Quote:
Originally Posted by Boost King  I was almost goint to get a 8800GTS 3D video card to play this game, but I decided to go the Patience route cause surely soon enough Epic will release this on 360 as DLC. They have to.
Boost |
Ok, to quote ones self! Here I go.
Answer, I was impatient. Over Xmas break, I had around 10 days off including the public holidays. Bored, and playing games, I really wanted to experience Gears on the PC. So given I had most of the minimum specs, which are a 2.4Ghz P4 or better, 1GB ram and a 256 MB Card, I thought I'd try.
My PC has 1GB of ram, and a Pentium D (Dual Core) at 3.4Ghz. So plenty of power. I didn't have a Video Card, so I bought a 256 ATI Radeon 2600XT. I installed the card and to my surprise the game ran, but was very very choppy, each movement was accompanied by a 1 second pause. Ie, Unplayable.
I did some research and most said that the game needs 1GB of free ram, not total ram. Given the OS takes up half of the ram, its a problem.
So I gave up and went out and upgraded my PC, to the Dell XPS 420. A gaming machine.
It boasts, a Quad Core 2.4Ghz, 3GB RAM, and I upgraded to the Nvidea Gforce 8800GTX 768MB Video Card (The biggest beast of them all).
It runs gears beautifully on the highest resolutions. Mine is set to 1680 x 1050 cause thats all the monitor can support.
All I can say is WOW. I love my 360 and Gears has supplied me for over a year with happiness. Its amazing just how crisp Gears is on PC. THe graphics clobber the 360 version, the sharpness and textures are just amazing. The overall game plays identical to the 360 version. There is of course the new chapters which are all included in Act 5. Currently you'll notice for Act 5 theres only 3 chpaters in the 360 version. The PC version has 8 now, ie 5 additional. For those who beleive Gears has a story (and I do), the extra acts give more information and assist in the story line somewhat. The boss (Brumack) is great to fight and rewarding (wink wink, secret acheivement).
The Acheivements are much like the 360 version, almost identical. However, they've abolished the extra 250 points for the new maps packs and all that. Those acheivements dont exist. They've also added in Not So Seriously which involves 10,000 kills unranked (again excluding Annex and King of the Hill). However, the most biggest change as well is all the online ranked weapon acheivements now allow for unranked play, meaning no ranked play required, except for the always remember your first acheivement etc.
Other advantages of online are the bonus online maps, 3 extra levels, Courtyard, Gold Rush and Sanctuary. Courtyard looks allot like a Musoleaum style level with lots of stone work and architecture. Gold rush is very orangy like Raven Down yet has allot of metal platforms like the feel of Process style building. Finally Sanctuary is set in the night time and is like your musoleaum style level as well. Nice maps, probably like Courtyard the best.
The downside to this is there are only some 1900 players on the ranked leaderboards for Gears PC. Compared to 2,000,000+ on the 360 version. It is impossible to find a ranked match on PC online, they just dont exist at all!. There is barely 3 or 4 unranked matches going. I've been playing solid for a week and the most players in our game was 5 out of 8. 90% of the time its a 1 on 1 game or 2 on 2 at best.
This in my opinion is the most dissapointing factor in Gears of War PC. The game shines in many ways, extra content, more maps, better graphics etc. The bit that lets this game down is the lack of people playing online. Weathers its because of the high end specs required to run gears on PC, or the sheer amount of PC players that prefer RTS games to shooters like gears, or maybe our PC owners dont want to play a 360 port. Whatever the story, it is hurting Gears of War by not having a real decent online support base. This game online is what is / was its strongest point. The plethora of online matches, both ranked and unranked was our smorgasboard as 360 owners. You really can appreciate the service that is Xbox Live when you try to play on something else. Its great you can sign into your XBL profile on the PC, and talk to 360 games at the same time. Its just a pure shame that they cant link the two game databases up for 1 big experience. If the PC gamers could tap into the 360 base you'd see a heck of allot of people in my opinion enjoying gears on the PC far far more.
This leads me to my final point. 1900 PC Gamers online for Gears, 2 million plus on 360. Surely it makes complete financial sense that GOW2 will be a 360 exlcusive again (for a certain amount of time) and that the game appears on 360 first and not PC. The support base for this game is 360 and quite frankly in my opinion is where this new Game GOW2 and the extra content in GOW 1 really belongs.
Thanks for reading.
Boost King
Yer, I'm back!