Even more enemy variety! Wooo! The bane of action games right now is the same box of men approach, but Gears 2 blew me away in regards to its encounter variety, and this steps it up further. Awesome.

Cliffy B, for all his product, has a sharp damn head (not another comment on product). I've prolly said this a billion times but when he described Gears as Bionic Commando in a horizontal space, I knew he was into games more than AWESUM SHOOTARS WIF GANS!! You can clearly tell by the advances made in Gears 2 that gameplay is very much paramount.

SP is a test, a predefined test. It has variables that shift, but you can get great at it and feel yourself lock in place and dominate the experience. There is still dynamism there to, to an extent, get infinitely better at a game with good enough mechanics and flexible enough measuring of your skills, but it is ultimately about practicing to run a distance faster or to.. wall climb or whatever, a challenge that does remain static, predefined.

MP is pitching one person's skills against another, it is, if you will, a sentient test that is a mirror image of you.

Assuming Raptor's arguments are well thought through, I don't think "predictability" is a comment on the player's behavior, but rather the proxy through which he operates. In an MP game the enemy you face over and over is for all intents and purposes a variation of yourself, which is to say an avatar in the environment that moves based on the same rules as you and from which you draw a line that a projectile of some sort travels across.

Enemies in a great action game have obvious systems for taking them down, ie you know what to do, but variety in those systems - making each of them rich and interesting to engage - and mixing them up in a hand crafted way creates a solid base for interesting mechanics to move beyond that core human battle of wits. Purely mechanically, I want to stress, that's not to say they're unpredictable. A game like Bayonetta is to an extent extremely predictable. It's not about not knowing what's coming at you or what it'll behave like - any measure of randomness would just lead to frustration - on the contrary it's about knowing what to do ASAP and then the mechanics of it is like a language you learn and become fluent in.


--- Edit: Okay, upon reflection I think I got a bit derailed here and the rest is mostly my train of thought chasing Harrison Ford through the woods. :O ---

When the enemies themselves are essentially that MP avatar but with the associated AI routines that are set to offer a challenge but not actually rape you the way that many enemies on your level of "AI" would, games quickly descend into utter tedium. That's what I keep refering to as "box of men" and I think it's one of the least flattering trends in gaming as stories become more *realistic* or whatever and there's no actual room to create enemies that are interesting to face. Conviction has enough zany things to tinker with and an analogue enough encounter system that it can mostly keep things fresh throughout, but my biggest gripe with it is definitely its tendency to be about shooting the same guy a bajillion times. And no, putting helmet on dude does not equal not shooting the same guy a bajillion times. It's the same guy with a helmet! If anything you're removing something from the encounter by docking a point of weakness.

Thematically Gears has never really connected with me, particularly. I think Gears 2 is infinitely more interesting than Gears 1 purely in terms of imagery (The Hollow is reminiscent of Unreal in a wonderful way) but it's still pretty low on my excitement meter. Alright Marcus new fluffy sideburns has me pretty excited. But more to the point! It does, however, have the monsters and tech in it that allows you to do more than "it's this dude, he's back from having been killed a bajillion times and now he has body armor!"

Where games were once governed by the trippy drug induced ramblings of a mad japanese game designer and you could have turtles and mushrooms and fucking.. cannonballs with angry faces on, games have now become slaves to realism and consistency. You see people throwing a fit when a new enemy is introduced and they're all "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE ANY OF THIS GUY IN GAME.. THAT... CAME BEFORE THIS GAME!?" And there's validity to that now that it's about universes and trilogies and prequels and all this story stuff, but it kinda took a dump on games as videogames.