Where did Gears of War go wrong?

Gears of War 1 was released in 2006 as an Xbox 360 exclusive Microsoft needed another game besides Halo to entice new fans and they absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one the game still sits at a 94 on Metacritic and regularly makes lists of top 10 games of all time boom as far as Shooters go it's probably top five of all time it's hard to overestimate the seismic effect the Gears of War Games had on the industry Gears of War quite literally created the Third Person cover baseed shooter and we can see this the fact that any game today with cover-based shooting merely copies its mechanics Last of Us Uncharted GTA 5 Mass Effect fortnite the division Tomb Raider all these and more are children of the gears games but gears wasn't just a huge success because of its shooting mechanics the game was also brutal on a level we hadn't seen before created iconic Weaponry iconic characters and told a one-of-a-kind buddy War Story starring Marcus Phoenix and Dominic Santiago playing the gears Trilogy through now in 2024 I also noticed just how brutal and smart the 2006 enemy AI still is how it's been 18 years in enemy Ai and games have somehow gotten worse is something I still don't understand gears 1 still holds up as having some of the best momentto moment gameplay I've seen in a game and definitely belongs in the pantheon of great games next to titles like Metal Gear Solid so where did gears go wrong well I'm going to get into that later on if you enjoy these videos hit the Subscribe button for the rest of this video I want to analyze the three big reasons I think gears of war was so influential number one the shooting felt like nothing else number two the game play felt like nothing else and number three the story felt like nothing else in the second half of the video I'm going to analyze what many fans consider to be the downfall of Gears where did it go wrong and how might gears find its way back into the Public's good graces I'm going to bring up this guy Cliff blazinski a lot he was the creator of Gears and truly seems responsible for nearly everything that made this game good the dude definitely wears Affliction shirts and Oakleys and drinks monster but we're not going to hold that against him his career sadly died in 2017 with this commercial flop of a game called law Breakers and now he makes musicals with his wife yikes anyway let's talk about the [Music] game the shooting in Gears felt like nothing else so I know I said this earlier but Gears of War created the cover-based shooter as we know it today what do I mean by that well Gears of War finally figured out how cover-based shooting was supposed to feel and they finally did it right and now everyone just copies gears now was there technically a game in 2003 called kill switch that was actually the first cover based shooter yes but it's an unfortunate fact of life that a game must also be popular to be influential and kill switch was not a popular game some people have pointed to Resident Evil 4 which came out a year before gears as pioneering this shooting style re4 doesn't actually let you snap to cover at all though and therefore isn't a cover-based shooter re4 definitely influenced third person shooters but Gears of War is the father of the third person cover-based shooter it's also really interesting to look at games from this time period that hadn't quite figured out how third person cover-based shooting is supposed to work GTA 4 despite being an incredible game came out a full 2 years after gears and has absolutely awful cover-based shooting I happen to be playing it right now and you can see some of it on screen in the game you're always snapping to the wrong person or moving awkwardly between cover to reference an even older game I remember playing The Getaway on PS2 back in the day and wow the shooting is so awkward and feels so terrible in this game so given how bad cover-based shooting felt in games up to this time it's easy to see why Gears of War was so influential okay Andrew so what exactly was the cover-based shooting mechanic that they invented well it's simple when walking around the camera is behind you and looks wherever you are looking a button snaps you into cover either behind a wall or waist high cover when you hold aim from this position the camera Zooms in so that all you are seeing is the player character's shoulder and head and what you're pointing at it seems so obvious and intuitive right now but man it took years for video games to figure out how to do this right if you don't believe me go back and play GTA 4 or GTA 3 or the getaway and you will see how incredibly awkward shooting guns in a third person game used to be the game play felt like nothing else so I should probably explain that I have zero Nostalgia for the gears games and I never even played one all the way through until 2023 so don't think that what I'm about to say is colored by Nostalgia because I literally did not play these games until 2023 Gears of War I is still one of the tightest most difficult funnest games you can play to this day if you have never played a gears game I would recommend playing the ultimate edition right now and you will see that almost nothing about