Batista - IGN