Shout out to @N0DEZER0
I’ve been reading through the replies and I have to say this level of feedback and communication directly from a developer is unprecedented. Keep it up and Gears 5 will make a major turnaround very soon.
Thanks again and much appreciated.
Thank you for your reply, Ryan.
Would it be possible to look into increasing the timer to 15 seconds rather than 10?
I believe that this would alleviate a lot of the spawning issues without having to re-program the hill locations or spawn points. It would give teams defending the hill an extra few seconds to set up, rather than having to repel a constant barrage of newly spawned enemies and, conversely, it will give attacking teams a better chance of breaking through defenses, as the defending team will not get reinforcements so rapidly.
An in-game example I could give would be Asylum. There are the two corner hills, which have 2 attack routes, essentially - through the sniper / embar area or through the shock grenade / middle hall area. An experienced team will secure the shock area first, then cap, knowing that anyone who dies will spawn in the shock area, just a few steps away. Meanwhile, when the attacking team is killed, they will generally spawn at the opposite side of the map. They then have two options: 1. Try to push through the choke point at sniper - the fastest route, but ridiculously heavily defended, or 2. Flank the hill through the mid-hallway (another choke point) or train tracks - very long route. This pattern makes a break of that ring almost impossible vs any competent team, as they are being reinforced before you can make it back to the hill.
With a 5 second increase to the timer, I think it would make things a bit more balanced, as teams would be able to attack hills such as these and get a larger window to attack, without reinforcements coming in and spawning on their flank at such a rapid pace.
Thank you for listening!!
Thank you for the response. It’s awesome to see you this active with the community now.
I want to start by saying “thank you” for taking time to interact with the community on the forums. It is a welcome surprise and I hope the fan negativity does not turn you away from this place any time soon. Gears fans are very passionate about the franchise, and I think sometimes that passion is…displayed in ways that come off as hostile instead of constructive and productive.
Although I am currently underwhelmed by Gears 5 as a whole, I hope that the fan feedback can help make the game a solid experience going forward. Since Versus has mostly been discussed above me, I wanted to mention PVE. I can break up points, if needed like The lMlan’s posts. My list of feedback:
*The stun from Shock Grenades in PVE needs to be removed entirely. I’m not sure if this was a conscious design decision or an oversight, but getting shocked in PVE usually results in death, since you can’t move once the grenade detonates. In PVP, it works the same as Gears 4 where high damage is dealt but you can freely move outside the shock radius. I noticed that shock damage dealt in PVE is lower (which is actually fine), but player movement needs to be addressed.
*Stopping Power in PVE needs to be toned down or removed altogether. I understand the need for it in Versus (with power weapons, at least) where a mechanic is needed to slow down players that carelessly run around with Gnashers. But…in Horde and Escape it makes certain sections of maps or some higher difficulties a chore to play. I can’t think of any reason why four Elite Drones need to freeze me in place with Claws while I try to move into cover.
*Skill card drop rates for Horde and Escape need to be tweaked. Master difficulty should ONLY award Rare cards or higher. Insane and inconceivable could probably be included in that change as well. In general, cards that you receive should exclude skills once a card has been maxed at level 5. If a player has, say, all Common skills maxed but is missing duplicates for a Rare skill, the game should focus on awarding skill cards that are not yet completed that fall under the award umbrella of whichever difficulty.
I think the system can be more rewarding for the time players put into the game, especially if we know that playing on higher difficulties ACTUALLY feels more consistent and worthwhile.
*For allowing us to scrap duplicates on maxed skill cards, unless you have a plan to extend past level 6, you can always just cap the limit at 20 cards and let us scrap anything over that.
*Character duplicate restrictions for Horde AND Escape need to be taken out. I’ve made my peace with the fact that everything is Hero-related now and locked to specific characters. I don’t LIKE the change, but I can at least tolerate it if everyone got to play as the character they wanted. NO, it will not break the game. And NO, playing with three Jack characters isn’t confusing. Take out the one-character restriction and I think the positive feedback will surprise you.