this game has aged at all so as far as gameplay goes if I had to pick one thing that makes gears 1 so special it would be the difficulty gears 1 takes about 8 hours to beat on normal difficulty love short games by the way wish more games were like this but on Hardcore difficulty I swear the game took me at least 20 hours I could go on and on about the clenched butthole moments I had in this game Cliffy B was a sadistic Master playing on my worst fears with well-timed enemy wave after enemy wave when you play Gears one particularly the last half of the game I really got the sense that the guys who made this game sat there and must have beta tested this game over and over again and they truly wanted the 20th time you play a section of the game to be as fun as the first time you play a section of the game you can practically smell the Dorito and Cheeto dust coming off of this game as I imagine Cliffy and the team at Epic spent sleepless night after sleepless night absolutely perfecting the AI in this game and like I said I think it's best enjoyed on Hardcore difficulty I specifically remember a pretty open area towards the end of the game where I must have died 500 times the level starts out with Locust and theen guards Locust will rush you and Destroy You theen guards have a one-hot crossbow bolt they they can hit you with that will immediately end your life I always remember getting past the Locust and thein at this part and then what should appear but Boomers and wretches this is a brilliant piece of gameplay because as I'm struggling to hide from the Boomers the wretches are ambushing me it's tiny little details like that that make gears one feel like such a tight perfectly designed game another wonderfully hard thing about gears is that a the checkpoints are punishingly difficult often being very far apart and making you redo entire sections of the game and B there is no revive mechanic they added the revive mechanic in Gears 2 but in one you were just up [ __ ] creek the enemy types in Gears one are really welld designed and play off of each other perfectly Locust soldiers behave kind of like players shooting and hiding behind things wretches are those little Hunchback things that run straight at you theen guards can kill you with one shot of a bolt Boomers can one-hot you with a grenade snipers can't on-shot you but will do a ton of damage and then lastly you have emergence holes meaning enemies can show up and flank you from any direction the balance in the interplay of all of these different types of enemies really made this game sing for me in a way that most games don't and that's why I think gears 1 and actually the whole gears Trilogy are classic video games technically I was fighting the same types of enemies the entire game and yet it never got old for some reason and the only reason I can imagine why is because the AI was so good that fights always felt tense and taut every single fight and hardcore difficulty I made it through by the skin of my teeth and this is one of the main reasons I was so disappointed with gears 4 and gears 5 but I'll talk about those games later on another thing I haven't touched on yet in this game is the incredibly fun Weaponry like the Lancer rifle I.E the chainsaw gun and the hammer of dawn what is there to say about the Lancer rifle that hasn't been said rushing up on an enemy Locust and sawing them in half while blood goes everywhere is truly one of those gaming moments you never forget did playing them for the first time recently I'm reminded how incredibly gory the first three gears games are and it just seemed like four and five got Tamer and Tamer the enemies in the original gears trilogy there was buckets and buckets of blood and it was toned down quite a bit in Gears 4 and five in a similar way the hammer of Dawn was such an iconic weapon in the first game that it comes up again and again in later games because fans loved it so much there's not much to say about it really other than that it's an incredibly cool idea to have a device that you point at enemy need to line up a huge laser from the heavens that comes down to shred them in his book control freak Cliffy B talks about how much he looks up to creators like hideo coima in making the gears games I think Cliff doesn't give himself enough credit in this area because in my opinion like I said earlier gears is at least as important in the video game Pantheon as Metal Gear Solid is just as Metal Gear Solid inspired a generation of stealth games gears inspired a generation of cover-based Shooters furthermore in cliffy's defense I love the metal gear games but if you try to go back and play Metal Gear Solid 2 now you'll see how horribly dated the camera and controls are and it's not so with the Gears of War Games never has a game from 2006 felt so fresh and so relevant to today another thing here that Cliffy learned from hideo coima is the art of the boss battle there are several incredibly clever boss battles in Gears 1 in this game including the bumac and the Berserker uh doing the Berserker fight for the first time it took me a while to figure out that you had to take out the columns to beat him uh but sometimes it's just simple mechanics like that in boss fights that make