Quick Look: Gears of War: Judgment

@xcharliesheen said:

The publishers set the retail price and retailers set deals as they see fit to get sales. Retail price is the intended price and thus the intended value metric for a title. Do you want review scores to fluctuate with sales?? Fair enough - but is is a metric that you take into account when buying. You obviously feel that as you can get a deal and not pay full price you are happy... little do you realise that trade-ins are highly poor value for the buyer, but reap massive profits for shops. Nonetheless the metric is fluid so when this game is on sale in a couple months time for $15 then you can decide whether it is now worth the money on a value metric, as in fact you can do right now and thus you are agreeable by that metric right now with the deal you seem to be able to get.
That is why reviews are taken at release (more often than not of course) and thus put against the value metric of recommended retail price.

Believe it or not - lots of games are still sold at RRP. Perhaps to ignorant parents or even children I don't know. They are the early adopters of the software world. (As opposed to hardware), and along with limited editions subsidise the smarter buyers.

If the RRP was set lower - you could be sure there were either competing deals at retail to encourage buyers to go somewhere in particular, or perhaps there would be no competition and everyone would buy in a walled garden a la iTunes.

I know what I prefer and why it works best for consumer.

This free to play stuff in full priced games is kind of sleazy...

You could say that this game is set before he got on...THE GEAR! ..... (ssss of war)

I never even beat gears 3. I was shocked just how quickly I got board with it, and I LOVED gears 2. The story was fun there were some really great one liners and regard it vary high in my gaming Library. But 3 never clicked with me maybe some day il go back.

I can't imagine seeing a lot of the spawn system stuff playing on Normal. Jeff probably replayed a mission though and nothing really caught his eye. Hopefully that stuff is more apparent when playing on Insane and dying a bunch.

I think Jeff was looking at some in the quick look. If you look at the final 2 or 3 you'll see a rainbow skin and what looks like a lava/fire skin. Also, I think I saw rainbow skin for the armor.

So anyone else thinking quick cash grab by Epic?

Cole is that small because they haven't started pumping the cogs full of that shitty protein rich food they get. Yes...that's from the books...

More like quick cash for Microsoft. They were probably contracted for 4 Gears games so they threw People Can Fly on it.

The animation of how that ticker when flying when Jeff meleed it was pretty funny.

I wonder if we'll see any PC ports of this franchise when the new Xbox shows up (ahh a man can dream.)

Gears is an Epic franchise, I don't think MS could make them develop one.

Lambent showing up in the prequel? Hammerbursts being single-shot in the prequel instead of three round burst? What is going on here?!

If EA put this game out with these types of micro transactions people would be flipping out nonstop.

Nah. XP in Gears means nothing in terms of gameplay. It's all cosmetic. There's no prompts in the campaign to buy new turrets or anything.

It's still shit, though. They have those prize boxes and there's only like 8 armor skins to unlock.

That singleplayer stuff looks cool. I like the arcadey nature of a lot of what they're doing there. It's awesome. It's really the kind of thing you'd hope a new company would include in their attempts at revitalizing a franchise. So that's cool. And I don't play multiplayer. I can wait for it to drop in price.

This just looks... not great. Not terrible mind you, but not great.

You're not ONYX. This is ONYX.

Yeah, I was also disheartened to see how little unlockable stuff there apparently is. There's barely even any actual character skins, and a fair few have been strewn around to different retailers as preorder bonuses. Even a mainstay character like Anya is locked behind a specific preorder. Plus I don't think the Carmine's A & B will be returning either. At least not at the outset... I can't help but imagine that they're going to be selling all of this once default content from Gears 3 right back for Judgment.

I've been rooting for Judgment since its announcement and I'm still looking forward to playing it. But all of the business surrounding the balance between what's on the disc and what's DLC is so fucking grimy. Plus, while it's not that big of a deal, I too am disappointed that you can't simply select the character you want and then choose the class afterwards for OverRun & Survival. Or at least have multiple skins attached to each class, like Dizzy as an engineer and Sam as a soldier ect.

I love Gears of War, and this just looks meh. I mean, I'm gonna rent it, but it really seems cash-grabby.

@yummylee: Some of that stuff is dumb(yeah, you should be able to change character and pick a class) but that's small potatoes. I can't be bummed out by the cosmetic microtransactions when the modes and gameplay looks so bad. Making it COG vs COG was step 1 in their attempt to make the most generic multiplayer ever.

This looks like the first game, with sniper rifles.

@ez123: Oh right yeah. I still can't understand why they'd remove the Locust from the regular multiplayer. They've apparently said it's because ''nobody liked playing as the locust'', but that can't be accurate... right? Turning it into Red v Blue doesn't look like all that much of a healthier alternative in any case. It just, as you said, makes it look all the more generic.

