Back in October 2016, the beginning of a new Trilogy of Gears games started with a time skip of 25 year and starring the son of Marcus, JD Fenix. The Story Campaign was pretty good, but still needed some more to help flesh it out more as a complete story instead of a stepping stone. It was far more of an appetizer than a full meal. The Versus Multiplayer on the other hand had been mostly… underwhelming. With issues with gun balancing and tuning and a vacant PC playerbase, it isn’t something to even bother with. The Horde mode on the other hand has been really fun… with your friends (and just your friends). The added features of proper classes and being able to place fortification anywhere on the map makes for some good fun. The problem with it was playing with random people who just do waves 1 through 20 to complete as many bounties as possible. That means if you’re looking to do all 50 on Insane, you’re screwed. The issues people had was a lack of a 1 to 20 variation, a map voting system, or punishment for quitting in Horde. For the most part, Horde was fun to play even with the kinks it had.
The keyword here is ‘was’. The recent June 2017 update for the game made the obvious changes to Versus and gun tuning (which no one seems to be satisfied with after nearly 8 months of updates, can’t blame them). The biggest part of this update was additions to Horde in the form of Skills for the existing classes. If you want my opinions on them here it is: most of them are not very useful as the original skills are generaly better. I can’t find a reason why you would need use most of these skill. Cloak? A well placed grenade, Boomshot, or Dropshot will still kill you regardless of if you have this equipped and you have to be in cover just for it to activate and a decoy does a very good job of drawing away fire anyway. Berserk? No Heavy is going to willingly take damage to the point of near death just to get extra damage. The risk/reward ratio just isn’t profitable enough. Other skills like Dodge are great for Scouts because they can run out with a less likely chance of getting downed or killed with the extra defense. The Engineer’s Flow skill is a nice addition to give players a better chance of surviving a round of repairs. Believe me, trying to repair everything in 30 seconds is impossible. This just makes it that less frustrating.
The main reason for writing this article is the changes they made to turrets and Hammer of Dawn Strikes. They though it was a great idea to severely up the price of turrets by 33 to 100 percent (increasing by each level) and decreased its damage output, effectively making the one thing that actually gets you through all 50 waves, completely useless. The Hammer of Dawn Strike now costs more power to use which some people might believe it will prevent people from exploiting its destructibility potential. Maybe if the skills for each class were more powerful or you made the classes have passive skills that didn’t require a slot this would make more sense. Why would you change a non-versus gametype in such a capacity that playing a 1 through 50 will take nearly 4 hours instead of a little over 2? I know. Microtransactions!
The biggest reason for these changes is not because they want you to “diversify your approach” to Horde. Instead, they nerfed the turret and increased the cost to slow down your progress. This in turn will make your credits per hour rate get hampered immensely. They want to break your will until you start spending your real money for a chance to get more skill cards to upgrade. Not only that, they introduced a special Horde Booster pack that comes with 10 cards instead of 5 and costs $2.99. Okay. I’ll just save up some cred… oh, wait. I can’t use credits to get these. You can only get them with real money. That’s a scumbag move there Microsoft and the Coalition. Is the reason you added more skills to Horde is because you wanted to give players more options and a 6th level, or was it the fact that players were maxing out their classes leaving them no reason to buy more Horde Packs? It looks more like the later.
I said I was done with this game after I saw just how dickish Microsoft and the Coalition were for making these changes because of how greedy they were, but a glimmer of light showed up on the Gears of War Subreddit. A way to show that if these devs and publishers are going to play dirty, we should play just as dirty. If this isn’t reverted back by the beginning of July, they can take their 100+ Gigabyte game and shove it.
