Holiday Specialtacular 2016: Happy New Gears

Also this (I went and checked and Matt was barely higher lvl than them so you know it was his pure skill that carried them).

I believe Mass was the sniper last time and he did a good job sniping, whereas I think Jason here had a lot more trouble so he ended up switching to a lancer after a while.

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@roboculus92: The storage container is useful too but they seemed really against the idea of using Boomshots and Dropshots.

Saving up power by not building anything for a couple of rounds is the only way to go. Wait I see that they're at ~20k at the start of the round at 2:45 in so they tried that at some point.

They switched the difficulty to Normal after their break...

These fucking openings are the best.

Well their first mistake was their fabricator placement. Set them up for failure immediately. Jeff is so fixated on number of entry points while ignoring the fact that they have 1 wall of cover, no choke points and no place to retreat to. They just have dudes walking right up to them with no place to go.

Looking at the map, the southern part with the horn (like Dan said) is the most defensible.There's 4 narrows stairs where you can place fences and cover with turrets. It would also allow Jason to actually hang back on the raised boat area and snipe too. Then they'd have the entire southern section of the map controlled that they can retreat and roam around through.

They just keep trying to hunker down in a corner when they should be spreading out and covering choke points.

This is the only thing I like.

huh? they're not playing uncharted 4

I want to pet baby Brad and Jason.

yikes, people are so obsessed with pure skill and not, y'know, having fun playing games on the internet lately. it gets really oppressive and exhausting and basically turns me off from any multiplayer game ever. i essentially have to pick one game, and make a fucking career out of it. i shudder to think how many people i would enrage if i just jumped into a horde game fresh.

sigh.

hope the guys had fun regardless (still have to watch)

more co-op stuff like this please. these videos are always great.

Look at those precious little stocking stuffers.

Fun video!

@philscorpio: Some side conversation might've given viewers more to chew on, but keep in mind that they're all playing Gears, whereas only one of them was directly playing Hitman. I'm not going blame them for wanting to stay focused and not distract others.

Thanks guys!

However....who the fuck made you wear those sweaters? :0

Not my favorite day so far

Manned turrets next time guys as you approach wave 50 is the key. Great try and sooo much fun to watch.

TY GB dudes!

Their mistake is not understanding how much of a difference manned turrets makes. It makes the game steamroll easy.

I want to watch this, but after 20 minutes of hearing "BRAINS!" over and over again, there's no way in hell I can take 4 hours of it.

Even when not acting with specific intent to do so, Dan still managed to make this video incredibly annoying :(

@baddudes said:

Yeah, I noticed that, too. Whoops.

Sorry no game with a GunGame mode can be called overrated, its the best game variant in any shooter that's just fact. except maybe CS:GO that game sucks a bunch and gungame/arms race cant save it

the Abyss was a good movie, the Director's cut was terrible though.

I just need this to be in the comments.

@professoress: I see you have good taste.

They briefly switched to Dan cam when Jeff disconnected. Jeff was on PC with a 60fps output while the consoles were on a 30fps output it seems. That would look weird if they constantly switched.

@bybeach: here's Jeff's one:

http://intl.target.com/p/men-s-ugly-holiday-who-yeti-to-party-sweater-grey/-/A-51305365

@ez123: So it's always 50 waves? Jeez, that's a little long yea.

I love how serious they all look during the match. :D

I did a double take at that run time. Niice

@mems1224: yah cause Uncharted 4 was actually a really great game this year, but he was talking about Gears 4 which was a serviceable retread of past Gears games in 2016. I would argue against calling Gears overrated only because no one really talked about it much at all after release.

"Balls are dicks" - Jeff Gerstmann, 2016

@humanity: one could argue that uncharted is just a serviceable retread.

