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.
Halo 5: Guardians lead concept artist Darren Bacon explains that the game's marketing was completely seperate to the game's development.
The marketing wasn't the issue, it just felt 343 were so bothered about getting Halo away from being known as a Bungie franchise that they tried to introduce so many changes to counter this.
It felt like they were trying to replace Chief as a character thus the big push on Agent Locke (he even got his own mini series). Chief was even in less missions in comparison.
Introduced squads which forced single player gamers to be paired up with 3 AI players over drop in / drop out co-op.
Cortana was butchered, ruining that relationship between Chief and Cortana we all liked. Would have been fine if the twist was the Didact was secretly controlling her or something but nothing. Did she come back in Infinite? Nope. Killed off screen in a sudden 180 to her villainous turn and replaced by a copy since they knew they screwed up.
Expected you to have read all the novels and the like to understand who Blue Team were and their relationship to Chief, had no build up to the characters and it felt like they expected you to like them without it being earned.
Everything they did felt like change for the sake of change, to mark it was a 343 game not a Bungie one and it's hilarious as they tried to f*** around with the multiplayer in Halo 4 to make it their own before reverting things in Guardians.
No issues it's just wasn't good story at least my friend it wasn't well written.
Yeah it says a lot about the management of 343 at the time that they could have a marketing campaign be so disconnected in tone and story from the game it's supposed to be about.
I'd imagine it would be frustrating for the developers that the marketing beats seemed far cooler than what you were stuck making. Maybe it would've been better if 343 just continued the story from their previous game but nooo they couldn't be bothered to do that even once
Xbox Game Studios and Halo Studios' Halo 5: Guardians had a story roadmap that was abandoned after poor reception from fans.
We didn't have an issue with the story, we just didn't enjoy the missions and the execution.
What's crazy is how decent Halo 4 was. It wasn't amazing, but it was decent. And then it all went downhill.
According to a Halo Studios dev, a PC port of Halo 5 was being considered but was ultimately scrapped due to technical issues.
Still no Halo 5, Fable 2, Gears 2 & 3 on PC.
I like when we get whole franchise collection on PC ... instead of partial ones, disregarding how yucky the missed one(s) are.
We've got Fable, Fable Remastered, Fable III on PC but the best one, Fable II is stll missing.
Same with Gears 1, Gears 2 Remastered, Gears 4 & Gears 5 ... but no Gears 2, 3 or judgement on PC.
If not for MCC, PC would've been stuck with Halo 1 & 2 and then straight to Infinite.
Fix this MS.
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.
Another dumba$$ article
Did it?
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".