Speaking of which, I suppose this is as good a time as any to post my beta thoughts.
As I mentioned above I am torn about stat tracking and ranks. Yes, it adds another later of metagame but the original appeal of Gears was due to how personal everything was. I can already see there being a lot less crazy Gears moments because you won't want that extra death dropping your kill ratio, so you'll play it safe.
Also, while I suppose it's nice to not have a one-and-done TDM mode, it also kills a bit of the personality of the game. Back in Gears 1 if you died it didn't result in an quick respawn, you sat in the lobby and smack talked back and forth with the other team and commented on the game. Now you just yell at your teammates as to who killed you, where he was, etc.
As for the other modes, KotH is pretty fun but can get old, Capture the Leader is by far my favorite mode as long as you have a good team. So many fun "oh crap" moments.
Something they eliminated back in Gears 2 is sorely missing and I mentioned it above as well, Player Lobbies. Essentially instead of matchmaking it just popped up a list of public P2P lobbies and you choose which to join. While I love the servers I wish they'd go back to that style, what was best about Player Lobbies was that you could have any number of friends play and it would populate the rest of the slots with randoms. Now you can have 5 on your team max, if you want to play with any more than that it's mostly luck as to whether they can get in or not.
Another addition I really wish they'd make that is slowly becoming the norm in shooter games is a theater mode. Something like Halo or Black Ops where it will save your recent matches and you can cut clips out and post them to YouTube. More than either of the other games I mentioned, Black Ops has so many crazy moments that would be great to share with your friends, but you can only tell them about it, they can't witness your greatness. They added a Screenshot mode in Gears 2 but nothing really came of it.
Now, on to the good stuff. Gears 2 was one of the sloppiest releases I've ever witnessed, probably THE sloppiest. Massive latency issues plagued the game to it's core, issues that were never really resolved. I angrily sold the game a month after it's release. Gears 3 is absolutely rock solid on the latency side, I've had no issues at all thanks to the dedicated servers. Even the P2P games I've been in have run great.
While we've only seen 4 maps thus far, they are decent all around. I don't think they're quite to the level of fun that the Gears 1 maps were, but they are definitely detailed. I love the sand storm in Trenches, Checkout is just fun, etc, nothing as silly as the hail storm from Gears 2. There are a few bugs with them but Epic has already mentioned fixing them in the final version (weapons falling through the ground on Trenches especially).
Weapon balance still needs to be addressed methinks. Ask any new guy what the two best weapons are and they'll say the Retro Lancer and Sawed-Off. Ask any vet what the two most noobish weapons are and they'll give the same answer. I don't think they're noobish persay (some people are purists), but they are definitely too powerful, especially the Sawed-Off. That coupled with the fact that you can see around corners without being up against the wall results in so many BS "you never knew I was there" kills it's retarded. Don't tone down the power, but tone down the "cone of death" that spreads in front of it. Too wide range. The Retro just needs to have it's damage dropped a tiny bit. The normal Lancer needs to have it's damage increased a tiny bit as well, the Gnasher and Hammerburst are fine as-is. Ink Grenades and the Scorcher need a little more damage added on them as well.
Oh, and the mantle kick absolutely needs to go, most BS tactic in the game. You can sprint up to an object that some is hiding behind and instantly mantle over it and shotgun them, they have zero time to react and it registers your mantle before they can do theirs.
The player models have a universal "no sleeves allowed" theme going on now, I kind of miss the old look. I'm glad that there are female Gears as well, kind of adds to the desperation of the game (use every soldier available). Plus it brings back the classic Firefly quote "Have you ever been with a warrior woman?"
Overall I'm very impressed, Epic is definitely redeeming themselves a good bit after the debacle that was Gears 2. It needs some tweaking and ironing out, but it's definitely a pre-order worthy game in my book.
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