Gears of War 3

[Rik]

It's strange how we never really got Gears 2 up and running here, had a great night on Brink last week on 360 but then everyone traded it in

We'll have to arrange some proper games of Gears 3.

[Pred]

It's strange how we never really got Gears 2 up and running here

People moaned about the lag problems and they weren't patient enough for it all to get fixed, which it did. It's a shame because Gears 2 MP was really good but people just moved on too quickly.

[Garth]

It's strange how we never really got Gears 2 up and running here, had a great night on Brink last week on 360 but then everyone traded it in

We'll have to arrange some proper games of Gears 3.

Me, tomvek and Drizzt played Gears 2 on and off for almost a year - we even had a special set of tactics for extremely laggy matches

[Kanbei]

I loved the beta for this, exams got in the way otherwise I would have played it alot more. Definitely be up for games when it comes out.

[Something Fishy]

:wub:

they where good times

The only online gaming period that I've ever really loved truth be told. As a whole I couldn't give a gooseberry fool about online, for me it's just about co-op with friends for the social aspect.

[tomvek]

Me, tomvek and Drizzt played Gears 2 on and off for almost a year - we even had a special set of tactics for extremely laggy matches

Great times

[Codename 47]

Sweet looking trailer i must say. I think with all the multiplayer talk and the delay that was announced a few months back, Gears 3 dropped off my radar completely. I totally forgot it was airing straight after the final and when i saw it i was like " ". The campaign's always been the highlight of the Gears games for me. It certainly doesn't have the greatest story but it's got Marcus Fenix ( ) and judging by the trailer it's going to have some ridiculously over the top set pieces Lambent Berserker and Leviathan look insane!

[Squinty]

Sweet looking trailer i must say. I think with all the multiplayer talk and the delay that was announced a few months back, Gears 3 dropped off my radar completely. I totally forgot it was airing straight after the final and when i saw it i was like " ". The campaign's always been the highlight of the Gears games for me. It certainly doesn't have the greatest story but it's got Marcus Fenix ( ) and judging by the trailer it's going to have some ridiculously over the top set pieces Lambent Berserker and Leviathan look insane!

I hope it's like playing a ridiculous action 80's movie. It's what I like most about Gears 2's campaign, there's some many stupid parts that leave a big grin on your face.

[Floex]

Stolen from GAF

[Rik]

Looks like the reign of Crysis 2 as console graphics king will be short lived.

[Pred]

It's just so grey and brown, though. There's a little bit of colour from the lights on the COG armour and from the lambent but it's still quite dull to look at.

[Glowy69]

:wub:

they where good times

The only online gaming period that I've ever really loved truth be told. As a whole I couldn't give a gooseberry fool about online, for me it's just about co-op with friends for the social aspect.

Before suzz became a turncoat

[CrystalGipsy]

This might tempt me back to gaming. I have always liked Gears it does not take itself too seriously and is generally good fun to play, unllike a lot of other shooters out there. No doubt the forum will be split by the usual crowd dissing on the story and comparing it KZ. To me Gears is like a Michael Bay movie, looks great, its full of stereotypes, has amazing action and set pieces and puts a big smile on your face. It does not tax the brain, try to change the world or attempt to be War and Peace or a high brow art movie, it is pure popcorn action and never looses site of what it actually is. This looks like it's building on the past games and then some more.

[Garth]

[gametrailers]714474[/gametrailers]

[tomvek]

Kotaku have put up an interesting article on the Gears Beta.

There wasn't going to be a Gears of War 3 beta last month.

The huge Xbox 360 shooter was simply going to come out in the spring, no beta to precede it. You'd be able to own the full game by now if everyone had stuck to the original plan. Things changed some time late last year. Microsoft delayed the game to the fall, leaving it creators at Epic Games an opportunity they'd wanted: to make a beta.

"We were on track to ship, and so we were nearing completion," Jim Brown, who heads development on the multiplayer portions of the first Gears of War and has resumed that responsibility for the new game, told me recently. "We figured this would be the perfect chance for us to do this. So we just dove in with both feet to do everything to get it out the door. "

Brown convincingly argues that the beta was no mere marketing ploy. He says it has made Gears of War 3 much better.

