Gears of War 4 headaches

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VideoGameCritic
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Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 13th, 2016, 8:22 pm

My friend Scott came over the other night and I thought it would be fun to play Gears of War 4 local coop mode. After all, I had played the previously few Gears on my Xbox 360 in that mode.

So we get to the main screen (I had gone through the install process days before) and selected local coop. It said a second player needed to sign in. I could see my profile signed in on the top right, and a box saying the second player should hit the start button (not represented by a non-descript symbol) to sign in. So he signed in with his profile and it even said "Welcome Scott". But when we tried to start the mode it gave the same message about a second person needing to sign in. WTF?!?

After messing around with that for a few minutes I decided it might be necessary to download the latest update. So I got online and the "update" was 21GB! That is no update or patch. It's basically the size of a whole game (actually much bigger than a game needs to be). That pretty much ended our hopes, because with my slow Comcast just downloading that would take hours.

I'll let you know if it works when it's finally downloaded and installed, but gamers should not be subjected to all this garbage. If we're playing offline local, why in the hell do we even need to sign in? These online centric "profiles" have become the biggest pain in the ass, making the setup of any multiplayer game an exercise in aggravation.

Especially after playing a bunch of hassle-free old-school console games, it's clear the state of modern gaming is horrendous. I can only assume those who defend it just don't know any better. And my Xbox One continues to offend far more than it entertains.

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Rookie1
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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby Rookie1 » December 14th, 2016, 7:46 am

a 21GB update? WTF is that all about? How can that even be justified by a developer? That could takes days on some connections, and if you have some sort of data cap it might even be impossible. What a joke.

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby C64_Critic » December 14th, 2016, 11:43 am

I remember WAY back in 1983, on the Nintendo Entertainment System... when you wanted to play a 2-player game with your buddy in the same room, you put your cartridge in the console, turned it on, selected "two player" from the game menu, handed you buddy the other controller, and you were off to the races.

Here we are 33 years later and - I realize some of it is out of necessity, but come on! For Gears of War in particular, you're playing a coop game locally the system needs some way to differentiate between the players so having each log in with their own profile makes sense. But as the Critic said, we were both logged in and the game even showed us being so... yet when we tried to launch the local splitscreen it gave an error that a second player had to be registered. We must have wasted 20 minutes all told trying to get that beast to work for us before we gave up in disgust (watching the progress indicator for the 22GB "patch" stay at 0% for at least 5 minutes).

Of course it's just a guess/assumption that downloading the patch will resolve the issue. Without any kind of instruction manual or release notes to be found, we have no idea if we were just trying to set it up incorrectly or if the patch will address the problem.

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby CharlieR » December 14th, 2016, 12:08 pm

that is because back then, things were the way they should be. I'm going to give you a line that I just came up with. I guess it could use some work, but I think it exemplifies gaming today in a nutshell.

Back them, gaming problems were about things INSIDE the world of games (hard bosses, etc.,) Today, they are about things OUTSIDE of the world of games (slow internet, mandatory installs)

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 14th, 2016, 5:20 pm

CharlieR -
Scott said something the other night along those lines:

"It's not the game that's the problem - it's the game around the game"

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 14th, 2016, 7:10 pm

UPDATE!

So I checked on the status of Gears of War 4, and apparently my network had disconnected sometime last night so the update did not fully download. I tried to put the console back online but it would not connect. The screen suggested turning my router and modem off for 30 seconds, turn it on and wait for 30 seconds.

This is not unusual. If you call Comcast with a problem this is what they tell you to do. And since Comcast is still in the stone ages when it comes to internet technology, you have to do it fairly regularly.

That didn't work, and after numerous retries I decided to re-set up my network from scratch. This time it managed to connect but then I got another message which I couldn't believe. "Your connection is working, but we're having problems on our end. Please check network settings to see what services are affected".

On OUR END?!?! So let me get this straight, they are wasting all my time forcing me to get online and download the latest updates, and they don't even have THEIR act together!?

I was finally able to get the update downloaded, so you'd expect the update to be pretty quick. NOPE. It's like the install process all over again! It's been an hour and counting (88% done last time I checked). All during the install it's flashing screen boasting the "features" of the new update. From what I can tell, it consists of 1) E-Sports support (joy) and 2) the ability to buy DLC to render you weapons in a rainbow of colors.

It's amazing how much time I've invested in this game (hours) without playing it at all.

Will it fix the local coop mode? Doubtful. That's why I avoid these updates like the plague. They don't benefit YOU, they benefit THEM.

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby Atarifever » December 15th, 2016, 5:24 am

C64_Critic wrote:I remember WAY back in 1983, on the Nintendo Entertainment System...

Unless you were in Japan, I believe you mean 1985 or 1986. In 1983, you were playing something cool like a Coleco, Inty, or Atari. Or your C64. :)

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby Atarifever » December 15th, 2016, 5:31 am

If you think this is bad, get ready for worse. The latest Final Fantasy has a patch coming to fix the story with new cut scenes. A patch to the cut scenes! Now they can't even release a story without bugs! And that's a game that delayed at one point specifically claiming it was to fix things to ensure they didn't have a day one patch. Then, after the long delay, they released with, you guessed it, a day one patch. And they still didn't even have all the story in there yet! That's like releasing a book with 30 pages missing and asking your customers to go online and print off the rest and then glue them in.

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby Rookie1 » December 15th, 2016, 12:20 pm

Its pretty safe to say that I am all set with "next-gen" stuff. First, I cant justify the moneys, and second the forced online stuff does zero for me. It apparently does nothing for others either. That COD style Star Wars game is already on clearance for $14.88 at WalMart. And that was supposed to be one of the biggest titles of the year.

IF I decide to invest in anything to play some of these next gen games, I will just get me a nice laptop. That will benefit me more in the long run.

The wild card is the Switch though. I am a Zelda fiend, and will buy a console for a good Zelda game if I need to.

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Re: Gears of War 4 headaches

Postby Sut » December 16th, 2016, 2:41 am

I normally shrug when you guys rant about updates but both Gears of War and Final Fantasy sound absolutely horrific.
Small mercy we have pretty fast broadband here in the U.K. But it's still an hassle.
I've not been on a Xbone but it sounds worse than the PS4 for these sort of things.


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