The extremely flawed Gears of War 2 multiplayer modes have been a huge point of contention recently. Even after two separate title updates, nothing has managed to quell the incessant complaining of those within the gaming community.
With all of that in mind, it looks like Epic Games have once again went into full blown disaster recovery mode. Among the most prevalent issues that they want to address is how the TrueScore leveling system operates within the game. So what kind of changes do you think they are proposing?
“What if, instead of skill rank, we instead showed your experience level. You would gain experience through your individual performance in Public multiplayer matches – the higher your score at the end, the more experience you acquire. Of course the experience gained across the different match types would be balanced so you couldn’t just grind on the respawning game types to try and level faster. The experience requirements for each level would grow with each level gained (like a typical RPG) and we’d have 99 levels of experience for you to show off your leetness.
Generally speaking your level will always go up since you’re always acquiring more score, hence experience, with each completed match. The only exception to that would be people quitting. Players that quit would gain an experience penalty that could cause them to be demoted. At the end of every match you will be able to see how much experience you’ve gained and how much further you have to go till the next level.
Since I know what one of the first questions is going to be, initially we wouldn’t have achievements for gaining experience levels because of Xbox LIVE rules that require all post release achievements to be tied to new DLC content. But when new DLC is released, it’s a whole new ball game then.” — Rod Fergusson via Epic Games Forums
It is good to see that after the cavalcade of problems that Gears of War 2’s multiplayer introduced, there is a team over at Epic that is still dedicated to solving them. Myself, I never really understood the appeal of Gears multplayer, in both installments. The first installment seemed to succeed despite itself, but it looks like gamers have wised up this time around.
Xbox 360 games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, have shown how multiplayer should be done on a console, so people have not been anywhere near as accepting of Gears 2’s shortcomings. At least Epic has the common decency to ask the communtiy what they think, before proposed changes are made. What do you think if their new matchmaking ideas?
