Epic Games, Please Fix Gears of War 2!
I consider the original Gears of War to be hands down the best console shooter ever made. The campaign was tight and fun if not a bit too short, but the online play had me pushing the nightly online gaming addiction into hours I had never expected giving the game a long life span for me. Let me summarize my online experience with Gears of War 2 for the first 10 days:
“Remote Parties restarted the matchmaking process”
…5….4…3…2…1
“Remote Parties restarted the matchmaking process”
Rinse, repeat.
I, along with many Gears fans jonesing for some online fragging have been experiencing excessively long matchmaking with Gears 2. In some cases like mine, online play is not even an option. In 10 days of trying every single day, I’ve gotten into a total of 3 online games. Let me summarize this. Three days in after multiple attempts of waiting up to 30 minutes or more for a match, I managed to get one to connect after 16 solid minutes of waiting. After the match end, I got pushed back the menu for the endless matchmaking and my online gaming night had ended.
One other time I got matchmaking to work for one match then out. My third game was a friend invite. For some it seems like they are getting into online games reporting 5-10 minutes of waiting to get in. At this point, I’m jonesing so bad to get in and frag I’d begrudgingly wait that amount of time if I thought there was even a reasonable chance. Epic has finally acknowledged the problem and claims to be working with Microsoft on the issue. I’m hopeful, but not too hopeful. After all, I’m still waiting for MS to fix some nagging bugs I still had with Windows 98.
I’m going to throw aside the complaints now talk about what I can play. I won’t beat around the bush on this, the campaign is much better than the original. It’s still short, but very diverse. They’ve invested quite a bit of the single player into motion-combat. Battles across moving platforms, boats, animals…etc. It all works really well with a couple of exceptions.
The bosses are big and bad and the game is full of stunning visuals. I loved the hell out of it. If you’re a Gears fan for the campaign only, this should get you where you want to be. If there’s any complaint it’s that some of the bigger monsters and battles could have been a tad more challenging. By the time I pushed it to Insane difficulty though it became just a little bit too challenging even to get past a couple of locust drones in a hallway, a scenario you would mow through without even slowing down on most other difficulties.
Like the Halo series, there’s no glorious reinvention of the formula for the sequel. There’s a couple of new weapons, like a kick-ass looking flamethrower that doesn’t really do much for you except look cool (you can make it through the game easily without even picking it up if you don’t want to). You get a couple of new grenades, but nothing special. It may be my imagination, but the sniper rifle feels a little crisper in operation than in the original and the torque bow a bit more accurate.
A surprisingly fun addition to the game is the Horde game type which is a multiplayer co-op mode pitting you and a partner or teammates against oncoming waves of enemies, each wave getting tougher and or bigger than the last. I was skeptical at first, since this game type seems to originate with a game type called Invasion from Epic’s own Unreal Tournament 2004. In UT2004, Invasion was fun, but of limited playability because the hordes were made not made up of the games awesome AI bots, but rather just slowly moving monsters that did nothing that lumbered in your direction.
In Horde though, you get the full duck and cover chess game with the locust hordes as they attack you and it quickly transforms from just a shoot-em-up mode to working out an attack and defend strategy every map you play it on. Certain maps give you a better chance than others by having better environments for arranging a strong stand. In some though, it’s insanely difficult as you get into higher and higher waves.
I haven’t had the opportunity to play many of the other new game types seeing as how I really can’t seem to go online and just drop into a game, so I’m going to reserve judgment on the real experience for a while and simply start begging:
EPIC, PLZ FX the gawdamned matchmaking!
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Tags: Game Reviews, Unreal Engine, Xbox Live
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5 Responses to “Epic Games, Please Fix Gears of War 2!”
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November 19th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I took some actions that allow me to matchmake now (albeit slowly), and I owe it to Epic Games to post this (and hopefully help anyone else having an issue) First, let me say again, no other game has had any connectivity issues before GEARS2. Everything worked fine.
*I’m using a recent model of Netgear Wireless Router, but the XBOX is hardwired to it
*I upgraded the router to the latest firmware (even though online documentation regarding XB live said the firmware version I was on should be fine)
*I reset the router back to factory settings
*I Opened up the XBOX as the DMZ (did this the first couple of days with no results though)
*On the DMZ settings of the router admin I made sure that “Respond to Ping on Internet Port” was checked
*I changed the heartbeat interval from 30 minutes to 15
Boom I can now matchmake. In a few instances I got into a match withing 2 minutes, some instances I got into matches in around 5-6 minutes, and in a few instances it just went on for excessive periods without hitting a match (or found teammates then was never able to “find an opposing team of similar skill”
In any case, at least I can play online, which is a huge improvement. Obviously, there still some issues with matchmaking, but at least I can play.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:20 am
That’s waaaay too much work to play.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
It is, but I’m pretty much only get continued replay value if I can get online. I would be pretty much done with the game completely now except working through Horde if I couldn’t play at all online.
As it stands now, sometimes I can get into a match within a matter of a couple of minutes, but every time you finish one match, the system boots you back to the lobby to start the process over. As it stands, I can get about 3 matches of 3-5 rounds a piece in over the course of an hour to 90 minutes. Matchmaking still sometimes takes upwards of 10 minutes and sometimes you just have to stop and restart it and you’ll get better success. In any case, when you look at matchmaking in games like Halo 3 which works really well (if you like matchmaking systems, which ultimately I don’t) you can still play a helluva lot more.
I even got online with UT3 the other night and used the Quick Match option and I was in full deathmatch server in under 30 seconds. It’s almost instantaneous in that game every time…and that whole system was designed by Epic as well.
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