Gears 5 [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

Scott_Arm said:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-gears-5-tech-interview
Click to expand...

Finally got a chance to read the whole article. It's amazing just how much they were focused on moving as much stuff off of the CPU as possible as that was the main limiting factor in achieving 60 FPS in campaign mode.

We had to adopt many new workflows and techniques - especially around keeping the CPU running at 60fps.
Click to expand...

Considering that next gen we're going to see at most a 2x increase (likely lower than that) in GPU power but likely a minimum of a 4x increase in CPU power, I'd be really surprised if 60 FPS doesn't potentially become the norm.

Also, while it may not happen, it wouldn't surprise me if we ended up with more 120 FPS titles than 30 FPS titles. Especially if reconstruction techniques really take off. For smaller teams that can't do reconstruction, then 30 or 60 will be the targets.

Regards,
SB
 
Question is how much money they make off of those cheap GP subs... or if people are spending on the Iron currency too. At some point GP needs to be sustainable at non-$1 subscriptions. As neat as it is to have an obfuscated revenue stream, the accountants have to make sure they're actually getting enough money to have a sustainable development.
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On the other hand, I will probably pick up Gears 5-proper when it goes on sale within the next 1.5 years. *cough*
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Gears 3 did 3 million sales in week 1.
 
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AlBran said:
Question is how much money they make off of those cheap GP subs... or if people are spending on the Iron currency too.

Gears 3 did 3 million sales in week 1.
Click to expand...
It's not relevant how much profit you made off cheap GP subs.
You don't own the title; so if you like Gears 5 and want to play the rest of the titles you have to keep subbed. In that sense, not like Netflix. Movies don't necessary have the legs some of this MP titles do.
If you don't resub then you have to rebuy it at discount.

The whole 'gotcha' is thinking that you can play it and drop it. But you've got like 2 months to try out everything there. And undoubtedly some will and some won't.
You also need to factor in how many people are playing gears that normally wouldn't have played or bought it.
And then each month there's more titles for release.
The Outer Worlds on Game pass next month, Ori in Feb for instance. MS just needs to fill in the gaps with solid 3P AAA titlles.

Someone will do the math and just say, well I'll stay subbed for 1 more month and play this game out for $15, still cheaper than buying it.
Well if that keeps happening each month for the year, and you still buy the ones that aren't on GP. You just upped your spending amount quite a bit. not to mention locking yourself further into MS ecosystem.
 
OK finished the campaign, it's actually pretty damn good and almost drew tears. I'll say except for the skiff traversal sections the rest of the game is a blast to play. The part where you have to make a life or death decision really got me :), but man to think how much Marcus has lost throughout the series, it became all too clear to me which direction the arrow has to point.
Some minor complaints being too many door pulling, pillar lifting sections, it's a damn pace killer. And sometimes you just forget to use Jack's abilities in the midst of a battle since you really don't need his support to win. Considering how much effort you put into upgrading the bot I say it's a slightly redundant mechanic.
 
Jack is hilarious to abuse, such as telling him to get a heavy weapon and then continue to run away from him so he's transporting it for you to the next major section.
 
iroboto said:
It's not relevant how much profit you made off cheap GP subs.
You don't own the title; so if you like Gears 5 and want to play the rest of the titles you have to keep subbed. In that sense, not like Netflix. Movies don't necessary have the legs some of this MP titles do.
If you don't resub then you have to rebuy it at discount.

The whole 'gotcha' is thinking that you can play it and drop it. But you've got like 2 months to try out everything there. And undoubtedly some will and some won't.
You also need to factor in how many people are playing gears that normally wouldn't have played or bought it.
And then each month there's more titles for release.
The Outer Worlds on Game pass next month, Ori in Feb for instance. MS just needs to fill in the gaps with solid 3P AAA titlles.

Someone will do the math and just say, well I'll stay subbed for 1 more month and play this game out for $15, still cheaper than buying it.
Well if that keeps happening each month for the year, and you still buy the ones that aren't on GP. You just upped your spending amount quite a bit. not to mention locking yourself further into MS ecosystem.
Click to expand...

Hell, with the constant additions to the library, there has never come a point where I've wondered whether I should keep the sub or not.

This month in addition to Gears 5, there was Dead Cells that I've been wanting to get, but since I know I likely won't ever finish it, I've been waiting for it to go on sale (while playing it when I can over at a friend's :p).

Much like my Steam library, there's more games I want to play on Gamepass than I have time to play them. So, every month there's a title or two worth more than my subscription that I haven't played yet that I want to play.

Every month they aren't just adding random games, but some really good critically acclaimed games to the library.

Hell, even non-MS Studio games occasionally make to the platform day and date with release, like the Blair Witch game.

There's certainly a lot of value to the platform. And as long as the developers are happy with how they are treated, I expect this to continue.

Regards,
SB
 
Scott_Arm said:
I'm almost at the end of act 2. Is this the best Gears? I have pretty good memories of clearing the palace at the end of Gears 3, but so far I think this one is on track to be the best of the series. Gears 4 was a solid game, but I wouldn't have put it ahead of the originals. This one is surprising me.
Click to expand...
Gears 3 was more

...epic.

