8:30 am 
Late last night I was chatting to Nick about the upcoming Gears of War 3 and the universal opinion (of the two of us) was that Gears 2’s multiplayer was disappointing and they completely screwed up the shotgun.
We had other differing opinions about how the Lancer worked in Gears 2 compared to 1 but by far our biggest complaints were around the shotgun and the multiplayer in general.
Thankfully Cliff Beszinski was listening in to our conversation and has come out and very candidly stated
“Straight out of the box, Gears of War 2′s multiplayer in regards to matchmaking was very very clunky and very very seldom worked. That’s something we take very very seriously and feel very very bad about.”
That wasn’t enough for us to pass on our forgiveness to Cliff just yet so he continued on and mentioned that Epic are working on ensuring the matchmaking takes into consideration your region and tries to match you up with locals before throwing you up against some Americans on a 100Mb pipe sitting on top of the server.
The problem with region filtering is that our smaller regions often won’t have enough people to play against and then we will have to revert back to the American userbase and since their matchmaking can easily find enough Americans to play against it doesn’t really want to let us join.
He then went on to acknowledge the mistakes they made with the Shotgun in Gears of War 2, in Gears 2 they pushed the tactical cover-based shooter style of game and then subsequently realised that people actually preferred the arcadey type gameplay of Gears 1.
You want to think that your lone soldier can take out the entire enemy team if he is quick enough on the trigger and that is something that was missing in Gears 2.
Gears 3 will hopefully bring it back as well as including 2 new weapons.
Sawn off Shotgun – Short range, huge damage for gibbing multiple locusts at a time.
Pendulum Lancer – You get a blade instead of a chainsaw and the gun kicks like a mule.
They will also be introducing many more execution modes, which don’t mean much to me at all since you quickly realise pulling of execution modes is dangerous and only to be used in safe environments, as well as changes to the cover system.
All in all I am hugely excited for Gears 3 and the sounds coming out of Epic games are all reassuring me that they are going to get it right again this time around.
Source: Examiner
