I’m going to start off by saying I’ve been playing gears religiously since Gears 1 back on the 360. It has always been one of my favorite games and series. It’s one of the few games where I actually play the campaign, and it’s multiplayer is one of the (or I should say used to be) the highest skill gap games and really rewards people who take the time to learn wall bouncing and shotgun mechanics. Now, me being a veteran doesn’t make my opinion more valid than someone who is new to the series, however, it does give me the advantage in seeing how things used to be.
Currently there are only 246 viewers on twitch, and it ranks in as the 239th game on the platform. For a game that is new, this is by far the worst state I’ve seen of any gears, maybe even worse than judgement. When the game came out, I was very excited, but quickly realized that what has made gears great is no longer present in this game. I know games have to adapt to stay alive, to bring in new players to keep the community growing, but how they have gone about this has driven away the Gear Heads that have been there since day 1. This was the backbone of the community, and I want to go over why this has happened in my humble opinion, and the opinions of my long time gears head friends.
The main reason is that gears has always been a shotgun game at it’s core, yes lancers have always been a big part as well, but in the past they required team shots, which required an organized team working together. However now the lancer is much too powerful, and one man can do the damage that previously required team work and multiple people to achieve. Not only this, it feels as if the maps were designed with lancers in mind. It has become a camp fest full of lancers, which is not fun for anyone except the new kid that came over from Call of Duty who doesn’t realize by playing this way is killing the game, because he never experienced what gears was at it’s height.
Secondly wall bouncing has been nerfed tremendously from past games. This is what created the skill ceiling, and if you wanted to be good you needed to learn how to wall bounce. I just for the life of me can’t understand why they felt that it should be nerfed to almost useless. Again, I get that you are trying to bring in a new crowd, and are trying to make the game more accessible, but cleary judging by the amount of people playing and watching the game on twitch mixer etc… you messed something up along the way. When you remove the core elements of what made gears so popular, you are killing your fan base that has come to love and expect a certain playstyle to remain present.
And finally, the way the bullet mechanics work in the game compared to previous version is by far less superior. I can’t tell you how many times I see a kill cam where the cross hairs doesn’t even touch 1 part of my body yet i’ll be one shot by the gnasher. I’ve tuned in to each developer stream on mixer and 90% of them are just talking about cosmetics and useless features that don’t matter to me. It’s clear to me your priorities are out of wack.
Now with this being said, I still love gears. It’s one of my favorite series of all time, and it kills me to see it in this state. In my opinion Gears Ultimate edition was the pinnacle of the gears experience. Sadly, I don’t think I have any interest in continuing playing Gears 5. Not that it matters to you or anyone on the forums, but it’s true. I hope you learn from y our mistakes on this game, and in a few years gears 6 will return gears to it’s former glory.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this (if you even did lol) hope you all have a great week.