*Lastly, the Inverse Omen. To put it bluntly: it’s AWFUL. Besides the cumbersome changes to movement and input timing in Gears 5, the Inverse Omen is the main reason I have mostly stayed away from Versus. On my 4K HDR tv, the red from getting constantly shot in Gnasher battles (or even playing with the half regen modifier in Horde and Escape) has made this game almost unplayable. The screen fills up and I can’t even see an enemy standing next to me…or locate a Juvie or Leech at the bottom of my screen.
This isn’t and wasn’t ever about “hating change” or getting used to the game. This is simply bad design. Every dev stream the Omen is mentioned, you guys talk about “the new systems” and recoil and rifle meta and so on. You don’t actually have to change any of that.
Stay with me for a second: keep ALL the screen indicators you already have…and just make damage the middle cog outline filling up with red until you die. No red on the corners of the screen, no full screen of red when you’re at 95%+ damage. Just make it the ring in the middle with extended “arrows” you already have that indicates where damage is coming from. Preferably have the outer ring slowly filling into the middle of the ring (with a toggle in the options for the reverse—a ring that starts in the middle and fully forms the cog symbol). I have a feeling this MAY have already been thought about/tested. But give it another look.
An opacity slider is not enough. The Omen needs another alternative. Keep the default Omen for players who enjoy the change and add the slider for players who prefer that. But give players like me an additional choice. If you guys get something finalized, you could always throw up a weekly Versus event with the new Omen included and take a look at the feedback.
Again, thank you for interacting with the community. I hope this feedback is helpful.
Will we see a War Journal to showcase what ribbons are still in game and which we have earned?
Just wanted to give the feedback that many people on here don’t notice supply drops or understand how they work, and this extends to scrap.
People appreciate earning things through visible challenges much more.
Last stream you talked about the possibility of removing the delay when you’re coming out of roadie run .
Is that something that will happen in the near future?
This is one of my main issues with gears 5, I believe it was in 4 also but I cant say with 100% certainty. The movement speed and shooting coming off of cover. If the “chains” or “sandbags” were taken off it would make the game play phenomenal.
Bring back competitive tuning and get rid of the delays.
If you can put your finger on it, please let me know. We feel that it feels like Gears, but if there’s something that you can identify that makes it not feel that way to you, please let me know.
I’ve never heard this before. Make sure you are comparing a similar number of players. Dialog can get suppressed when there is too much chatter.
I can’t speak to specific prices but we have reduced overall prices already. We will continue to evaluate the pricing. Right now our focus has been on getting the service quality up to where we want it to be. Going forward we will look more closely at the content and pricing.
Thanks for the feedback.
I would too. By splitting the lists, we would end up increasing the wait times for both lists. At the moment, I’m not sure that we would want to do that with all lists. This has been requested enough that we have taken it on as a design challenge but don’t have a concrete plan yet.
Thanks for the feedback. We feel that there’s some great content in the current tour and future tours. We don’t feel we’ve really done a good job of showcasing what content players are earning. There is cool stuff in the store as well. We are definitely going to be taking a close look at our content plans with a lot of this feedback in mind.
What I’m hearing is that the characters aren’t balanced enough in terms of their relative power so that it creates tension over who gets to play the characters. This is fair. It was hard to tell how players would play each character. We now have a lot of data about which characters get chosen and which don’t. We will go through cycles of balancing, buffing and nerfing characters and cards to make the meta more interesting. We will also be adding new Heroes which we hope will shake things up.
I think that you’re right that’s where we should go. I wanted to make it open ended initially to get a sense for what were the top issues.
We definitely want to bring out as many characters are we can as fast as we can. All of them take a lot of work. We plan on regularly releasing more heroes with new operations. We know there is a lot of demand for the original delta so we hope we can get to them soon.
I hope the addition will shake things up to, but in the long run I feel that unbinding the classes from the characters would help with that. I didn’t really have too big of an issue with 4’s horde and the fact that it was an overall good thing to be able to CHOOSE. That’s the other big problem I see with 5’s horde mode is the lack of freedom of choice. We all have our favorites and this game pushes us away from that and I don’t see lore being a good or even passable explanation for why this was done since lore isn’t at all a part of COOP Vs AI, which is what horde is.
Just please consider having a horde classic in the future for those who want that freedom of choice. It would be a welcome addition.
Thanks so much for the kind words. We think Escape is great and also has a lot of potential.
We don’t talk about future work until it’s announced. As a BR fan, I would love to see a Gears BR too.