Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski weighed in on the multiplayer in Gears of War: E-Day, arguing that the developers need to rethink the balance. He points to the shotgun and the wallbounce — the latter being the trick where players rapidly change direction next to cover — as the core issues.
He says he watched a lot of footage (Twitch streams, YouTube clips, etc.) and saw a stark gap between vets and newcomers. Some experienced players, according to him, almost live off wallbounce-plus-shotgun combos, shaping their whole match approach around those mechanics so they can outgun everyone else.
That style isn't automatically wrong, he adds, but it becomes a problem when it’s effectively mandatory to win. New players end up needing to learn one very specific technique first, i.e., master wallbounce, before they can even feel competitive in other modes.
His fix: tone down wallbounce in standard playlists and give its enthusiasts a separate queue. He also slammed executions as an expensive-to-implement feature that, in practice, gets little use.
Still, Bleszinski had a positive note for The Coalition’s open testing of E-Day — begrudging praise, maybe, because balancing legacy mechanics with onboarding new players is a tricky tightrope.