When it comes to sitting behind cover and shooting, no game has done it as well as the old Gears of War games. Their cover shooting was and is without equal. If Gears 4 is outdated it's in its refusal to integrate cover shooting with other kinds of mechanics like platforming (e.g. Uncharted series, recent Tomb Raider games -- the single best example I know of is the part in the 2013 Tomb Raider when you're assaulted by countless soldiers in a huge area with a tall temple neighboured by a shanty town that's packed with multi-story buildings to climb, run through, hide in or jump between, as well as with ziplines and explosive barrels; it's by far the most complex and visionary third-person shooter level I've seen and makes everything else in that game and its sequel seem narrow-minded and pathetic in comparison), stealth (e.g. The Last of Us, Uncharted series, recent Tomb Raider games, recent Splinter Cell games, Metal Gear Solid V), melee fighting (e.g. Resident Evil 6, by far the most ambitious and groundbreaking game when it comes to the integration of shooting with melee, with a combat system that deserves to be picked up and refined by a better developer in a more focused game), high-speed dodging and dashing (e.g. Vanquish) etc.
The future of third-person shooting is a game that has you seamlessly and dynamically transitioning from MGSV-like stealth to Gears-like cover shooting to out-of-cover movement that combines Tomb Raider's climbing with Vanquish's dodging and boosting to melee fighting that's as integrated with the shooting as in RE6, all in a massive, complex environment in which you have to outmaneuver your enemies. In other words, the future of cover shooting is its integration into a more complete species of action game of which it will only be one small part. Those are the kinds of games we are moving towards and that's why Gears of War seems dated. The addition of a cover system to third-person shooting was a step in the direction of a more complete kind of action game back in 2006, but to take further steps in that direction you have to keep adding more systems -- which is exactly what other games have been doing for years (to varying degrees of success). Which is not to say that Gears of War 4 won't be good. I'm looking forward to playing it and won't be surprised if it's excellent. But an excellent Gears of War game that's more or less like the previous installments is inherently less impressive in 2016, not only because we've seen it before, but also because the formerly visionary concept of cover shooting has been made part of more expansive game design visions.
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