"There's obviously a huge marketing component," Brown said, "We got our name out there, we got people looking at the game, we got people hands-on playing the game." He's right. The beta was popular and was played by more than a million people while it was live for about a month this past spring.

"But," he added, "this was genuinely an attempt for us to get feedback and try these new processes out. When Gears 2 shipped, it was admittedly a little bit rocky. There were some problems with matchmaking and overall game balance issues that we addressed, certainly, but that was over a series of title updates [read: downloadable patches]. It took us a while to iron out all the wrinkles, and we wanted to make sure we didn't have that initial hump to get over [with Gears 3]."

The beta consisted of four maps and three gameplay modes. Several of the weapons, liked the sawed-off shotgun, were new, as were fundamental gameplay changes like the fact that killed players could re-spawn before the end of a match. (Reminisce by taking a video tour of what was in the beta.)

"This was the perfect chance for us to test-balance our new weapons, to test the new set-up dedicated servers, to test our matchmaking algorithm, to test our point-balancing and new game mechanics," Brown said. "All these things… the new title and ribbon system, the new leveling system, all the stuff that was new to the game, this was a really great test-bed, with over a million people banging on it day-in and day-out, to see what's wrong, we hope, before we get the full game out. "

Some of the tweaks coming out of the beta were the kinds of things you'd expect: altered weapons, revised reward systems. "We changed the headshot damage on one of the rifles," Brown said. "We changed the overall power of another one." They changed the names of some of the ribbons—the accolades that appear for various feats during an online battle—and tweaked some of the awards that were given out. One ribbon reward, called Underdog, infuriated expert players. It could be earned only if you beat a player who was 25 character-levels above you. It was only worth 10 experience points, but day-one players who could play the game well never encountered any players who were 25 levels above them. They couldn't earn that reward and they complained. The result: cut.

Brown said his team at Epic also "identified some pretty serious flaws" in the layouts of some maps. The stats from the beta showed the how people moved through the games down to the individual button press. They could see how the "people in the wild" played the map vs. how the level designers intended for the maps to be played. The designers spotted bad cover arrangements that had players thinking they were covered only to painfully discover they were exposed. Changed. There were places people could sit and simply pick-off other players as they spawned back into the map. Changed. Two of the beta's four maps turned out to have big problems. "I am not shy about saying that Thrashball and Trenches were both flawed for re-spawning game types," Brown said. "We have made pretty significant changes to those maps to try and address that." A specific example: "You could take the top of Thrashball and hold it forever and never come back... So we had to rearrange weapon layouts and cover layouts to balance out that map and make it more playable overall."

There were changes made that you might not expect. Some players thought that Anya, the Gears character who was a playable fighter for the first time in the beta, was "a little more gruff and vulgar" than she should be. "Her lines got toned down and pared back a little bit."

Epic developers studied player data. They played their beta obsessively. They read through the forums. The game's community manager answered more than 50,000 e-mails during the beta period, Brown said. They soaked in the response.

Gamers aren't always right. Game designers know this and they can't make a change just because a part of their game has been criticized. Take the sawed-off shotgun, a new weapon introduced in the Gears 3 beta that Brown's team knew would be controversial. "That was obvious," he said. "It's a weapon that lets you run up to someone, shoot them in the face and they explode. It's binary: you win or you lose." They'd made the weapon for players who aren't experts. "The sawed-off is intended to be for a new player who really isn't that experienced with the game, really isn't that great of a player, but they can still run up to somebody, pull the trigger and they still get that awesome moment where the dude explodes, they get points, ribbons start appearing on the screen, and there's a big celebration. There's this big sense of accomplishment. "

The introduction of the sawed-off in the beta freaked some players out. "We were kind of shocked and surprised at how passionately people felt about it," Brown said. "There were people who thought it should be cut; there were people who said it was the greatest weapons in the game." But the developers stuck to their gun, because they discovered that there were message board threads like that for every weapon in the game. Each was loved by some and hated by others. That, they decided, was a sign of creative success. They'd made guns that appealed to a variety of player-types, each catering to different play styles. They did make some tweaks to the sawed-off, but the uproar about its inclusion didn't discourage them. Beta players found that it could be countered, and that's what mattered. It had its place.

