Gears 5 Learned from the Failures of Dead Space and Halo

Gears 5 has been a significant win for Microsoft. The game has been nearly universally hailed as a major step forward for the Gears of War series, but many of its bold new features are built on the bones of past failures. In fact, Gears 5 is an amalgam of lessons learned from two of modern gaming’s most divisive titles: Dead Space 3 and Halo 5: Guardians.

[Sciurus_vulgaris]

Gears 5 has reviewed marginally better than Halo 5. Using the word “failures” plants an implication that Gears 5 was vastly better received than Halo 5, when currently it hasn’t been.

[DEEHULK88]

Another dumba$$ article

[AK91]

Did it?

[Welshy]

I'm not sure I'd admit building my game around 2 games considered to be the worst in their respective franchises. I'd rather avoid their design altogether than try to improve poor design.

Surely you would compare good aspects of Gears 5 to other games that were well recieved. It's risky to say "we designed similarly to bad games, but made them good this time".

[neomahi]

I beg to differ. As a long time huge fan of the series, this was a huge step back and missed opportunity to pull out in front of Sony with huge titles on the horizon, and it's dared to challenge Resident Evil 2 and Death Stranding for Game of the Year and doesn't stand a chance. For Xbox fans, yeah, it's gonna be something special, but the rest of the gaming world knows better. They know Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II are ever nearer (even though I totally disagree with Naughty Dogs new political direction) and Nintendo has a fairly good line-up and even challenged Microsoft with Astral Chain, good luck up against that. The truth is, fammon made Gears 5 the sales success it was but your not likely to find anyone that traded in their Switch or PS4 to play it.

The game falls short still relying on an incredibly flawed and clunky Unreal Engine rather than showing some faith in Microsofts own talent and using 343 Industries engine I feel after seeing some stuff for Halo Infinite would have been the better choice. We're also on the 6th entry here and the cover system still hasn't gotten the bugs worked out. The Matriarch battle, for example, is a frantic fight requiring speed and timing, and when the dodging and cover system don't work, it's death after death after death which also brings me to AI. Compare the artificial intelligence of Del in Gears 5 to Ellie in The Last of us (Remastered) and you really wonder what happened. Del just stands there and yells out gripes and complaints and let's you get curb stomped and/or ripped in half. Then watch Ellie go to work. (If you've played The Last of Us, you'll totally get what I mean.) Microsoft are dependent on Xbox Live and this game exposes that. Microsoft wants you to buy a year subscription and play with buddies to ease the difficulty a bit, but it's not difficulty, it's poor or lazy programming. For a game that's about working together as a team, your teammates sure do leave you for dead quite a bit. It's an inconsistent poorly designed game that can really frustrate gamers.

Finally, it shows Microsoft and thus The Coalition have always been and always will be trend followers and never the trend setters. It's readily apparent that in The Coalitions break room, theres a foosball table and a PS4. What The Coalition did was say how can we make money? Well, look at the success and sales of God of War! Yup, but it's a poor ripoff. The linear story-driven/open world, if you wanna call it that is a blatant attempt as pulling off its GoW brother, but misses out. God of War made it work because it was innovative, Gears of War was just trying to mimic God of War so all it is is a walking simulator as some call it, though it did make we long for Amped 4, where's that Microsoft?

In the end, Black Tusk was set to try something new, and as they were essentially bought out and formed by Microsoft, Microsoft insisted they make Microsofts money back off the purchase of the IP and to now be able to afford Rod Ferguson while Cliffy B went off to work on the PS4. Microsoft should have let Black Tusk try something new.

Is just my humble opinion. I'm not at all excited for Gears 6 and Xbox Scarlett may be the first Xbox console I don't buy, maybe toward the end of the generation because I don't buy Xbox for Halo and Forza. Not even for Ninja Theories new game, no, I'm have an Xbox for Gears alone and Gears 5 doesn't push me to get excited for new Xbox hardware, I just look for PlayStation all the more now.