While I never played gears horde mode, COD zombies has a similar problem. I feel like trying to start from basically scratch late game is almost impossible. In COD is losing your upgraded weapons and perks, and in this it seems having no fortifications and a fabricator at Lvl. 1 is just too weak to regain your momentum, unless maybe your entire team is very skilled. I wish devs would stop crippling players so much for death in wave based modes. I understand you need consequences to make it meaningful but I think it could be balanced a little more in the player's favor especially when you consider this isn't competitive.

If the difficulty curve for wave 50 is cause of pay to win, that sucks.

@linkster7: I was like, oh they must be doing two runs, but alas.

@mems1224: it manages to take the story and do something meaningful with it, something that Gears does not.

I really love the trend in these videos of wearing Christmas jumpers that are 100% unsuitable for green screen

did they notice that the 2nd time they played, they didn't put it back on Casual? It was on Normal difficulty...

Yeah those gun skins are horrific.

Yeah I thought that as well when they hit wave 50 halfway through the video. I imagine that wave 50 difficulty spike is even more frustrating when playing with random people on the internet.

Maaaaaan when developers don't replenish your supplies and consumables at all after failing a challenge/attempt/wave it's the absolute worst, creates that garbage feedback loop of "oh you failed now you have less resources for next try so you're more likely to fail again."

@humanity: when does that happen? Because I'm about halfway through UC4 and it's a boring, cliche slog

@xealot42: If my pickup raids of Destiny are any indication you would have last someone by the sixth wipe, desperately tried to find someone to fill that spot for ten minutes, and then give up to try another day.

It seems like, from watching this and playing with my friends, it's better to restart from wave 1 instead of playing wave 50 with nothing. If there was an option to start from wave 40, 30, 20 that would improve the experience.

@mems1224: I guess it's just not your type of story. By the mid point it definitely has shown a lot of great narrative and character building, and I didn't even like Uncharted that much until UC4 so I'm not even coming at this as a huge fan or anything. You either appreciate it or you don't and I guess you just don't.

The part in the Horde lobby than says Wave: 1 can be changed and you can start from any wave.

Basic tips/suggestions for Horde for the guys. Everyone needs to team up and stick together. Put the fabricator in a well defensible end of the map,the spawn points are usually best. Then build a base around that only and all stick to it especially for boss waves. That way you can shoot at the enemies from a good distance and you force them to choke point in one place and you can all focus fire on one big enemy at a time. Investing in two manned turrets with some fencing is often a good play as well. the manned turrets are way more powerful and useful than the unmanned turrets.

@kadoom said:

Came here to post about how much this reminded me of old games like Gradius, where you're basically fucked if you lose your powerups. Of course, then it was intentional to make you feed more quarters into the machine, now it just seems punitive.

This is like watching my dad play gears.

Love watching the both coasts come together as one for the end of the year.

Now that's out of the way. Is it just me? Or how the guys are playing? Or are there very limited base building defense options in this game? Would have been cool to see more diversity in this new installment.

Anyone else notice they forgot to change difficulty to casual after the break (they are on normal now where I am on the video).

To add to the Zombies vs Horde discussion, I hate zombies but love Horde mode. I played a lot of different versions of Zombies in college and I think it's a cool side thing that got too big for it's own good. It always turns into you kiting a huge number of zombies that are a pain in the ass to kill while your teammates try to do some bullshit while they pray a stray zombie doesnt hit them in the back and kill them in 1 or 2 hits. The best thing about zombies is the unique aesthetics them come up with

Horde mode actually takes more coordination and the enemies don't become ridiculous bullet sponges(which is funny to say, considering gear's enemies are naturally bullet sponges, but it's nothing compared to late game zombies). It stays a consistent level of fun, while zombies becomes tedious very quickly. I am with Jeff/Dan in that I wish they did the spec ops stuff from Modern Warefare 2, instead of zombies.

Also I will add that I didn't own a 360 last gen, so I could only play gears with my friends who owned one, but it always come down to me being the only person wanting to play horde, with the rest wanting to play zombies. Fuck zombies.

Brad and Jason look adorable in their stockings.