Gears of War: Judgement

Excited does not even begin to describe what I feel about this bit of news! I guess I had better start grinding 3.0 again so that I can get it done before this game comes out. Knowing Epic, they are probably going to give you some sort of in-game bonus if you have 3.0 unlocked... They'll probably give you in-game bath salts that turn your character into the Miami Zombie that allows you to eat faces off your enemies or something.

Game informer outed Gears of War : Judgement in their cover reveal

Looks like Game Informer couldn't wait until Monday for the full reveal. The cover images for Gears of War: Judgment have been revealed, each depicting Damon Baird and Augustus "Cole Train" Cole in handcuffs, seemingly being escorted away from the battlefield by some COG soldiers. We're assuming this is a prequel because, dang, both these guys look young.

Look for the full unveiling on Monday, June 4 at 12:30PM ET/ 9:30AM PT during Microsoft's E3 press conference. Mantle past the break for the Baird cover.

I hope it's not coming as a holiday 2012 release, i'm hoping tihs is just an early alpha look at a title coming 2013.  Which since halo 4 is coming this year, i'd wager money on it being a 2013 title.

Surprised TANK didn't beat me to this one\\

Been on vacation all week :lol:

Vg247 has an interview with cliffh where he says People Can Fly are doing most of the heavy lifting on Judgement not Epic prime.  Epic sounds like they're mostly oversite and design testing.

Not sure if this is a good thing or not.  A fresh set of devs on Gsars might do it some good.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/06/class-warfare-bleszinski-and-chmielarz-o...

Cliffy talks more on Judgement and why it's not E-Day or Pendelum Wars themed, also of interest at the end is 'early 2013' is listed as the launch date

"The time came, we finished Gears 3 and obviously it's done well for us, and a prequel seemed like the next logical step. So we started looking at the timeframes and what we could do. I looked at E-Day and was like, 'Yeah, there's no chainsaw on E-Day.' It took the COG a little bit to figure out that the Locust have thick skin and their bayonets are breaking, things like that." Being able to chainsaw scary monster men is essential to anything donning the Gears of War title, you see.

As for the Pendulum Wars, its human-on-human conflict would technically make for a game that isn't Gears of War. "Now you have no chainsaw and now you have no monsters," Bleszinski said. "And now we're not Gears of War anymore. So we looked at the timeframe, looked at the timeline, and figured that there's a window there of several months after Emergence Day, where humanity got hit and quickly got their shit back together and figured out, hey, put a chainsaw on the end of the gun – that'll help. So that's the timeframe for the game."

Gears of War: Judgment launches on the Xbox 360 in early 2013.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/07/bleszinski-gears-of-war-judgment-e-day...

More from Cliffy. looks like Gears may be moving into an accelerated development cycle with maybe a release every 1 to 1 1/2 years.

"If you look at the slightly compressed timeframe for these products – we don't have the two and a half years like Gears 2 had – the fact that with the feature set needed, we're in a world where if you look at the Call of Duty interviews where they're like here's the CEO of Sledgehammer, here's the CEO of Infinity Ward, here's the CEO of Duncan Hines, you're like, 'Jesus, what's going on here?' It takes multiple studios now to really make a game that can have all of this between the campaign and multiplayer and the co-op elements and things like that, and plus they're quite fucking crazy, to be honest with you," Blezsinski said. Chmielarz added that the addition of People Can Fly brings something "fresh" to the Gears franchise.

"The big idea is, yes, we can bring something fresh to this. I think we basically inspire each other – we have these new ideas and then sort of shake the foundation of Gears up without changing too much; it's still Gears." But it's also a question of manpower needed to tackle the technical hurdles of building upon the precedents set in Gears of War 3, Blezsinski explained. "Making the campaign have that many Locust and be that intense made it a requirement for the younger guys working on the Epic side to refine the controls, and there's just non-stop back and forth [between Epic and People Can Fly]."

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/08/we-basically-inspire-each-other-people...

Here's an interview talking about the new dynamic spawn system and difficulty

Gone are the static spawn wells seen in Gears of War entries in the past. With Gears of War: Judgment, People Can Fly and Epic Games will introduce something they're labeling as S3 – a smart spawn system.

"Previously in Gears, if you wanted a greater challenge, you went for the higher difficulty mode. It basically meant less health for you and more health for them. It worked perfectly fine, but we tried to attack this from a different angle," People Can Fly's Adrian Chmielarz explained to Joystiq. "S3 constantly monitors your performance, from simple stuff like accuracy and your skills, but also like your location in the combat zone." Chmielarz provided an example of a player in one corner, shooting Locust, then having the system adapt on the fly and spawn enemies at more challenging locations.

"The other thing it can do is run multiple scenarios: you play through a section of the game, from checkpoint-to-checkpoint, and you die at the very end of it. So then you think to yourself, 'Okay, I know how to fix that; I got this.' You replay and suddenly it's a completely new scenario – new enemies and you have to adapt one more time. Another example would be you choose a higher difficulty level to replay a section and then you encounter an enemy type that you have not encountered before. We kept it in reserves for a higher difficulty level. The big point about S3 is to make sure that you are challenged. We think that the word kind of disappeared from the vocabulary a little and games now actually paint the path for you on the floor, where to go next."