them so [Music] satisfying the story felt like nothing else the gears Trilogy truly taught game developers everywhere exactly how you do a sequel and I wish this idea was copied more if you can't improve on the original game don't make anything at all gears 2 and Gears 3 took the base that gears 1 had established and they made it better they made the story better they made the set pieces better they made the mechanics better gears 2 and three merely improved gears 1 this is also why I think Cliffy B walked away from Gears after making Gears 3 because he knew he was not able to make it any better and he was probably right most of us fans believe that Gears 3 is the highlight of the series and it never got better it only went down from there but getting back to the story before I talk about the story of Gears of War I want to zoom out for a second and talk about the tone of this game and why it works so well together as a complete package gears one on Hardcore difficulty is incredibly hard then you look at the characters and you've got these hardass grizzled military guys Marcus Dom col train they're grunt soldiers who did their job so well they got promoted but they're still grunts the whole idea of the gears games is that the camera never zooms out you are the grunt Soldier you are doing the Dirty Work bureaucrats and politicians will argue about taxes you're just here to shoot stuff take care of business and Chainsaw guys in half as far as the story beats itself gears takes the template from classic war movies like Saving Private Ryan Fury and platoon the camera never pulls out to give you the General's perspective you've been given your order you are on a linear Mission throughout the whole game to complete an objective in this way the gears games are hyper masculine hyper military games rough men talking roughly to one another making jokes making fun of each other but we're still here with a job to do now it's all oh coold train tell us all about that play again and hey number 83 signed my shame and because of this hyper masculinity that you see in the first three gears games I think this is why gears 4 and five fumbled so hard for me who the heck is Kate Diaz and why am I supposed to care about her and her mom gears four and five completely lost the brand identity of the gears games gears is about male bonding and Brotherhood it's about men fighting hard ass fights in a war against the evil Locust taking over the world we are the grunts we are the boots on the ground it's a game of Manliness no offense to games that focus on female characters but gears is a game about men moving on to the actual story you could sum up the story of Gears one in a few sentences Marcus Phoenix and his allies are on a mission to get a device that will take out the Locust horde we fumble when we first get the device but get a better version of the device later on and wipe out the Locust boom end of Gears one gears 2 and three as all good sequels do significantly expand the range of the story possible spoilers ahead by the way in Gears 2 the game does emotional damage to you Dom is your War buddy throughout the first game in the second game he talks about how much he W misses his wife Maria and wants to see her we finally get underground to her and she's inside one of those containers being drained of her life by the Locust he kisses her just as her skull Fades away and she's zombified right in front of us even now 15 years later this scene hits hard there's also a scene later on where Tai the dude with tattoos all over him commit suicide when he realizes he's being turned into a locust I can't think of any other game in 2010 that had suicide or such heavy themes moving on to Gears 3 the spot that hit me the hardest in that game is of course the death of do Dominique Santiago he's been with you for three games at this point and to kill off a character you thought you were going to get to the Finish Line with is absolute emotional damage the reason I believe the gears Trilogy is so celebrated and the fourth and fifth games are such mixed bags is because plot-wise the first three games followed the formula of classic buddy war movies like Saving Private Ryan why this is such a Timeless plot for a movie and a Timeless plot for a game is because we don't actually want the camera to pull out we don't actually want to know that everything we're doing just makes us a cog hit in a machine when you're with your platoon you have everything you want Friendship Community purpose the orders that come down from your commander don't really matter this is a basic principle of every Army and how it works the same applies to War Stories in games if they actually want to be realistic and good War Stories the orders coming down from above don't matter it's our brother next to us that matters un fortunately again gears 4 doesn't seem to understand any of that instead of Gears being about Brotherhood Duty and a common purpose to your fellow man gears 4 is about women motherhood and being a deserter it also plays the worst of any of the gears games so far but I'll get into that later now I'm no sexist and I'm totally fine with women being in the gears games but when the original trilogy were such male-focused hyper