Gears 5's latest update brings plenty of new characters.

The first few post-launch characters have arrived in Gears 5. As detailed prior to launch, developer The Coalition intends to add more and more characters to the game in the months to come.

Characters serve a dual purpose. In Arcade multiplayer and PvE modes, such as Horde, they bring unique skills not available for the rest of the roster. In competitive multiplayer modes, they simply all act as skins.

Today's batch includes four new characters, two for COG and two for the Swarm. For the COG, there's the Gear, and the Deebee. For the Swarm, you get Warden and the return of General Raam. The abilities in Arcade are mirrored between the COG Gear and Raam, as well as between Deebee and Warden.

In PvE, however, only the COG Gear has your typical PvE skills such as passives and ultimates. Typically, both heroes would have this, but The Coalition decided to not to give Deebee passives because of how prevalent Deebee units are in PvE.

The new characters are available now in Gears 5, but you'll need to do a bit of grinding to unlock them. The Coalition says it should take you around ten hours of play to unlock a single hero, or you can spend 500 Iron to instantly get them.

Unlocking characters is done through the new Totem system. In the customisation menu, you'll be able to craft a totem of the character you want to unlock. From there, you can equip the totem and do five objectives. Getting them all done awards you the character, but the bad news is that you can only have one totem active at a time.

Alongside the Gears characters, Gears 5 is also getting two new Terminator characters from Dark Fate. Available in a pack for $20, the bundle includes Grace, and Terminator model Rev-9.

Read up on all these objectives, and the new characters' various abilities on the official blog.