Cliff Bleszinski then interjected, "I think that's why you're starting to see this love for games kind of like Dark Souls now. In order to try and grow the audience, games have been softened – players can't get lost ever, or they can't die ever. But then it's like you've just lost the point of the game and what games do, having that challenge. We're a little guilty of it – I'm fully willing to admit that. When was the last time a game has asked something of you? I've been playing Gears since the beginning, obviously, but when I go into the playtest lab and we play 4-player hardcore co-op [in Gears of War: Judgment], it takes us a good three or four tries to get through a combat scenario. I play a lot of games where I just get into the flow of combat and it's getting good then, boom, cutscene. I'm like, 'Fuck you, get back to the gameplay.' In this game, the pacing has gotten to the point where when you get past a protracted battle, and you finally get a cutscene, yeah you're happy to see the story progress but you're really just happy to have a break. You're going to die, you're going to die a fair amount, but hopefully you like it," he said.

"It's definitely going to be harder than Gears of War 3," Bleszinski added. "The thing about Gears 3 that I learned kind of in hindsight is the fact that technically it was the longest campaign that we've ever done, but we accidentally softened the difficulty a little too much. So the good gamers got through it in a similar timeframe to Gears 2, and were like 'No way it's the same length!' So we looked at the difficulty and there are certain little trade-offs that they made where, like, do you go DBNO or just die? Things like that, and also the same thing with enemy damage models. Gears of War: Judgment is going to be tough, even on normal difficulty level." Chmielarz then added that he thinks "normal is going to be more difficult than ever before."

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/08/youre-going-to-die-a-fair-amount-blesz...

The thing about Gears 3 was that it wasn't hard at all. It was just stupid hard at times on Insane like for instance - the frustrating barge section where you and your teammates run around dodging boomshot turrets, Theron guards with torque bows, while you all wait for the barge to descend low enough for you and your team to board. That was a pain in the ass in 4-person co-op especially if you're playing with people that aren't as good at ducking and moving as would like them to be. The moment you stepped off of the elevatore was almost certain death because the boomshot turrets were accurate and their could shoot behind walls (not that there were any walls on that level to begin with). Then there was the last section with the queen, the flying beetle,  and the never ending Theron guards that spawned everywhere including your armpits. Just when you thought you wiped them out, they spawn a few dozen more reinforcements near Hammer of Dawn.

That said, hopefully S3 doesn't do that but instead makes Judgement less predictable. If a game is unpredictable, I think people will appreciate it more than a game where you memorize what the AI does and you're good to go. That's what made the two levels I mentioned frustrating yet at the same time exciting. When you finished them, you felt like you actually accomplished something. It may have been frustrating for you or for you the people you were playing with but at the end, you could hear EVERYONE let out a sigh of relief that the level/game was over. That's what S3 should bring. That's what I'm keeping my fingers crossed for. Oh and if I've spoiled this for some of you that haven't finished the game, I'm not sorry - the game's been out for close to a year now and in case you haven't heard, someone dies in Gears 3... someone major.

I think 'randomly generated' is a term being thrown around by game devs and in reality it's just a gimmick.  Sure the sequence may not play out the same from play session #1 to play session #2.  But if you keep playing it, eventually you end up learning what sequence triggers what.  It's a game, not reality they can't build in infinite randomization.  Usually there's a few different variances they plug in to trigger to give the illusion of randomly generated gameplay that really isn't.

The "AI Drector' of Left 4 Dead was suppose to be that, but you could see the patterns playing on the hardest difficulty when you died a lot.  Most recently Diablo 3 is suppose to have all this randomly generated environmental stuff but it doesn't, you can see the patterns i the layouts of the environments and dungeons.

So we'll see what PFC can do here but I'm not really fully buying into the whole dynamic combat bit.

Gears3 insane was pretty damn easy except for the last boss, that was emberassingly hard (sorry that i kept dying guys)!

The sub mission was also a pain in the ass on Insane, especially if you were playing coop.  That was one of the levels where it was almost better to break up the room, get past the sub solo then party up again.

The only reason I expect this to be difficult is because you're forced to play classes. Baird is an engineer, Sofia is a medic, Cole is a soldier and Garron is the scout. If the person playing Baird doesn't set up the barricades just right or throws his turret in a stupid spot, you could get screwed on the flank. If Sofia is a little slow on the revive with 1 person suddenly there's 2 down. Garron can't shoot for shit and now you're overrun.

I doubt the randomness will have any real impact. Instead of 2 bloodmounts and a kantus they'll throw a kantus and a serapede at you. Once you figure out the strategy for each enemy type it's really not gonna matter which ones come at you.

Are you sure you play as classes in the campaign?  I was assuming that was a multiplayer only thing.

Cool idea, gives you a reason for playing thru it again other than achievement hunting .

I wonder where 'judgement' lies in the timeline VS 'Raams Shadow'

Wow, this take on the campaign sounds really cool. I hope they can pull it off the way they describe. If so, it will bring a depth of replayability that did not exist in this series before. It puts a twist on finding the collectibles beyond just finding them for achievement's sake. Hopefully they do not get too carried away and require more than 2 playtroughs to get the whole story, because that would suck. I know that the industry is moving towards the player playing their game over and over again and not reselling it, but requiring more than 2 campaign playthroughs would take things too far in my opinion.

I agree with Tank, I think the classes are just a multiplayer thing. I think they realized that people like to fiddle with their characters beyond just getting trophies and ribbons, this is their response to that. They might be taking a page from the ME3 playbook, that one feature alone has kept people replaying to test out different character combos. I guess we will find out if they give you skill trees that you can advance or the class just has those abilities and they are static.

I'm glad they are taking risks instead of just churning out another rails shooter like the previous installment. Because they could, and we would all still buy it because Gears is so awesome anyway.

because they are "toy" guns. Notice how the barrels of them are all orange and they have green spots to make them more toy looking.