Looking Back At: Gears of War PVP

Online PVP shooters are now more plentiful than ever, with many niche options to choose from. Remixes on remixes of different styles of shooters. Do you want a tactical FPS? An arcade FPS? A Military Sim? A Battle Royal? Why not grab a bag of all of those? Or a randomized assortment of a few elements of any given two? If you look hard enough, you’ll find the game that sits in your “Goldilocks Zone”. Back in the 2000’s, we didn’t have quite as many options as we do now. In a post Quake and Doom world, shooters exploded in popularity. What once was a genre with minimal offerings eventually blossomed into a broad category.  By the mid 2000’s Halo had cemented itself as the flagship console FPS. Blending elements of its progenitors all while also making it controller friendly. By the late 2000’s, Call of Duty, the once modest WWII franchise, fundamentally shifted its identity in both gameplay and setting with its 2007 installment Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Around this same time period, Epic Games developed and released their violent, gritty Sci-fi shooter franchise: Gears of War. This franchise, at the time, occupied a very particular niche within the Triple A gaming space. Gears of War, to many, is often remembered as a static cover shooter with a memorable campaign and an uninteresting multiplayer. I,however, remember Gears of War as a kinetic, dynamic and unparalleled third person shooter franchise that has not quite been replicated by another developer. Despite its stand out characteristics, it’s fallen in popularity. Since the franchise was given to The Coalition to develop, Gears hasn’t accrued the same cultural traction it once had. With that in mind, I want to discuss Gears as a concept. What at its core, across the various games, makes the multiplayer so interesting and captivating.

Reflecting on Gears PVP, there’s an extensive list of things the multiplayer did right. The maps across the Gears Franchise are superb. Good quality maps are what all online shooters live and die by. How enjoyable are your maps? Do they put on display how exemplary your gameplay loop is, or do your maps reveal flaws? Gears’ maps demonstrate what makes the gameplay loop so phenomenal. The multiplayer maps exclusively follow a ‘symmetrical’ design philosophy, providing equal opportunity to win for each team regardless of their spawn. These symmetrical maps are often varied in terms of how each corridor is structured, where the power positions are, what corners and barriers players can duel at and so on. All of these elements come together in a way that exemplify what made Gears’ gameplay so kinetic and visceral. The dance between various pieces of chest high cover, each team using coordinating plays to provide suppressing fire for one another and the breakneck shotgun fights that culminate in the center of each map. These maps provide amazing points of interest for individual players' talents to shine and provide a sandbox where well coordinated teams can deploy strategies to provide crossing fire for one another.

Each map, regardless of its structure, had power positions. Power positions were powerful because they provided high ground or some potent vantage point. Aside from this, players’ who controlled these spaces are rewarded with a unique Power Weapon, a concept in online shooters that has since been lost to time. In Gears, games are won and lost over who controls the power weapons and who is the most proficient with them. Weapons like The Boomshot (a massive RPG with a grenade-like arc) are a bit more user friendly. You shoot the projectile at some unsuspecting player’s feet and they turn to chunks, but not all the power weapons are as approachable. The weapon I have an unyielding admiration for, that I haven’t seen in any other game, is the Torque Bow — a large crossbow that becomes more accurate the longer you hold down the trigger. The Torque Bow fires off these blisteringly fast explosive arrows that will stick to opponents upon impact. If you’ve mastered the weapon, you can shoot the arrow through an opponent’s head, giving you an instant kill on your first target, and opening up the opportunity for that same arrow to stick to whoever may, unfortunately, be behind your first target. I remember the first time I pulled this off back in middle school, I was in absolute disbelief. The viscerality of the weapon and what it could accomplish was an electrifying feeling. The Torque Bow, in many ways, is a weapon the player can only get more value from the more familiar they become with it. To this day, when I close my eyes, I can still imagine the mechanical whirring it makes as either side of the bow tightens, until the weapon suddenly releases the arrow. The noise of it sticking to an opponent or popping their head is unparalleled Audio Porn.

There are many other phenomenal weapons: Longshot Sniper, Digger, Incendiary Grenades…The Hammer of Dawn— All these weapons help to construct Gears’ pvp identity. Fighting for these speciality weapons demands players understand their base loadout: The Lancer Assault Rifle and The Gnasher Shotgun. Initially, players believe The Lancer’s strength is in its comically over the top ‘Chainsaw Bayonet’. The name gives it away, it’s a chainsaw mounted underneath the barrel of your large rifle. You yank rev up the mounted chainsaw and rip opponents in half. As players spend more time with the game ,they understand that this is a surefire way to get yourself killed. While revving the chainsaw, you move in a slow, predictable pattern, locked into a specific animation without any recourse.  Using the chainsaw in PVP is more of an act of disrespect than anything else. The Lancer should be seen as a support weapon. Pepper opponents with bullets as they push power positions on the map, help teammates in the middle of intense 1v1s, poke at opponents when they position themselves poorly. These are the instances where the iconic assault rifle shines. Aside from misunderstanding the chainsaw, players initially believe The Lancer is the primary dueling weapon. We may think of the Battle Rifle from Halo, the AK-47 from Counter-Strike as being analogous to The Lancer. Rifles are the default dueling tool in most PVP shooters. However, in Gears, the weapon far more comparable to these rifles is not the rifle, but instead The Gnasher Shotgun. 