So many weird little changes; giving grenades their own dedicated button is understandable, but making pistols count as secondary weapons?.. What? Why? What good does that serve? It just makes no sense.

@bacongames: Unlikely to happen, gears 2 wasn't ported because of the high piracy rates of gears 1.

That weapon swap animation is kinda crazy.

Also, I fell into a real bad E-hole at EDC last year :(

The first game had sniper rifles.

The ME3 team already figured out how to get around segregating their userbase via map packs, which was they gave everyone all the maps for free.

more of the same gears games we've gotten the last 9 years just doesn't cut it annymore. had it, liiked it, fed up with it...

This is completely off-topic, but I have to mention it. A lot of people seem to give Dead Space 3 and GoW: Judgement a hard time for it's micro-transaction stuff, but no one said anything when Sleeping Dogs did it. Just find it really weird that some games are excused while others aren't.

Caught a bit of this on the live stream, the A.I. seems stunningly terrible.

The issue with having 4 characters in the 5 player Survival mode is ridiculous. Castlevania HoD had the the same issue, and that was just as stupid back then as it is now. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is, and why no one thought to invest in another character. As we've learned, an extra character costs exactly 175K to make - seems like a worthy investment in contrast to the reality of a duplicate character. Honestly, even a Carmine character model would have been acceptable, if not preferable.

people should realize that 60$ is not as much as it used to be. if you don't want the games to have additional ways of getting money then the price of games has to go up. take a minute to think about it. game development is getting more expensive and to be able to make money on the games 60$ is not enough for a lot of games.

In Gear 2, there's that segment where you pilot those flying enemies. Baird pulls his goggles down to fly one of them.

Is that Prophet talking?

I would have got it but screw the lack of mp content, give us the full game! they're reusing so much from previous games and skimping on content, this really shouldn't be a full price release.

Mehh.

Gotham City Impostors did it before ME3, utilising their micro-transactions presumedly to fund each map release. As someone who loved GCI and wanted more people to play more of it, this was the best thing I could hope for.

With that said, GCI also wasn't £40, so buying a few items in-game really wasn't hurting anyone. Everything about GoWJ reeks of desperation, the weapon skins in GoW3 were handled pretty poorly, but there was never any question about the amount of content and polish in the game. Way to send off one of your most important franchises, Microsoft.

Really not worth $60 and then there trying upsell you on a bunch of DLC. I would stay far away from this for now.

I really like the idea of that declassified stuff, but the Gears games in general are a little boring to me.

Removing modes and maps that was in Gears 3, when the game is presumably running on the same engine, kinda feels like bullshit. But the real shitty part is when they then sell it again through DLC.

Also, the fact that a majority of the unlockable skins can only be unlocked by paying is ridiculous.

More like Gears of Snore!

More like Gears of Bore!

At least it's not Marcus anymore. What a stupid-looking character that was.

All the way, Jeff's references were killer.

wow, and to think it's been almost 8 years since the original Gears of War came out.

This whole micro-transaction b/s is ridiculous in this game. Even sickening. The game is overpriced with low content, season pass is another $20 which they incentivize with double xp (WHAT!?!?!), and the whole game is pretty much a copy paste of Gears 3!........ Omg. How can even Gears fans support this....

These publishers bank on your blind loyalty knowing you all have no bounds, then they sucker you for everything you have. Yeah, sure you've got the money, but are the circumstances working under good faith/practice?

This looks terribly boring, even more so than 3, which is saying a lot. Also they spelt judgement wrong.

Huh. Played through both Gears 1 and Gears 2, but I can't remember too well...were the Locust always that much of bullet sponges? They're soaking up some serious amounts of damage before going down.

Baird rules.

Why do people look to Gears for a story? I'm a huge story-driven gamer, and I dove into and loved Gears even knowing it had nothing interesting on that front. It was just plain fun. Gears 2, as well, although that was more *despite* the story.

Maybe it's just because I skipped Gears 3, but watching this makes me eager to dive back in and play a Gears game again. If this one was on PC, I'd definitely be there. Even still, I'm considering it. I already know the stupid story bits from 3, including the ending, so I don't feel like I'd be missing out if this campaign is lengthy enough to justify the cost.

I am really on the fence with this game. Part of me is like "Fuck yeah more Gears!" But the other half is like "Oh no! more Gears!"and from all the talk I have heard about the lack of content for the multi-player really leaves me in a position where I feel this wouldn't be worth my money right now. Even with the included downloadable copy of gears one. and all the other crazy bonus content most places are giving away with this game.