misfit119's Blog (2 followers)

Warning: Information on Horde 3,0 mode is below. Readers who want to be 100% fresh going into Gears 4 beware.

So I'm a huge Horde mode fan. Like a ridiculously huge one. If they released a Gears of War game that was just a badass collection of Horde mode variations, maps and such I would buy that thing without batting an eye. I don't care if it doesn't add anything to the series, reuses assets from previous games or whatever. I just love that mode.

I started obsessing over it as soon as I played Gears of War 2. But as time went on I found myself not even bothering anymore. I got together with some friends, got all of the achievements and then stopped playing it. Why did I stop? Well the mode was just a bit too flat. No matter what you do in Gears 2's Horde mode you're always just as good as that guy that just started. There's no progression, no change, no variety. Once you knew where to hunker down on each map and deal with each of the enemies all of the challenge was gone. So eventually it just lost its shine.

Gears of War 3 changed all of that. Now you had a Horde mode where your decisions really mattered. How you chose to develop your character was up to you. If you made it your mission in life to ensure that every time you played you built up every sentry and decoy you could get your filthy mitts on then your decoys and sentries would get awesome over time. I have a friend who made it his goal to buy up the Silverback armor and make it worth using. Sure it meant that he was dead weight when building up the base but he tore right through Corpsers and Reavers. So everyone brought something to the table.

Gears of War 4 has ruined that and in quite possibly the worst way possible: Microtransactions. Yup. If you liked the Requisitions Packs from Halo 5 well then they're back and they're acting as the gate to making Horde mode playable.

See now Horde mode has five classes to choose from and each one comes with its own set of skills that it can equip as well as a general pool of skills. As you level up the class, separate from your own level progression, you'll be able to equip more skills and make your character better. Examples:

My engineer currently has the ability to repair fortifications for 20% cheaper. But as time goes on I can make it still yet cheaper to build fortifications as well as making my fortifications tougher.

The heavy I'm using currently carries a card that lets his heavy weapons carry more ammo. A good thing since he starts with a Boomshot. But eventually you can increase the damage and reload speed of these as well.

Sounds like a good idea. So what's the problem? Skills don't improve with use like the fortifications did in Gears 3. They level up by "destroying" duplicates of a skill card. So to bring Decoy Health to level 2 you need one spare Decoy Health card to get rid of. To get it up to level 3 I need to use up 3 spares. And so on and so forth.

To actually get these cards you'll need to earn credits to buy these card packs. How do you get them? Well when you level up you get about two or three hundred credits early on and this grows slowly. Very slowly. So you'll take these credits to buy the packs and hope that you get the cards, right? Well yes. You'll hope since there are six categories of skills plus bounties (more on this later) and then there's the various skins and characters to unlock.

But I hope that you don't want the rare abilities or characters / skins because unless you save up credits you're going to find the card packs that contain rares and skins to be near impossible to buy. The cost for a pack of all common stuff is 400 credits I believe which I was able to afford by reaching level 10. To get the better stuff you need 1,000 or 4,000 credits. So I guess you'll need to save up and try hitting level 100 to buy some of these.

Unless you spend money to buy these on the Xbox Marketplace that is. Ugh.

You do have another option. Some of the cards you get out of these packs are purely for helping you level up or get some chump change credits. These are called bounties. I don't mind them but they take a ridiculous amount of effort for small rewards. Clear Horde waves 1 - 50 for 200 credits? Nooooope.

But I find myself destroying these cards for scrap so I can use that scrap to make skills I'm actually trying to use instead of the garbage coming out of the packs I finally manage to afford.

It's basically a system that forces you to play and play and play to get a modicum of half-decent skills together. Or to, you know, spend money on those boxes. It honestly ruins the mode since the mode seems to expect that you're going to have these skills and be using them since the rest of Horde 3.0 is goddamn balls out difficult.

In Horde from Gears 3 you got your credits simply by killing enemies. So if you performed well you got lots of money you could spend on building, upgrading and repairing your defenses. But in Gears 4 you need to manually go out and retrieve the energy that enemies drop upon death. This power then must be brought back to the home base and deposited or it'll be lost when you die. If the next wave starts while you're out there retrieving it well then it despawns and you just lost energy.

That too might not be a huge problem if the stuff in Horde wasn't so stupidly overpriced. A spike barrier, the cheapest item, costs 2,000 power. Even if you get executions on every enemy in the first two waves (barring the Ticker type enemies obviously) you will probably only just be able to build one lone spike strip. In later waves when the enemies get more dangerous you're still probably only using one spike barrier and maybe a single shock sentry to stun enemies.

On average, by wave ten me and my fiancee often only just barely managed to place two spike strips and one shock turret only to have them steamrolled by the bosses. If it's destroyed you can pick up about 1/4th of the energy it cost to build it but that's it. For the most part it really feels like you shouldn't even bother with the fortifications for the first ten waves even if you have a dedicated engineer since it takes so long to build stuff and it's likely to be destroyed when the boss comes. It's just... dumb.

As mentioned above a thoroughly skilled character could get a bit enough discount that this no longer applied. If you get a 40% reduction on the price of a shock sentry you're only paying 3,600 which you can comfortably do in a little over two rounds. It makes a huge impact. But that leads right back to the problem of getting those cards to level up the stupid skills in the first place...

Now I'm not going to go on about how most of the enemies are really damn tough or how the bosses are stupidly overpowered. Most of these problems feel like they would be alleviated if the characters didn't start off as such giant wusses. But the whole mode seems designed to bully you into buying the packs via the Marketplace and it grinds progress in Horde to a screeching halt.

A stupid boring grind I can deal with. Incredibly hard difficulty, I can deal with. I mean I ground out Age of Empires Online and I beat Super Meat Boy. But to give a long boring grind that deliberately makes the game hard unless you give into siren song of the premium content? It's just infurating.

Who knows. Maybe they'll rebalance prices and credit rewards shortly after launch and before general release. Maybe someone'll figure out a way to get lots of credits and make this less of an issue. But as it is the whole system seems horribly ripe for essentially ripping off gamers.