 

 

 

The Gnasher is the weapon in Gears of War with the highest skill expression in the game, and the core reason as to why I still think about this franchise to this day. The Gnasher is the flagship weapon that is only bolstered and made dynamic because of Gears of War’s in-depth cover system. The Gnasher is an 8-round lever action shotgun that has the potential to one shot any opponent at point blank range. This weapon is the player's primary ‘Dueling’ weapon. As the years have gone on, The Gears Community has come to learn how to manipulate and deploy the games’ signature lock-n-snap cover system in expressive and creative ways.

Movement— within the Gears community, this action, this skill is what all Gnasher Duels hinge on. There are many intended mechanics within Gears, but there are unintended movement skills uncovered by the players learning how to manipulate the existing features and systems present in the game, unknown to the developers. The tech that defines the said movement is easy to understand, but hard to master. Gears of War 2 introduced a seemingly minor feature to the cover system that blew the lid wide open on the games’ movement mechanics going forward: being able to cancel your slide by pulling back on your thumbstick. Over time, players started to chain these cancels back to back. Some wall bounces are fast, spammy, making it hard to know where your hit box is going to be. Other styles are more slow and methodical, covering great distances without much warning, allowing you to close the gap before players have time to react. Wallbouncing remains, to this day, a core component to  Gears of War player versus player. As new Gears games have been released, new movement quarks are unraveled and uncovered. Wrap-arounds, Back As and Forward As, Slapshots, Roady Strafing, Reaction Shots — these niche skills all coalesce into creating a high skill ceiling movement shooter with depth and potential for skill expression. Without going into extensive detail about each piece of tech, these skills are what makes Gears of War PVP so special. The little nuances that players can sink their teeth into, to make themselves the most lethal Gnasher Wielder in the server. Games with this sort of high tech movement are often reserved for PC games. By virtue of the mouse and keyboard, there’s a greater chance for games with movement and high skill expression. Games like Quake, Titanfall 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 all possess  their unintended quirks that radically alter how their online PVP is structured and is enjoyed by players, Gears is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Where console players, on a controller, are the pathfinders, innovators and wielders of highly expressive, movement oriented gameplay.

The tight symmetrical maps, the inventive weapon design, and the breakneck shotgun duals are what defines Gears’ core identity. All multiplayer games need distinctive characteristics in order to make them stand out above the rest, otherwise they all run the risk of falling silently into the background, never to be played again. Yet, despite Gears of War’s sense of identity being one of the most defined on the console market, it never seems to garner the same sort of attention it once did in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s.  One lingering thought I’ve had throughout my tenure as a Gears player is about the movement, an element that is core to what makes the multiplayer so exceptional, is it a non-starter for new players? Do they look at a player who’s been playing for numerous years and think “I want nothing to do with that”. I don’t doubt that’s crossed a few peoples’ minds. New players log onto Gears PVP and expect something more akin to the campaign, where the player engages in intense rifle fights from behind cover. This style of combat does happen online, but in order for a player to grow and find success, learning how to use their Gnasher via the movement mechanics is how players will find continued success.

A tale as old as online games, is advanced ‘found-tech’ leading their respective games to their own demise. Quake as a franchise has dropped in popularity as a result of its intricate movement systems that, like Gears, were founded through the community unraveling what exploits were possible. One of the most critically revered shooters of the 2010’s (Titanfall 2) failed to meet the expectations of The Developers (Respawn) and Publisher (EA) in both sales and active users, prompting the development and release of the far less movement intensive Battle Royale Apex Legends, a game which has gone on to accrue thousands of active new users even 4 years after release and has raked in millions of dollars in micro-transactions. These games, and many like them,  have ostracized players because of the found-tech, an element that makes each of these games go from amazing to exemplary. There’s this apparent aversion to games with seemingly inaccessible movement mechanics for many reasons. One of which, simply, is the time investment. Some players simply don’t want to spend the time to learn how to effectively wallbounce, some players would rather not want to pick apart a game with these particular movement mechanics and their intricacies.

