I’m not a normal forum poster, if you don’t know who I am then let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Justin Kenny, some of you may know me as “Kenny Bounce”. I’m a professional player for Team Reciprocity and I have been playing gears of war since 2006 while playing competitively since 2012ish. Not much of that matters, but some insight of where I come from in Gears.
I wanted to talk to everybody in here(im not sure how many people will give this attention) about the similar fight I think we are fighting but in 2 different places. That fight is us all wanting a better gears of war game. Everyone’'s definition of that could be different and this isn’t me saying that “gears 5 sucks”. This is me wanting more improvement to continue with gears 5. For the most part, I felt like TC was making consistent improvements until a part of this recent update, which is where im looking for help/insight here. My issue/the competitive scenes issue with this recent update is the increase in the slide speed and the increase in the speed boost in Gears 5. Now this may seem like a little thing, but in gears reality it plays a big role in how the game plays. Why this is an issue is because it creates one sided individual fights. Which means that in a specific one on one shotgun fight, a majority of players will use the faster movement system in some way to get a kill even though they don’t have the positional advantage. Why this is an issue is because in classic(notice im not saying better because thats opinionat based) gears you weren’t able to utilize a fast and lethal kill like you can now in this game and like you could in Gears 4. In older Gears games, you would have to methodically pick your opponent apart by using whatever way they gave you to kill them. Gears 5 initially gave us something similar than that, but this update takes away from the methodical nature that Gears of war had in its classic titles because of the speed increase that has been done. This is something that myself and the competitive scene feels needs to change.
Now, I understand that not everybody is going to see the issue in that. Which is fine, everybody likes what they like. But let me run something by everybody. What if, instead of creating the faster “less methodical” gameplay in gears 5, TC took the game and made it more methodical but with more ways to individually outplay an opponent.
This is how I would propose that being done:
- revert slide speed and speed boost
- keep strafe speed increases and roadie run speed increase
- continue to look at the speed in which you can shoot out of roadie running(maybe make almost instant)
- make rolling sideways or backwards faster than rolling forward and allow players to shoot faster out of it.
- reduce the damage OR create a recoil pattern for each rifle to help improve the skill gap. This is something that isn’t mandatory, but could help with the balancing of the picture we are looking to create.
Now, each of these changes play a role in making the individual gameplay more methodical. #1 rebalances the individual fights to make them equal(right now the aggressive playstyle is more dominant to the defensive). #'s 2-4 create different abilities for both playstyles to utilize to outplay an opponent. #5 is something that can help allow gears to get back to its roots. Gears of War at its roots was a shotgun/individual heavy game that allowed players to outplay their opponents at every turn. If you were a “more dominant” player in a lobby, then there wasn’t a single person who could take you down. And if there was someone who was equal level to you, then you would have the best fights against those players. Its what made Gears, Gears. It feels like in the new age gears games it is too difficult to take over like in old games because of the assault rifles. This could be because the damage on the rifles are too high, or the fire rate is too high, or the recoil pattern isn’t hard enough or etc. Whatever the solution would be for those, it still stands that they are making it to where the movement needs to be “more overpowering” to outplay an opponent using them. My proposition is to reduce movement speeds while increasing the speed at which shotgunners can shoot out of the roadie run+roll while reducing rifle effectiveness(if needed) so the speed of the game can be lowered and more methodical without damaging the ability to outplay opponents can be introduced into the game.
When thinking about this, don’t think too much into the number balancing of this. We don’t have the numbers to properly give a solid solution number wise
I am looking for ways for Gears to give those feelings again while not taking away from the positive things that come with the new age Gears games. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comment section below. Hopefully we are on the same page and we can help Gears improve.(or nobody responds to this and the thread disappears lol).
Thank you for reading this