Jimbob Posted May 17, 2011 Posted May 17, 2011 Do you mean planting grenades onto a meatshield? Cos you've always been able to grenade tag enemies - even in Gears 1. I got to level 100 a while ago when they were doing 20x XP. The longest thing was getting the 100,000 kills. A ridiculous achievement! I hope the "leaked" list of Gears 3 achievements I posted a couple of pages back aren't true, as I don't think I'll be getting Seriously 3.0 I meant sneaking up behind someone and planting the grenade, which i got into the habit of doing to some people. I knew of tagging the meat-shields anyway.
Cube Posted May 17, 2011 Posted May 17, 2011 I tried Gears and Gears 2 after the beta. It's amazing how much stuff you actually miss from the Gears 3 beta.
Shorty Posted May 17, 2011 Author Posted May 17, 2011 Adam Fenix!!!Oi oi, spoiler tag wouldn't have gone amiss there. You might ruin my enjoyment of the stor... lol, just kidding.
Beast Posted May 19, 2011 Posted May 19, 2011 I really liked the Gears of War 3 beta and I think it's improved from Gears of War and Gears of War 2. The camera is back a little more when you run instead of it being up your character's arse, blocking the view of the surroundings and there's no host advantage, which was awesome. The shotguns aren't that overpowered like they are in the first two and the weapon kills were cool. I'm pretty much looking forward to playing Gears of War 3 but first, I need to complete Gears of War 2, haha.
Hero-of-Time Posted May 20, 2011 Posted May 20, 2011 Looks like I will be watching the Champions League final afterall. http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/gears-of-war-3-campaign-teaser-video-1 I see the fate of Clayton Carmine was leaked yesterday, I didn't bother looking at it as I want to keep it as a surprise.
Dyson Posted May 20, 2011 Posted May 20, 2011 Seriously excited for Gears 3. Think it's becoming my most anticipated game of the year after the beta. I went back and played Gears 2 a couple of days ago and it's insane how ridiculously overpowered the Gnasher is in that game. Every single kill was being made with it! Plus I miss the Retro Lancer.. my little golden baby
LegoMan1031 Posted May 28, 2011 Posted May 28, 2011 Good trailer, but at the same time doesn't really give much away. *Hype level increased*
Hero-of-Time Posted May 28, 2011 Posted May 28, 2011 Good trailer, but at the same time doesn't really give much away. *Hype level increased* Agreed. Many seem surprised that Prescott is gearing up and the Lambent have control over the Leviathans, guess they should read the books then. It's nice to see a quick flash of the underwater section, I missed that during my first watch.
Hero-of-Time Posted May 29, 2011 Posted May 29, 2011 I see the trailer is now on XBL. They have also released some more stuff for your avatars. You can finally buy a Lancer and Hammerburst!
LegoMan1031 Posted May 29, 2011 Posted May 29, 2011 Agreed. Many seem surprised that Prescott is gearing up and the Lambent have control over the Leviathans, guess they should read the books then. It's nice to see a quick flash of the underwater section, I missed that during my first watch. Are the books any good? I see the trailer is now on XBL. They have also released some more stuff for your avatars. You can finally buy a Lancer and Hammerburst! Cool, might see if i have some spare microsoft points... lol.
Hero-of-Time Posted May 29, 2011 Posted May 29, 2011 Are the books any good? I think the books are fantastic. I'm not a big reader so I can't compare them to other books but they do exactly what they set out to do, which is to fill in the blanks for the games, which are alot of blanks to fill. The last couple have been amazing. They kicked off straight after the ending of number 2 and you get to see what has happened to them, Doms decent into darkness, who they joined and who they have made alliances with, all before number 3 arrives. The last book is out in a couple of months and it will lead directly into the 3rd game. If it wasn't for the books I wouldn't really care for the story at all.
Jimbob Posted May 29, 2011 Posted May 29, 2011 I see the trailer is now on XBL. They have also released some more stuff for your avatars. You can finally buy a Lancer and Hammerburst! I'm going to hang on, see what the prices are for the L.A Noire pre-order DLC coming in the week. Nice to see new avatar gear up as well.
jayseven Posted May 29, 2011 Posted May 29, 2011 It's Gears, what's not to like? Provides 100% of your testosterone RDA in the trailer alone. I felt my beard literally growing.
Hero-of-Time Posted June 4, 2011 Posted June 4, 2011 Here's an interesting read about the changes made thanks to the 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. I'm glad to hear they are sorting out the spawn killing that was going on.
Dyson Posted June 4, 2011 Posted June 4, 2011 Yeah, a good write-up. Read it yesterday on Kotaku, looks like they're trying to make this the absolute bees knees based on player and dev feedback. The beta was astonishing. I hope the final product doesn't change too much from the brilliant formula, I'm currently the at most excited than I have been for any Gears of War game
Jimbob Posted June 5, 2011 Posted June 5, 2011 It's amazing going onto the Epic forums, and hearing people complain about being picked off with a Retro. Most of these people, are shotgun gamers and don't like to be outdone. I congratulate Epic for making a weapon to counter the Gnasher. I don't want Epic to ruin the formula of Gears 3. One of the most anticipated games i'm looking forward to as well, and can't wait to sink my teeth into it again come September. I thinks a day off work could be in order for this, and i know where my online gamings will be as well.
LegoMan1031 Posted June 5, 2011 Posted June 5, 2011 Ha, they wont like me then, as most of my beta kills came with the Retro, i love it! I still used the Gnasher for close range situations!! I like the variety!
Jimbob Posted June 5, 2011 Posted June 5, 2011 Ha, they wont like me then, as most of my beta kills came with the Retro, i love it! I still used the Gnasher for close range situations!! I like the variety! They hated me, people were shouting abuse at me down the microphone some nights. I still hate on Gears 2, trying to counter a recoil on the standard Lancer, which doesn't exist. I guess i got used to the Retro Lancer so much.
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