 When I reflect on why people don’t play Gears of War like they used to, I think the advanced movement is one of the deterring factors, but more pressing, I think that Gears Multiplayer is not entirely special or engaging without learning these mechanics. Truth be told, a Gears game without advanced movement is not a game I want to play, and many die hard fans feel the same way. The Gnasher becomes far less interesting as a result. The Lancer v.s. Lancer duels that the game, on its face, seems to incentivize are not nearly as engaging or interesting when compared to exhilarating Gnasher Duels that feature two movement fluent players. Gears pvp is its movement, and yet its movement is what alienates new players, preventing the game from gaining the traction it needs to be a successful IP in the eyes of the fans and the developers. 

 

When I think about making games with found tech and reflect on how the respective developers handled it, I think of the gaming behemoth that is Fortnite. The parallels between Gears and Fortnite are uncanny. Both are high skill ceiling third person shooters that hinge on niche mechanics uncovered by the community, both run on the unreal engine and both hinge on players being proficient with shotguns. Albeit, Fortnite provides more opportunity for players to fight at medium and long range than Gears does, but they have more in common the further you compare the two. Fortnite’s advanced building mechanics are, by far, one of the most recognizable examples of found tech in the gaming world. The seemingly instant construction of crazy buildings that take 10s of inputs a second lead to these elaborate duels between players. A few years ago, players started to complain about how the game was losing its appeal due to these incredible build players. Players who didn’t know how to build, or didn’t care to learn, frankly couldn’t touch a capable builder. The extended build fights would simply get out of hand. A duel between two skilled players could go on for a minute to two minutes if both knew what they were doing. A duel between a skilled and an unskilled player could end in just a few seconds. Being able to construct walls and buildings within an instant is an exceptionally powerful tool to give to players. Many players walked away from the game because of how exhausting the game became. 

Much of Fortnite’s audience is casual, and as a result, they don’t much care for player found mechanics. As a result, players stopped playing as much. Epic, the current developers of Fortnite took note of loss in players and, I imagine, looked at game franchises like Gears or Quake and saw them as a cautionary tale. What Epic eventually decided on, was to have two separate playlists for the Battle Royal: Build and No-Build. Adding these two options allowed both types of players to engage in the Meta-Game they want to without either Meta-Game impeding on one another. Because building itself is a binary feature, but what players do with this feature is considered ‘found-tech’, the developers can turn it off. Underneath Fortnite’s building is a holistically interesting third person pvp shooter. The same, however, cannot be said about Gears. 

The found-tech in Gears is linked to an intrinsic part of the game, the cover system. As a result, the developers cannot simply turn off the cover system, it’s intertwined to the core systems, whereas Fortnite’s building isn’t, there’s still a core game underneath the building. Further, any recent attempts by The Coalition to make their Gears games (Gears 4 and 5) more accessible to casual players has been met with backlash by The Community. Any attempts to tweak or remove the found tech has sown doubt within the existing fanbase. And unlike Fortnite’s developers, The Coalition can’t just make a movement and no movement playlist. It would require the developers to not only ‘fix’ a lot of the incidental quarks that are born out of the games cover mechanics, but it would also hemorrhage the player base in a way that would not be conducive to the overall health or longevity of the community. Signaling to those players that what they love about the game is not important to the developers.

There is no easy answer on how to bring Gears PVP back to its former glory. Gear of War 2 and 3 are often seen as the golden period of the scene. Where players of all kinds came together to play, movement and non-movement players alike. I think what brought such a large install base to those games were the stand out campaigns with memorable set pieces, phenomenal moment to moment gameplay, little bits of well written humor and unforgettable character moments. Neither Gears 4 or 5 have matched the narrative quality of 2 or 3, and that may be a small reason as to why these games don’t fly off the shelves. Despite Fortnite’s success, many players still see third person shooters as games of the past, especially in a PVP environment. Maybe having a phenomenal campaign offering of old will be enough to revitalize the players. The Coalition could go down the free to play route for the PVP, but we saw their sister developer (343) has struggled to keep their recent Halo installment despite it being Free To Play, so even that model isn’t guaranteed to find success. As boring as it may seem, I don’t have immediate answers. What I wanted to put on display is what makes Gears so special. Even though the future of Gears of War is uncertain, I am thankful to have put so much time into it, to have learned it, and made many lifetime friendships as a result.

 I encourage you, after reading this, to go watch Gears of War movement montages. They will give you a peek into the community and put the movement tech on display. If you want to know where to get started, I linked a few of  my personal favorite montages below:


Gears of War 2 Reigns Trigger Gnasher Montage

Gears of War 2 Avenge Teamtage

Gears of War 3 Immortal Bounce Montage

Gears of War 3 Kaos Teamtage

Gears of War 4 ESS Limitless Montage

Gears of War 4 Gsq Zeus Montage

Gears of War 5 ‘Next-Gen’ Montage