Halo 3 and You

[Gamerforlife]

Hey, its all good. I'm not offended.

Just about some games you mentioned:
PD Zero: Haven't tried it. I'm going to buy it soon as I really loved the old PD. However, I have muted expectations since I did download the multiplayer demo and its pretty average.
Time Crisis: Great series, obviously not related to Gears in any real way since its a gun game though.
Full Spectrum Warrior: Nice idea, bad exectution. Its like a puzzle game. When you are in good cover, nothing can hit you ever. Same with the enemies. So its a puzzle to figure out where to flank the enemy from. Not really a battle simulation, with its millions of variables.

I absolutely disagree with you that taking cover is implemented poorly in Gears. It makes me wonder if you have played Gears multiplayer much or if you just don't like the idea of Gears. Same for the weapons. The shotgun/pistol/lancer combination you start with in every match is perfection. Each has its own strength and can be hugely powerful in the right hands and right situation. The pickup weapons (sniper, Hammer etc) are awesome too. Very powerful but with limited ammo and reloads to balance it out. The only weapon that sucks is the alien SMG (can't remember its name). Its in no way better than the Lancer you start with. The fact you don't think there is a point in the varied weapon selection really makes me wonder once again if you have played enough Gears to really understand whats available there.

Max Payne: Loved it. Loved the sequel as well. However it has no multiplayer and there is no cover usage at all.

Mercenaries: Loved it. Once again no multiplayer or cover though. More like a GTA clone with more explosions.

Armed and Dangerous: Couldn't get into this, though I did try. I loved Planet Moon's Giants though.

Freedom Fighters: got great reviews but I couldn't get into it. Can't remember why. Anyway there is no cover or multiplayer afaik.

I do get where you are coming from with the 'new games are just prettied up older games' angle. I agree with you in many cases. But Gears just isn't one of those games with all flash and no substance. Its a game with amazing graphics but even better gameplay. I would say that if you aren't a multiplayer gamer - and of course some people just aren't into that - then I do understand the single-player Gears is underwhelming. But if you like gaming with friends, on or off the internet, then there really hasn't been a game of Gears quality and polish for an extraordinarily long time. Its almost the Street Fighter II of 3d shooters - deep as you can imagine, and rewarding to those who learn it.

Back on topic, while I've really enjoyed Halo 3 multiplayer so far - it still seems quite a long way off from the precision of Gears. Oh well, they are both fun in their own way.

No offense to you, you're entitled to your opinion but I have to say a few things since I didn't think Gears was really all that.

In addition to the games you've already mentioned, Perfect Dark Zero lets you take cover, and there are many times in practically every third or first person shooter I've played where you need to take cover or get quickly gunned to death. Heck, you can even play a light gun game like Time Crisis 2 that is built around you taking cover. There are even a few very realistic last gen games where you have to take cover because one bullet will actually kill you, like Full Spectrum Warrior I believe. People talk about Gears like, "Oh my god, a game where you have to use cover! That's never been done before! Most realistic shooter ever!!!!!!!"

The fact that Gears makes you constantly use cover is actually to its detriment I think. It made the game very repetitive and boring for me. Fine for a simple light gun game like Time Crisis 2, but a third person shooter should be a little less repettitive. The weapon selection was lame except for ONE weapon. The Hammer of Dawn. Of course, when you have a game where players are just constantly hiding behind stuff, it's not like there's any point to having a varied weapon selection. You might as well just keep it simple

I think Gears gets so much attention for two reasons. There's the amazing graphics. I never read a single review for Gears that didn't gush over its graphics for like three paragraphs and make me feel like it was mandatory to get a big high def tv to play it on. It's all about the graphics these days. The only other reason it got so much attention is because people were tired of waiting for Halo 3, so the gaming media latched onto another game to hype to high heaven.

I guess I can see what you mean about Gears being the first next-gen third person shooter to get a lot of attention. I think there are a lot of last gen third person shooters that are much better though.

The Max Payne games have a better story.

Mercenaries Playground of Destruction has nice open ended gameplay with lots of firefights and tons of stuff to blow up.

Armed and Dangerous has MUCH more creative weapons and a lot of humor. MDK 2 has some great third person firefights with a mix of funny weapons, power ups and a dog who can fire like four guns at a time! Heck, the Ratchet and Clank games have better weapons than anything you'll see in Gears of War.

