Swimming with Sharks: Multi-Player Gears 3

They Shoot Horses Don't They?

The Gears series has created a solid and very active online multiplayer community of gamers who both very much enjoy that arena of combat, and have become very good at it. So good in fact that without Epic or the gaming world realizing it, they Ninja'd in and, in the dead of night, set massive C4 charges to the kiddy pool in Gears 2, making it one large deep ocean of near instant death.

What this translated to was a game environment in which new players who have yet to master the finer points of multiplayer combat in the Gears arena are referred to as "chum" by the veteran players, who pretty much annihilate them on sight. Instantly. To the point that the vast majority of new players give up trying to play in that arena because they are... Wait for it... Wait for it... Tired of an experience that amounts to 30 seconds of running and then instant death.

To compensate for this phenomenon, in Gears 3 Epic has created a "Casual" area for multiplayer play that is in every sense of the phrase, the Kiddy Pool. It is a non-ranked version of the Versus Mode that allows new players to get their bearing and pick up some skill battling a combination of other new players and mostly bots. In theory that should prepare them for the Standard area, which includes not only the Versus Mode, but Warzone, Execution, Capture the Leader, King of the Hill, and Wingman Modes, each of which includes selections for either Quick Match or Ranked Match.

On Thursday the battles that could be had in the Standard area were a fun mixture of skill levels that tended to go on a lot longer than is the case with matches in Gears 2, but on Friday and Saturday the Standard areas of Gears 3 became the equal to the experience of Gears 2 for most new and low-skill players: thirty seconds of running and then instant death. I have a theory about why this is so...

By Friday the accidentally delivered games were in the hands of gamers who pre-ordered their copy of the game, and the Standard area of the multiplayer modes was flooded with Gears fanatics who love the fast-paced and frenetic action of Gears multiplayer combat. The all-too-brief period of a level playing field that games journo's enjoyed from Monday to Thursday was over, and the horde of 'professional' level players have begun to arrive and that, as they say, is that.