Well, I gotta say this : While I think that Escape also could use some more map variety especially(which I don’t think is happening for Gears 5 now), playing the Hivebuster DLC kind of made me more interested in the idea of starting out at the hive entrance then making a mad dash out of there.
Spoiler tags for anyone who hasn’t played the DLC yet.
Mostly, what I found interesting about it was how the section around Sanctum played out, felt and also looked visually with the increasing signs of Swarm infestation but also playing around the theme of the bunker having been built either without proper funding or just in an unstable location, which would require different types of hazards to be overcome, not just from the Swarm but also the hostile environment(of course, the volcano setting made the temperature specifically something that could have been used but ended up mainly creating a few not immediately lethal hazards if you took a few seconds to think, as we never had to cross any rooms with temperatures beyond human tolerance because of system malfunctions), but also unmaintained sections of the bunker. It could have some small collectibles detailing what the purpose of the bunker was as well as the state it is in, and finding a schematic of its layout(if a map wasn’t provided right off the bat) could tell the player what they’re getting themselves into more precisely.
Of course, the story details wouldn’t necessarily be there or be nearly as present as in the Hivebuster DLC, and it would definitely take more time to complete than an Escape run as well as being basically a different mode of its own with a different name, but now that I’ve had a taste for it, this type of concept sure seems like it could be interesting in the end. Whether to include the ending escape with a crazy ride across a lava river on a giant metallic door or some other sequence of that sort, well, I haven’t thought of that too much yet.