Freedom Fighters has REAL squad based gameplay. Not the best I've seen, but it still adds to the game, while your teammates in Gears are just there to die and wait for you to take care of business. I know there are even better squad based games out there, but I haven't played them.

Then there's the generic vehicle riding level in Gears, which was so utterly pointless. A lame level for anyone who's seen the tons of vehicles in Halo.

Gears is a good game. Fairly well designed, with good graphics and sound, but it's so generic. I've seen EVERYTHING the game does before and done better.

Maybe that's why I'm so into retro gaming, because with very few exceptions it's all been done before. Next gen is mostly about doing it all again with better graphics and less creativity.

My point about weapon variation was more about Gears not having anything we haven't seen before, except maybe the Hammer of Dawn. And there are lots of shooters with a greater selection than Gears and more fun weapons than Gears.

As for multi-plaer, I have nothing to say about that. I don't care for multi-player. Shooting your friends for the hundredth time just gets boring to me. I'm more interested in losing myself in a cinematic fantasy world with a story, than just killing people for points. With maybe the exception of old 2-d fighters, gaming for me is all about single player or co-op or I pretty much don't care.

And the whole well the single player is so so, but the multi-player is great is something I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing. No offense, but It seems like every single game company that makes a shooter today can just crap out an underwhelming single player and it's considered okay. When did shooters become about multi-player and nothing else? Add this to my long list of reasons why I'm sick of most modern video games. I blame game reviewers for this, because they're the ones that give high scores to every shooter that has a lame campaign mode but great multi-player. Anybody remember the perfect ten scores that Halo 2, with it's UNFINISHED campaign mode got.

As for Full Spectrum Warrior not being a battle simulation, I believe that game was originally designed to train army soldiers. Hence why you can't take a bunch of hits like you can in Gears of War. If we're going to talk about which game is more realistic, it's not Gears of War.

Most of those games you mentioned not using cover actually do require you to hide behind something quite a few times. Again, the simple fact that Gears makes you do it ALL THE TIME doesn't impress me. I guess one could call that revolutionary, or you could just call it taking something that every shooter in existence has already done and simply placing a bit more emphasis on it. It doesn't impress me all that much.

It's sort of like when people say Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne's battle system is revolutionary because you can exploit enemy weaknesses to your advantage. Well, what rpg doesn't let you do that? I guess I'm just more impressed by brand new ideas than just taking old ones and over emphasizing them. Of course, I probably wouldn't have a problem with Gears not being revolutionary if it wasn't for the simple fact that everyone keeps saying it is. I'm not in disagreement that Gears of War is a decent game, but it's this ridiculous"BEST, MOST REVOLUTIONARY SHOOTER EVA!!!!!" stuff that annoys me. Course I don't mean you specifically, but that's the reaction a lot of gamers seems to have towards Gears.

Is it just me, or is the gaming industry always looking for something to proclaim as THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME!! Seriously, why does everything have to be hyped so damn much. It's like it's hard to even know what a truly amazing game is anymore with reviewers giving out high scores like candy these days. To bring this back to Halo 3, it's essentially an Xbox 1 game. If you've played Halo 2, you've played Halo 3. Yet the game is hyped as the game that will truly show everyone how amazing the 360 is. If Halo 3 is next gen, then gaming is truly evolving at a slow rate.

[lordofduct]

And the whole well the single player is so so, but the multi-player is great is something I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing. No offense, but It seems like every single game company that makes a shooter today can just crap out an underwhelming single player and it's considered okay. When did shooters become about multi-player and nothing else? Add this to my long list of reasons why I'm sick of most modern video games. I blame game reviewers for this, because they're the ones that give high scores to every shooter that has a lame campaign mode but great multi-player. Anybody remember the perfect ten scores that Halo 2, with it's UNFINISHED campaign mode got.

The problem with this... the gaming world is moving towards multi-player. The PC has been there for some years, and consoles are catching up. I good majority of gamers love the community feel for it.

Why else would Everquest, WoW, and other MMORPGs do so well? It's just another level grinding RPG of oldschool... with a few prettier graphics... but the community? Co-op, PvP (which from what I've seen is big) and other multi community functions is what are drawing these people.

Same in the fighter, FPS, and other battle games. The ability to go online and play real people whenever you want, and communicate with them via text or even headsets verbally... it just draws people. It what gets most of the play time.