Idk, I just liked the game more in most ways.
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Jack upgrades just feel tacked on, and the glitches in co-op aren't helping it as well. In some ways, the RPG aspects of Gears 5 reminds me of some rookie mistakes and typical trigger bugs you'd find in certain RPGs a decade ago (cookie cutter assets, map issues, event trigger issues, no new game+ etc). Feels like they're just reinventing the wheel cog, and I'm not sure if it's particularly impactful. It's different, which I can appreciate. It just feels like there are a lot of improvements left lying on the feature table to make it a much more solid experience when taking into consideration the number of other games released that did similar things but better.

That said, I'm sure they were crunching hard to do things, so perhaps even more time would have been good for them... Oh well.

The main thing that I get out of the skiff is allowing more time for squad banter as a means of character development & exposition for the player. The skiff is otherwise kind of boring, and there's no photomode to even take advantage of that. In co-op. the implementation is not as polished as I'd have liked to see.

Otherwise, the best thing about the ice area is destroying the ice. The combat is pretty much as good as it can get with waist-high cover, and I hope they can further evolve the dynamism with more environmental triggers in the future.
 
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So I'm up to about 8 re-installs of the game on PC because

A) initiating the texture pack download messed up the game on the next launch.
B) I did it a few times to make sure.
C) two separate updates each gave an error, whereby cancelling meant uninstalling the game.
D) it's happened on two different computers now.

I think I'm done with the game. The game won't even work from a fresh download, and now there's a perpetual update listed in the MS Store with no name attached to it.

I think this sets a record for me on quitting a series. The last one being returning Halo 4 within a month of launch back in 2012. :runaway:

Hell, I played Crackdown 3 longer than this. :V :mad:
 
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@AlBran You sure your windows 10 isn't corrupted? My windows 10 install has a habit of corrupting itself which causes a lot of nice random problems. As far as I can tell my memory and drive are both good, so I don't know what the deal is.

Run command prompt as admin and "sfc /scannow" to see if you have any corrupted system files. If you do, you might have to get into some bullshit with dism. I've had to go through it twice in the past two or three months.
 
Scott_Arm said:
@AlBran You sure your windows 10 isn't corrupted? My windows 10 install has a habit of corrupting itself which causes a lot of nice random problems. As far as I can tell my memory and drive are both good, so I don't know what the deal is.

Run command prompt as admin and "sfc /scannow" to see if you have any corrupted system files. If you do, you might have to get into some bullshit with dism. I've had to go through it twice in the past two or three months.
Click to expand...
hm.. Thanks. I'll try that (forgot about that command). I'm just fed up with half a terabyte of bandwidth gone just from this.

Haven't had issues with FH4 updates, sooooo.......... anyways. What's irksome is that it's the same problem on two different computers now. (0x87e00013) Resetting the MS Store in the windows settings didn't help either. The missing name entry in the update section is also irritating (it's clearly tied to Gears 5 as it activates simultaneously with the Gears 5 download), almost as if they used some invisibility duct tape for the texture pack.

Here's a thought - why is the texture pack even a separate download if it's just an extra fraction of the base game. It's not like the consoles have an option to toy around with.

I've also seen 3 different download sizes - 58GB (launch), 62.6GB & 66GB. :s
 
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@AlBran Only reason I'm suggesting it is my pc seems to work pretty well and I'll only notice it's corrupted when one piece of software will randomly stop working correctly. Then I'll check my system files and discover my shit is fucked again. No cpu overclock, memory tests out ok, and drive reports its in good health, so I have no idea what is going on. Probably windows update just doing what it does.
 
Did the scans. Fixed some things (had to bing the online repair command because the log file was a thousand pages of text with no simple way to know what I'm looking for "the fix for online repair is in the log file, which is in a convoluted folder location, and we bothered to write a bunch of text for the command prompt but couldn't just write out what was needed to actually do the repair instead of looking through a mass of text like I'm typing write now but 9000x more to filter through and going on and on and on in one incredibly long unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic).

And now I can't even begin to install/download the game at all! Click Install. Choose Location. Ok. Nothing happens.

I can thank them for making me want to pursue the Steam Backlog. :)

Seriously 5.0. What is going on here. So the beta app doesn't show anything, and now this is what I see in the MS Store update section.2019-09-18.jpg
 
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@AlBran I honestly think Windows 10 is a huge pile of turds based on my recent experience with corruption. Here are the instructions I wrote for myself that I'll inevitably need again:

open cmd as Administrator

Try:
DISM /Online /Cleanup-image /RestoreHealth
sfc /scannow

If it complains about missing sources with an error, follow the full instructions below.

use windows installation media tool to create an iso https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
mount iso (right click the iso to mount)
copy install.esd to drive
dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:install.esd
Note the index of the version we want for Windows 10 Home (or whatever version)
dism /export-image /SourceImageFile:install.esd /SourceIndex:**IndexNumber** /DestinationImageFile:install.wim /Compress:max /CheckIntegrity
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:WIM:install.wim:**indexNumber** /LimitAccess
sfc /Scannow

Reboot at this point and then check everything again. Do a basic drive error check as well.
 
Yeah, things seemed clean after the DISM I found on bing. :| So, after the download completed, it needed to run an update, and that's when it failed again (and something about Gears.Halifax.Something.exe was in the update list.

I give up.
 
Is the Reset button in the Apps section of the settings functionally equivalent to wsreset :?:

I'm more afraid that uninstalling and reinstalling the store via the command line will fuck up every other thing I have installed via the Store (and thus 100s more GB to download).
 
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