But the most important information they gleaned and the most significant changes that were made were and will probably remain invisible to most Gears players. They involved the game's network infrastructure. Testing that, Brown said, "was really one of the biggest and best things we got out of the beta." Previous Gears games didn't use dedicated servers. They didn't rely on the kind of networking that has to connect match-made players efficiently through a data center and server farm. The popularity of the beta, with more than a million people playing, helped ensure that those systems worked and that, when they failed, they could be fixed. "We made some very significant changes," Brown said, noting that the volume of play was forcing tweaks at their data center that the people at the center had never seen before. During the beta, the Epic team would take part of their game's online systems offline, change settings, change code and make a pile of improvements. "Having those one or two days of downtime on the servers now means we don't have to do it for several weeks after we ship."

Brown considers the beta a huge success. "We learned so much," he said. "There are innumerable changes we've made from code side to content side… so many things that will let this be more successful when we launch it." In fact, Brown said they're now afraid that if they tweak things too much now that people who loved the beta will be angry about those tweaks when the game ships. So they're being careful.

One other thing: The Epic team didn't realize that the beta players were going to love chasing and shooting the game's chickens. Does that mean there will be more chickens in the final game? "You have not even seen the beginning of the chickens," Brown said. "I know there were some doubters in the office and that we were able to throw some extra support on them for the full game, I will say that." He's not sure if he can promise that chickens will be added post-beta, but it sure sounds like those birds are safe from being cut.

[HM]

The problem with the sawed off is that it takes no skill whatsoever to use, it's the very definition of a noobs weapon. I'll fully admit at the beginning of gears 1/2 i was awful with the gnasher, i hated it. But then i saw my mates get better with it and the more i used it the better i got. The sawed just makes that experience and progression pointless. Why run up to people when they don't even have to properly aim at you and yet they still kill you. Why bother to get into a shotgun battle where the most accurate player will win, when they noob with a sawed just insta-kills you. There is no sense of accomplishment with it, you barely have to do anything to get the kill. It's a total game breaker in my eyes and if it isn't properly nerfed/removed after a few months of online, then i don't see me playing it alot. It put me off the beta after a week or so and it will probably kill my enjoyment of the full game.

[Squinty]

Doesn't really bother me that they fine tuning the experience with the extra time being given, hopefully I can play the multiplayer and enjoy it outside Horde.

[tomvek]

Gears 3 Limited Edition Console

The Xbox 360 limited edition “Gears of War 3” Bundle includes an exclusive red and black console design with two custom-designed Xbox 360 wireless controllers, a 320GB hard drive and built-in Wi-Fi connection for easier access to the world of entertainment on Xbox LIVE. The console will be available for $399 (US ERP) and at your favorite retailers beginning September 20, 2011.

The package also includes a standard copy of “Gears of War 3,” a wired headset, plus a download token for bonus game content including the Infected Omen Weapon Pack and the Adam Fenix character for use in multiplayer. The Infected Omen Weapon Pack gives fan the infected omen skin for use on the five starting weapons: Lancer, Retro Lancer, Hammerburst, Gransher, and Sawed-Off Shotgun. Also, the power and eject buttons have been customized with unique sounds from the “Gears of War” universe.

Also, the customized Limited Edition “Gears of War 3” wireless controller will be available separately for $59.99 (US ERP).

[Garth]

[Codename 47]

Gears 3 Limited Edition Console

The Xbox 360 limited edition “Gears of War 3” Bundle includes an exclusive red and black console design with two custom-designed Xbox 360 wireless controllers, a 320GB hard drive and built-in Wi-Fi connection for easier access to the world of entertainment on Xbox LIVE. The console will be available for $399 (US ERP) and at your favorite retailers beginning September 20, 2011.

The package also includes a standard copy of “Gears of War 3,” a wired headset, plus a download token for bonus game content including the Infected Omen Weapon Pack and the Adam Fenix character for use in multiplayer. The Infected Omen Weapon Pack gives fan the infected omen skin for use on the five starting weapons: Lancer, Retro Lancer, Hammerburst, Gransher, and Sawed-Off Shotgun. Also, the power and eject buttons have been customized with unique sounds from the “Gears of War” universe.

Also, the customized Limited Edition “Gears of War 3” wireless controller will be available separately for $59.99 (US ERP).