I'm not into this gameplay, I'm a single player kinda guy. I didn't have friends growing up who were interested in playing games that I owned so I was stuck 1P. But everyone else is eating it up, Halo 2 got more players ONLINE then anywhere else in its title.

It's an obvious choice for the developers then. Multi-player is what the majority wants. This is a market, not a love the niche hardcore old school gamer from racketboy.com like LordofDuct who is dieing for another Shining Force title that plays like SHINING FORCE for christs sake.

No they are gonna release whats rolls in the cash from joe-gamer frat boy who likes to face hump you after he unloaded an entire sniper rifle into your head and crotch with glee. (also joe-gamer frat boy doesn't even know what the word 'mod-chip' means and probably won't do it to his console... where as us hardcore gamers are notorious for it, despite the fact that we don't do it for stealing purposes, but instead for homebrew and nostalgia purposes. It's like calling a stoner a heroin addict despite the functionality a stoner has over the dope fiend, but that is a whole different topic for some other time... all I'm saying is that marketing and developing a game is a complex choice, so they do what works, not what pleases you).


So yeah, a crappy 1 player mode... everyone says "yeah the one player sucks, but multi-player makes up for it"... I guarantee even if the 1 player mode gave you a blow job at the end of it, the majority of gamers (who are the ones saying the previous statement) probably would pump 100X more hours into multi-player.

Is it just me, or is the gaming industry always looking for something to proclaim as THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME!! Seriously, why does everything have to be hyped so damn much. It's like it's hard to even know what a truly amazing game is anymore with reviewers giving out high scores like candy these days. To bring this back to Halo 3, it's essentially an Xbox 1 game. If you've played Halo 2, you've played Halo 3. Yet the game is hyped as the game that will truly show everyone how amazing the 360 is. If Halo 3 is next gen, then gaming is truly evolving at a slow rate.

This continues my point. First off though,

Next-gen is not a name for gameplay evolution. Gameplay has always evolved very slowly. And for the most part is the same basic mechanics since the NES created the action genre we know today.

Next-Gen is a coin name. It's a hype name descibing that we are in the next generation of hardware. Hardware is not gameplay, it's processor power, how many floating point arithmetic operations can be processed per cycle, how many poly's can be rendered on screen, how high of resolution can the textures on the models be, how many objects can be displayed on screen at a time and all be done with out dropping below 60 fps. No gameplay in that.

Right now I could slap together what shows off next gen with out hardly doing any programming. Find a 3D rendering engine, slap a bunch of models into the thing with tons of poly's and high quality textures, and bam that's what next-gen means.

PS3, XBOX360, they are doing this. The games are very detailed and are ran with much more ease then last generation.

Yeah the quality is only a small step up, but that's not the hardware's fault. It's the artist's fault. They are in transition. It takes a lot of work to make higher quality models with higher definition textures. They have to be drawn and modeled which takes human skill. And that takes money. LOTS OF MONEY.

I'm not trying to say it is OK what the game market is doing. I'm just saying it's normal. They want to make as much money as possible when spending as little as possible as they can. And with the cost of game making increasing exponentially, this is hard. You need a guaranteed money maker to do it.

AND you need to hype that money maker so everyone knows it is coming and spends money on it.

Think of it this way, one of my favorite games, "sub-terrania" was made by 2 guys in a dorm room. Myst was made by 2 other guys in a garage. But, Final Fantasy 8 thousand 4 hundred bajillion was made by 100+ people in a huge building, GTA3 by another huge clump of people.
BioShock was made by a huge group of people... and they used a fucking pre-built engine. They didn't even have to do the hardwork really (programming wise that is)... they just input all the shit they wanted on top of the Unreal engine. And even then they still had a huge crew of animators, programmers and artists. (and might I add, if you want to be a game maker, become and animator, they make a fucking killing in comparison to programmers and 3D modelers).

Welcome to America sweet heart, that's called capitalism. And with out it, well... we'd be a socialist hell hole. (and I'd be in heaven... go socialism!)


----
Final comments from me, LordOfDuct, and aspiring game designer.

Me and my 2 friends just started a small game studio. When planning out a game... you know what question we ask ourselves most?

Not, what do I, and others like me, want to see in this game. But, what does the MAJORITY of gamers out there want to see, that I think is cool.


and like usual, no one is probably gonna read my horrible grammar/long ass post. YEY!