masculine games about Brotherhood and Duty and then you turn that game on its head and make it about a mother and a daughter well it's easy to see why gears 4 was such a failure critically and commercially if they wanted to tell the story of Kate Diaz I think it should have been a spin-off game kind of like Uncharted Lost Legacy gears is about Marcus Phoenix the same way Uncharted is about Nathan Drake modern films and media keep doing this to our characters and I wonder when they will learn that we don't want beloved characters changed if you want to introduce a new character create a new series it's similar to the movie She-Hulk that recently came out nobody wanted this movie nobody asked for this movie and no surprise it bombed well what about gears 5 unfortunately it fell suspect to all the same problems of Gears 4 it's overly complicated it gets away from the hyper masculine boots on the ground story about men of the first three gears game and it becomes a game about deserting the military being a coward Sisterhood about women and starring women one of the final confrontations in Gears 5 involves Kate going head-to-head with jyn the head of the Cog is there a problem people no problem at all Mrs Kennedy we were just discussing a ideas of what to do with the new Prince Eric movie putut a chicken it make a gay I found the story of Gears 5 so boring that I barely made it to the end of the game in addition to the story of Gears 4 and 5 being vastly inferior to the trilogy the gameplay itself is inferior as well if you check out the clip on screen I'm playing hardcore difficulty in Gears of War I the combat is incredibly tense and incredibly hard if you stick your head out for more than a few seconds the Cog in the middle of the screen goes completely red taking any fire at all or moving at a bad time in Gears 1 means instant death with nobody to pick you up so how does the difficulty of Gears 4 compare well it's significantly easier in Gears 4 on Hardcore Mode there's a segment where you are fighting four Boomers at once I immediately beat this part on my first try meanwhile in Gears one the hardest part of the game had two Boomers and I must have died 50 times at this part on Hardcore Mode did you notice how in Gears one I had to stay in cover basically all the time otherwise I would get immediately melted you know the way War should actually be well in Gears 4 hardcore mode I can just kind of wander around nobody's attacking me no danger so the hardest difficulty in the gears Trilogy is insane and let's just say it's uh insane in Gears four and five they added an additional difficulty even harder than insane called inconceivable but guys I got to be honest inconceivable in Gears 4 doesn't even come close to insane in Gears 1 make that make sense for me in Gears 1 I still found the enemies to be smarter to be constantly outwitting me whereas in Gears four and five on inconceivable it was kind of like they made the enemies spongier and they could take more bullets but they weren't really smarter and the AI wasn't really more advanced but guys this goes back to what I was saying earlier that the original gears Trilogy are the hardest gears games they're much harder and they have more of a hardcore feel than gears four and five gears four and five are soft games they're easy to beat they were easy to get through and they're just they don't represent nearly the challenge of the original Three gears games so guys just to begin to wrap this video up I am not even close to the world's biggest gears fan and I have only recently started playing this series but what I do know is it's incredibly sad for me to see a beloved Trilogy of games get watered down get softened get feminized get sanitized and turned into the garbage that we have in Gears 4 and gears 5 and no offense to you if you do like gears four and five I just feel like they do not represent the core brand identity that we see in the original gears Trilogy as far as I'm concerned Gears of War 1 2 and 3 are the only real gears games and I hope that Microsoft returns to this original formula returns to the masculine feel to the Brotherhood feel returns to the boots on the ground to the true realistic military style game that these first three games were and I could almost look past the fact that gears four and five are about motherhood instead of Brotherhood if these games were still fun and difficult but the difficulty was toned down as well to just make these games completely uninteresting to me so in summation I think Microsoft giving the gears games to the Coalition it's similar to what they did by giving Halo to 343i these have become bad games and they've gotten away from the core identity of what made these games good and I hope they find a new studio whether it means bringing back in cliffyb or whatever they want to do I hope they get back to the core of what made these games good because this ain't it all right I'm out of here

Channel: AndyPants Gaming

Views: 65,026

Keywords: gears of war, doom, shooters, halo, master chief, marcus fenix, gears 1, gears 2, gears 3, gears trilogy, gears of war trilogy, locust horde, gears of war multiplayer

Id: fF2IYcDRMZA

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024