Gears of War 2: Reemergence has begun

Last night on Gametrailers TV, Geoff Keighly along with various members of the Gears of War 2 development team, including Cliff Bleszinski debuted new footage and information for us all to clamor over. During the episode, they touched on various topics such as the single player campaign, the multiplayer experience and also shared a few tidbits about the upcoming comic book. Before I watched this I asked myself this question; “What do you want to see from Gears of War 2?” and when I received the answers after watching the show, I must then that I am far from being disappointed.

Gears of War 2 follows the story of Marcus Fenix and his cohorts as they fight for the survival of earth against the intimidating Locust horde. Gears 2 takes place six months after the first game. For those who don’t know, at the end of Gears of War Marcus and the Delta Squad achieve their goal of setting off the lightmass bomb to obliterate the Locusts. Even though the bomb somewhat succeeded in getting rid of them, the effects only lasted for so long and the Locusts returned to continue their path of destruction. While the game had little to no story, what was available to you in terms of narrative helped get the point across in letting us know how the game unfolds. In order to improve upon this flaw, Epic Games hired writer Josh Ortega to come on board and give the story more life, which in turn would allow us to actually want to sit through the cutscene sequences rather than skipping them.

While the game had many flaws, it comes as a relief to know that the Gears team is hard at work on improving these issues. The usual complaints, such as the bugs and glitches that were present in the first game have been taken care of and will be but an afterthought once you get your copy and head online with it. At the top of the show Cliff stated that the cover system has been vastly improved, with over 400 tweaks added to the system to give us a better experience. The game will ship with at least twelve maps, which is a great improvement over the first game which shipped with ten. Some maps from the first game will return, such as Gridlock and Subway which were actually two of my favorites. I’m hoping that the rest of the maps are all original, not to say that remakes are a bad thing, but it never hurts to have something completely fresh to take a crack at. Another addition to the multiplayer experience will be the addition of bots. While it hasn’t been stated how exactly the bots will be manipulated during the game, you can probably expect them to have the same use as the bots do in the Unreal Tournament games.

A big gripe of mine with the first Gears installment was that it had no party system, akin to what Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 had. It really took away from the experience when you couldn’t play ranked matches with your friends. To make things worse, unless you were playing party matches with all your friends, then you were forced to wait in a lobby until people showed up to go into battle against your team. Rob Fergusson, producer of the game stated that the party system will “match players of like skill level with each other to enhance the gaming experience.” Going off of that statement, I would assume that the game will have some sort of ranking system, much like Halo 3 where you are only matched up with people of similar skills levels. This is a plus, because after a while of playing the first game it became boring when you would only play against people who bought the game months later, which made the experience subpar due to being more advanced than your opponents. It’s reassuring to see that they have worked so hard on improving the game, so that it feels like a brand new experience rather than Gears 1.5.

Lastly, the visuals of the game have been vastly improved with Epic being able to pull off having up to 100 enemies on screen at one time. Since they’ve been touting this feat for quite some time, I hope they take advantage of this, rather than having some sort of semi-interactive cutscene with 100 locusts running around that really serve no purpose other than to say it was done. Based off of what I’ve from the Gametrailers footage, the environments have transformed from a cramped, almost enclosed looking areas to more open and lush places. The graphics have also received a boost due to the upgrades of the Unreal engine, which will leave you gasping at some points in disbelief from seeing how far the game has come along. Shadows look richer, the amount of detail on the character models has also been improved and from the footage shown even the fire from the new flamethrower weapon looks very convincing.

All in all, Gears of War 2 is shaping up to meet and exceed the expectations of anyone who is interested in the game. I went in as a skeptic and came out confident that when the game is released in November, that myself and the rest of the Vice Guys will enjoy this game for months on end.