[JJJ]

About the weapons. Yes, sure there are many that are more fun. None that are more balanced that I can ever remember. I remember there was a mod for Unreal with about 20 crazy new weapons. It was damn fun for about an hour but none of my friends would have seriously played with it for more time than that - because they totally fucked up the game balance.

Ok, I figured you are a single-player only gamer. Thats fine. Most of my very favorite games are singleplayer (Xenogears, Planescape Torment, Deus Ex). I do both. But you do like co-op? Did you try that in Gears? Its pretty fun - no one had made a co-op shooter like that for a long time. Its popularity is the reason why Halo 3 has so many co-op features.

I don't think in any way Gears 'crapped out' on the singleplayer side - though some shooters obviously do. I had a great time playing though it. I'd say it was too short, and the final boss was lame. Other than that it was really fun. I think its an above average title just based on that. Add in the multiplayer and now its an excellent title.

Frankly it scares me to consider soldiers are being trained with Full Spectrum Warrior... Of course its obviously the more realistic game. I just don't like its implementation of cover.

I don't think Gears is the best game out there - though realistically its probably the best 360 game (even counting Halo 3). I don't recall reading any reviews that claimed anything more than that. Of course many said it had the best graphics ever in a game, and I think its pretty hard to argue against that - even now 1 year later.

And as for Halo, I agree with you 100%. Its not a revolutionary game. Its disappointing that they didn't do more. In my opinion Gears was a revolutionary game, and thats where we disagree. However we can probably both agree that there needs to be ALOT more revolutionary games for next-gen systems in order to justify their existence. Sometimes I think that the shock I felt when I played Mario 64 (a true revolution in all dimensions) the first time will never again be equaled. Lets hope not.

My point about weapon variation was more about Gears not having anything we haven't seen before, except maybe the Hammer of Dawn. And there are lots of shooters with a greater selection than Gears and more fun weapons than Gears.

As for multi-plaer, I have nothing to say about that. I don't care for multi-player. Shooting your friends for the hundredth time just gets boring to me. I'm more interested in losing myself in a cinematic fantasy world with a story, than just killing people for points. With maybe the exception of old 2-d fighters, gaming for me is all about single player or co-op or I pretty much don't care.

And the whole well the single player is so so, but the multi-player is great is something I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing. No offense, but It seems like every single game company that makes a shooter today can just crap out an underwhelming single player and it's considered okay. When did shooters become about multi-player and nothing else? Add this to my long list of reasons why I'm sick of most modern video games. I blame game reviewers for this, because they're the ones that give high scores to every shooter that has a lame campaign mode but great multi-player. Anybody remember the perfect ten scores that Halo 2, with it's UNFINISHED campaign mode got.

As for Full Spectrum Warrior not being a battle simulation, I believe that game was originally designed to train army soldiers. Hence why you can't take a bunch of hits like you can in Gears of War. If we're going to talk about which game is more realistic, it's not Gears of War.

Most of those games you mentioned not using cover actually do require you to hide behind something quite a few times. Again, the simple fact that Gears makes you do it ALL THE TIME doesn't impress me. I guess one could call that revolutionary, or you could just call it taking something that every shooter in existence has already done and simply placing a bit more emphasis on it. It doesn't impress me all that much.

It's sort of like when people say Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne's battle system is revolutionary because you can exploit enemy weaknesses to your advantage. Well, what rpg doesn't let you do that? I guess I'm just more impressed by brand new ideas than just taking old ones and over emphasizing them. Of course, I probably wouldn't have a problem with Gears not being revolutionary if it wasn't for the simple fact that everyone keeps saying it is. I'm not in disagreement that Gears of War is a decent game, but it's this ridiculous"BEST, MOST REVOLUTIONARY SHOOTER EVA!!!!!" stuff that annoys me. Course I don't mean you specifically, but that's the reaction a lot of gamers seems to have towards Gears.

Is it just me, or is the gaming industry always looking for something to proclaim as THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME!! Seriously, why does everything have to be hyped so damn much. It's like it's hard to even know what a truly amazing game is anymore with reviewers giving out high scores like candy these days. To bring this back to Halo 3, it's essentially an Xbox 1 game. If you've played Halo 2, you've played Halo 3. Yet the game is hyped as the game that will truly show everyone how amazing the 360 is. If Halo 3 is next gen, then gaming is truly evolving at a slow rate.