Hi,
I really like the Ice omen way of showing damage, it looks great, and it isn’t too intrusive…
The RED OMEN, however, is just blinding and disorienting…
See this clip - it might not seem like much watching it now, but when that red flashed and filled my screen, I completely lost visual track of where he was! By the time I could see again, I was dead…
Now for an even more extreme example, check THIS out - when I went full red, I was completely blinded! I could see nothing… This is beyond stupid, it’s like, in the middle of boxing match, someone throws a cup of water into one of the boxer’s face and eyes. It totally makes them useless for a fraction of a second until you recover from the shock, and by then it’s usually too late…
Now here is the ice omen in action - I have zero problem with that. You don’t lose your peripheral vision, you don’t get those stupid red lines from the corners into the centre blocking your vision, etc…
The Benefits of the new omen system we were told were:
- shows different type of effect: weapon damage, ice damage, and stim
- shows you direction you are being shot from
well, neither of those really factor in multiplayer… There is no stim in multiplayer, and the ice/damage is only an issue on one map and it happens usually so quickly, it doesn’t make that much of a different. Re direction of fire - sure, if someone is plinking at you with the snub, firing 1 bullet per second, sure, it will tell you from what direction the fire is coming from.
But the much more real realistic scenario of getting lancered down, there is almost no time to see where the fire is coming from - you have to dive into some cover immediately and hope you guess the direction right… And in up close gnasher battles (the staple of Gears, right), this is irrelevant…
The benefits, FOR VERSUS, are non-existent, and the damaging effect of that full-screen-red-cant-see-anything-what-just-happened to the experience of the most iconic of Gears MP activity (up close gnasher fights) is devastating…