Sat, Oct 17 · 1:00 PM PDT
The next meeting is on October 17th at Vocari Hub. It starts at 1 PM and ends at 10 PM, but you don’t have to stay the whole time and can come and go as you please. The featured game is Gears of War Emergence Day for Xbox Series X. Emergence Day is supposed to have two player split screen local co-op and four player per team multiplayer. I’ll bring at least two Xbox Series X systems with me to the meeting, but online play might be a problem as I am currently having trouble finding gift cards to renew Xbox Live in stores. You can also play any game that I have installed on any of the eight or so game systems that are setup in the main room if you are not interested in Gears. I will provide four pizzas, cola, and bottled water for guests to eat during the event.
Gears of War Emergence Day is somehow the second prequel Gears of War game to take place before the events of the original 2006 Xbox 360 game. In the context of Gears of War’s story Emergence Day is when the evil mostly albino sub-terrain monsters known as the Locust first appear and start the war against all humans which as chronicled in the first three Gears games. Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are veterans of human on human world war called the pendulum wars. They are relaxing in the city of Kalona when the Locust first appear and attack everyone. Soon they use improvised weapons and salvaged ammo to march to the center of town and meet five brand new characters that were never previously mentioned in Gears of War 1-5 despite those games taking place after this one chronologically. There’s Colonel Trench , Captain Akilia Gray, and Mayor Isabel Shaw. Captain Gray assigns Marcus and Dom to Bravo Squad with new characters know-it-all rookie Lucas Reyes and grizzled imulsion miner Mags Carter. The only other returning character is Tai Kaliso from Gears 2 but Captain Gray puts him on Theta Squad and he’s probably only playable in multiplayer. So far I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Cole, Baird, Kim, or Hoffman appear in the game, but it could be that it’s a secret or they just forgot about them. The entire game takes place in the large city of Kalona on the planet Sera. Thankfully it has different districts and a huge factory for mining imulsion, so it shouldn’t get too repetitive.
I played the multiplayer beta back in August for Emergence Day. There were two maps Market and Outpost and only two modes conquest which is like team king of the hill and team death match. In either mode each team was comprised of four people for a total eight players per match. I mostly played Horde mode in the beta which had one map Golden Quarter and there was two verities. Normal Horde mode is four players but the new Siege Horde mode has twelve players total, but made up of three squads sort of like how the PlayStation 3 game MAG worked although that had two hundred and fifty six players. In the matches I played Horde mode was only three waves instead of the normal fifty. Each wave has a different objective like retrieve six canisters spread across the map, beat a boss like a Reaper air ship or giant spider Corpser or simply defend one area of the level for a few minutes. I saw one new boss enemy a Bile-Frog that shoots toxic gas from its mouth so you are better off sniping it. Horde mode also now has different classes that can be leveled up with different loadouts. Each class has one exclusive skill and weapon, but you must grind to level ten to unlock that weapon. The active skill of the Marksman and Assault class activated by clicking both analog sticks at once seemed useless. The Medic and Breacher class having healing skills seemed much better, or perhaps something to grant more ammo or damage would be good. Horde mode has three different difficulties now. I found Rookie to be too easy, enemies were downed instantly, while the hard mode Commander was much too difficult where everything one shots the players. The Infantry normal difficulty was just right; you had to be careful and stay in cover but had enough ammo to survive the wave.
The biggest change compared to the other games in the Gears of War series is you can now jump with the Y button. It’s a pretty tiny hop and is really only useful when you get a running start but it’s kinda fun. There is also fall damage but you have to do something stupid to die from it like use the new grappling hook to climb three stories and then jump down instead of using the hook to go back down. You can now slide when running by pressing the A button, and can even shoot or crawl under a table while sliding. Sliding didn’t seem to work that well for me though. It was much slower than running or even walking and had a huge recovery animation. Also sometimes I wanted to get in or out of cover and would slide in place instead. Another change is you can now execute brutes, butchers, and grinders. Before they would just keel over when you defeated them. Something I didn’t like was wretches seem much stronger and can instantly kill you when you are in a downed state, yet the normal Locust will straddle your defenseless body for two minutes and just slap your face repeatedly until a teammate of yours finally revives you. In the campaign there are supposedly optional side quest you can start by talking to certain characters in the levels and then finding or doing whatever it is that they want. The developers say that this might lead to some branching paths in the story, but what is not clear to me is the game open world? Are the side quests easily missable? Does the game have a level select or do you have to backtrack to earlier levels to search for a collectable that a quest giver wants? I guess this won’t be clarified until the game comes out on the sixth.
I didn’t use every weapon, but I did try out some of the basic ones in Horde mode. The Gnasher shotgun remains the best starting weapon. It fires fast, easy to down people and sometimes even one shots at point blank range. The only downside is it takes a while to reload. The Retro Lacer has been renamed the Lancer Mark 1 and it’s somehow worse than it is in the third game. The recoil is very bad and the accuracy is even worse. I didn’t try the charge finisher but the standing still melee seemed better with quick bayonet strikes. The normal Lancer with the chainsaw barrel in renamed the Prototype Lancer. Shots seem pretty accurate and chainsawing felt good. However it seemed like damage of the chainsaw Lancer had decreased a bit and it was difficult to down someone that was running toward you, more so then in earlier games. The Hammerburst rifle felt powerful again and also accurate. In the early games it was sometimes better than the normal Lancer, in Emergence Day it certainly is.
