2020 TWIG Content: VS, Escape, Horde

Gears 5
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#1

I tried to summarize the news provided from 2020 This Week in Gears announcements.
Taken from https://www.gears5.com/news (This Week in Gears)
I didn’t capture every new featured Hive or detail the Operation changes.
Some things I noticed:

  1. Versus Events were held almost weekly, though not always unique, they rotated through several different events. I think I counted 17 unique VS Event types.
  2. New Escape maps showed up more frequently than new Horde content, less frequently than Versus.
  3. New Horde content was few and far between
  4. Operations were the main source of new Horde content

Check out the list, I can add modify if people point out stuff that I misrepresented or missed altogether. Draw your own conclusions. Let’s discuss how we feel about content.

Feb 11 – Cupid’s Torque Bow Tag VS Event and Gnasher Updates!
Feb 17 – TU4.1 and Gnashers Only KOTH VS Event
Feb 24 - Arcade Double Trouble VS Event , Double Character XP, and TU 4.1
Mar 2 - Playlist Update, Dodgeball VS Event , and more.
Mar 9 - Mar 10 – 17: Horde Frenzy, TU4.2 and St Patrick’s VS Event
Mar 16 - Free Boost Until Operation 3
Mar 30 - Operation 3!
Apr 6 - Bunny Hunt VS Event
Apr 13 - Ranked Gridiron VS Event and earnable Thrashball Cole!
Apr 27 - Hyper Dodgeball VS Event and Lethal Engagements Hive
May 4 - Hyper Dodgeball Continues
May 11 - New surprise, Gnashers Only FFA VS Event and new Hive ‘The End’
May 25 – OSOK VS Event, New Hive Melee Brawl
Jun 22 – Golden Gun VS Event , featured hive The Corruption
June 29 – Classic Execution VS Event, featured hives The Barracks, The Detour, earnable rewards.
July 14 – Operation 4!
July 21 – Guardian VS Event , featured Hive The Malfunction, Featured Horde Overload
July 27 – Hyper Dodgeball VS Event, Featured Horde Abyss
Aug 3 – 8 player FFA VS Event, featured Hive The Ambush, Horde skill card adjustments
Aug 17 – Gnashers Only KOTH VS Event, featured Horde Rail Line
Aug 24 – Luck of the Draw VS Event
Aug 31 – OSOK VS Event
Sep 8 – Classic Execution VS Event
Sept 14 – Classic Blitz VS Event, featured Hive The Gatekeepers
Sept 21 – Golden Gun VS Event
Sept 28 – Gnashers Only KOTH VS Event
Oct 5 – GOKOTH continued, featured Hive The Split
Oct 12 – OSOK VS Event
Oct 19 – Boom Snipes VS Event , Horde Event Mad Man’s Monsters
Oct 26 – Pumpkinball VS Event, featured Hive The Mist
Nov 2 – Torque Bow Tag VS Event

I think it’d also be interesting to track what earn-able rewards were made available outside of the Tour of Duty.

5 Likes
Let's revisit OP4 together
#2

Amazing how little was done for horde.

For a mode that is quintessential with Gears, it’s felt like the red headed stepchild.

Thanks for the wrap up.

4 Likes
#3

I remember them saying that they considered it an “absolute failure” to have no Horde events OP3, then they just decided to repeat it for whatever reason.

I mean they did do marginally better than OP3 with the horde maps and all, but still pretty disappointing that they couldn’t just do some basic changes to this or that and give us another Horde event :pensive:

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#4

No doubt brother.

Just a special event with a new modifier. Bam. Horde happiness for a few weeks.

There must be something deeply wrong, or something the devs don’t understand in the horde coding. They literally say it takes too much work to put the lancer into the regular modes. Each update has brought bugs and reversions to prior problems like bleed barriers.

Heck, maybe they should just make bleed barriers an event.

#5

Wouldn’t be surprised if they consider dripfeeding a map every two weeks a “horde event”.

1 Like
#6

Sold!

Heck if we could get even new tile maps every two weeks…that’s improvement.

#7

@Omen_LP theory of too many cooks in kitchen makes more sense with time, its why they can’t fix basic issues that have been in the game at launch, its why they keep screwing up updates, they are trying to make the existing code do this but it does that, if they have difficulty giving a Swarm character a Lancer then you know something is fundamentally wrong.

1 Like
#8

Absolutely. I think he nailed it looking at the code outsourcing. Excellent thread @Omen_LP.

There is something fundamentally wrong holding horde back.

Makes me nervous about this major PVE update forthcoming.

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#9

one of my favorite devs of all time once told me that “one great developer is worth 100 bad ones” and I’m starting to see his point, not that this is to imply that all TC are terrible, just that you’d be better off with a smaller group of more specialized developers is all.

Well because OP5 is probably pretty massive overall, lots of little things will be overlooked for a while.

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#10

I’m said many times, I don’t know SHTI about GAME development - I have no idea how to built 3D worlds, how to do hit detection, etc… I offer no comments on how easy/hard/etc that it, I don’t know - I just know I wouldn’t know how to do that…

BUT from a general software development point of view, yeah, this practice of outsourcing to cheaper jurisdictions, that’s killing the quality of the code… You get what you pay for, most of the time… You can’t get something for nothing…

A great analogy was given to me once, many years ago : I was working for a large bank, and after 2 years (on contract) the manager was told she couldn’t keep me any longer , she HAD TO replace me with offshore programmers. And she told me, she could get 3 people there, for what they were paying me. Fair enough.

I kept in touch with the team, I had friends there, and how they described the change was this:

They were now paying 3 chickens to do the job of 1 horse.

Yeah…

I really do believe, they don’t know the code… and the code is huge, it’s complicated, with many interdependencies, and they simply don’t have the resources to understand it, and to ‘fix it’ (think chainsaw, etc), never mind add new things to it… So they are stuck, making little touch up on peripheral issues, and even THAT is causing bugs all the time…

Sad…

But I know how those decisions are made…

“Wait, we can get 10 programmers for a year for $X, or we can get 15 programmers for 2 years for $Y where Y < X??!?! OF Course do THAT!”

programmers are treated like screwdrivers - the bit fits, they are all the same quality, so just go with the cheapest one…

1 Like