I love Gears of War. I love its universe, its characters, its story, and damn near eveything else. Ive completed each game about 5 times, read both books twice each (and am eagerly awaiting the third), hell, I even have COG tags attached to my keys. So I must be beyond happy that the game has a multiplayer mode, where i can take my favourite characters online and test my shotgun skills against other players, right?

Wrong.



If you've ever gone into the deep abyss of Gears multiplayer, I can only assume you know most of the problems i'm about to address. If you haven't played GoW before, then I both pity and envy you.

The first, and arguably the biggest, problem of Gears online is one which has infected the online gaming world since the beginning: Lag. Lag ruins games. It can turn what was supposed to be a fun night shooting people in the face with your friends into an angry fit of cursing and controller breaking. It is pure evil, and it does not discriminate. Not in Gears of War.

You see, when you enter a match of gears, the game will automatically choose one player to be a host. Quite why Epic Games, who is no stranger to multiplayer , would put this into their games is beyond me. It was a hugely complained-about problem in the first game, and yet Epic still chose to keep it in.

What makes things worse is that instead of picking the player with the best overall connection to be host, it seems to just pick at random, which usually results in someone with a bad or just average connection being chosen. Even if there are 9 people in a lobby from, lets say, America, and one person from Australia, theres a big chance the Aussie will be selected, meaning the Yanks will be lagged out and will bombard the poor Australian guy with angry, hateful messages. The Aussie will then become confused, as his connection is fine when playing Call Of Duty or Battlefield, and will wonder why he was the reason everyone else lagged.



The cherry on the cake, however, is that the host, who is probably involuntarily lagging out his fellow gears players, will have a near perfect connection. His bullets will be released the moment to pulls the trigger, he will be able to take and deal out alot more damage then anyone else, and he wont be teleported across the map. Therefore, as you can imagine, the other players will be sitting ducks for the host to easily blast away. Unfair, right?

Now, usually this wouldn't be such a big deal, if it wasn't for the aforementioned fact: I LOVE Gears of War. Thats why every laggy game, every inexplicable bullshit death, every glitch, bug and general shenanigan hurts that little bit more. Because I know how awesome the multiplayer could have been, but some huge ass balls were dropped, and we got this mess.

However, I completely respect the notion that Gears should have online. When you get the odd match (and i mean, ODD) where you don't lag, the host-advantage is low, no one rage quits, no glitches or bugs occur, and the team that wins do so because of their superior skill, and not their superior connection, then it is a very, very good time. Therefore, I can only hope beyond hope that Gears of War 3 matches the gloriousness of its brothers on the campaign side of things, and also brings in a new era of gears multiplayer. One where we can run free, lag free, with each other on the beautiful aspho fields, and chainsaw some Locust face off. Because, after all...