[maven];871689 said:
I actually do think they use the "slow walk / comms" to disguise loading, and some of the cutsenes (corpser entrance for example) can be skipped by some obscure button. In any case, the loading times of this game (considering I'm currently playing it on a system without HDD) or nearly non-existent, so props to Epic for that; combined with the texture-detail, shaders, shadows and post-processing effects I don't think there's anything out there ATM that can rival UE3.
X will skip many of the longer cutscenes, and often times you'll see a loading screen if you do. No big deal, absolutely no problem at all. But some of the checkpoints simply don't let you get back into the action as soon as you want. It's still really a minor complaint, but it's also still very noticeable.
Regarding difficulty: Have been playing through Insane. Did fine by myself up to said corpser, but the Gnasher shotgun I was carrying wasn't doing the job before I got hammered in the head. Co-op with Lancers worked perfectly and quickly, though. I'll probably play from there on by myself again, to see if I can do it single player, no shotgun this time (as I want to keep my sniper for those lovely bow-weilding asses afterwards). Also, I'm slightly disappointed as Insane doesn't feel all that insane to me. The enemies are definitely much more aggressive, and it is tougher than hardcore. But it's not tougher than Halo 2 on Legendary, IMO. Of course, I haven't played that in quite a while, and I'm quite reckless in that game anyway, so playing it safer in GoW may be what makes the difference for me. Blindfire has been essential, though, and hey, it feels good to blindfire shotgun a drone into gibbs when he decides he wants to be on the same piece of cover as me. However, regarding the game in general on all dificulties (or at least hardcore+insane), there's been many cases where an enemy seems to pop back into cover at JUST the right time for me to waste a sniper shot. It's happened so often, it's harder and harder to believe that it's coincidental. And it seems that the latency over live in co-op is quite noticeable with the sniper rifle. There's just enough of a delay when you're not host to make sniping a moving guy quite difficult. When I switched to being host, didn't have much trouble getting some of those Theron guards/sentinels when they were running around. Not much of a complaint, so much as a note, though. Every complaint I have about the game is, ultimately, very minor. And so far, it's easily the best looking and best playing next gen game yet, IMO (and as a shooter fan).
I hope the co-op in this game convinces more developers to actually go through the pain of doing it. Playing a game solo is all good and well, but co-op is in another league entirely. There's nothing like having another thinking person running around at the same time as you are. Halo was the best one before, but Gears has raised the bar, and quite significantly with the game being very much designed around co-op. It's just too bad they never managed a 4-player co-op, as it would have been nice to get 3/4 people on at the same time and play. It's perfectly understandable, however, with the miriad of achievements, present alternate paths and what would have been required for 4 players, etc.
Besides that, today is "Emergence Day," so sales data/announcements will probably come fairly soon. I have high hopes it will do more than well enough to make Gears of War 2 the highest priority after the release of UT2K7.
