RSTEIN said:
I've never seen someone with bigger blinders. You know that it's OK to be critical, right? What do you want people to do? Play the game with a forced smile and pretend that they're having fun? Without criticism things don't improve.
Epic is probably my favourite developer. I spent countless hours with Unreal and UT2K4. They really hit Gears out of the park, too. The campaigns are awesome. Horde is a huge innovation that everyone is now copying. But they dropped the ball. Even a fanboy like me can see it.
Gears 2 MP was shit out of the box. Absolute shit. Game breaking glitches? Check. Lag and super host advantage? Check. Vulnerable to lag switchers? Check. I don't see how anyone could conclude otherwise. I really don't. I consider myself to be a fairly reasonable person. I try to see things from both sides. I honestly don't see how anyone could point to Gears 2 launch MP and say "that right there is a good game".
Yes, Epic responded with patches. But every patch brought new exploits problems with it! Crazy ammo counts, invisibile mode, flying/god mode, etc. They were like British Petroleum trying to plug a leaking pipeline.
Now, after TU5, Gears 2 is pretty amazing. In fact I would say it's the best MP offering on any console (highly subjective of course). Lag is now good. The weapons are balanced nicely. The new maps are awesome. And of course the core gameplay can't be beat.
Obviously Epic knows where they fucked up. The fans told them that. They looked at the game and concluded that. Because of that Gears 3 is shaping to be the best in the series.
Blinders? Right.
I'm definitely not going to say the game was perfect, but despite them fixing things, there was an excessive amount of ignorant bitching - some of the things you mentioned were there, were annoying, but were fixed early and luckily were barely seen - they messed up with their second title of a brand new franchise & direction, okay.
But the effort they put out definitely deserved some decency, especially with Microsoft's two-week certification to deal with. What pissed me off the most were the "they don't care" bullshit that people kept spewing, despite the updates, which were even based off of fan requests - can't think of many others that do the same.
Regardless, I'm just glad that phase is over, it's like everyone finally grew up now, and hopefully some proper discussions will go on in Gears topics now, because I know quite a number of GAFfers still play regularly, but probably didn't dare to post in a cess-pool of complaints.
Continue to keep it classy.
Now, reading that the shooting delay from roadie running and rolling is gone is just the icing on the cake - my goodness I missed that, and have died at some critical times because of that, oh yes.
i think i will finally pick up Dark Corners when it goes down in price
