Gears of War annoyance #3: Tweaking torture
If you like to inflict more self-torture, try tweaking your new Gears of War for the PC. Normally, tweaking the game to get the best performance is a necessary exercise, especially when your net worth isn’t good enough to be announced in a magazine.
Well, Gears gives new meaning to torture.
One of the first things hardware-savvy PC gamers do when they run a game is to view its video settings and see what can be changed. When tweaks are done, said gamer plays through the early stages to test if performance is any good. If there are settings to be changed (and trust me, there will always be settings to be changed), one would simply visit the video settings while the stage is paused.
Not in Gears of War. When you press Esc and look for the video settings, you won’t be able to find it. You’ll have to quit to the main menu, and then visit the video settings. If you want to try out a new configuration scheme, you have to ditch the campaign and go to the main menu.
Funny thing in tweaking is you need to switch a few settings to see which one gives you the best gains. Tweaking was never such a frustrating exercise in any shooter, but Gears does this in spades.
But wait! Aren’t there settings that require you to restart the game for it to take effect? Yes, they have that here too. If you want AA (and if your PC can handle it), you have to restart. That means you have to log into your Windows Live again, unless you don’t plan on saving your progress if you do decide to play.
Jebus! Sounds like you’re having a hell of a time with GOW. It’s really a shame: the game was great fun!
Hopefully Epic Games and Microsoft will come up with some sort of patch to fix all the problems you’ve been having.
Apparently, it’s not just me, Klopzi. If you visit the Epic Games forum, you’ll see that everyone is pretty much having the same problems.
I currently can’t continue the single-player campaign, but multiplayer is still good. I got clobbered though, but it’s a good thing because at least I get to play the game.
You’re barely hitting the tip of the ice berg about tweaking this game, don’t mean that as an insult though lol
Even when you find out how to tweak the ini files they don’t even save correctly and can be over written by the game at any seemingly random time, it seems like that to me, can you guys even see a pattern yet? I’m clueless
Other games it wouldn’t piss me off as much, but I bought this game after weighing all the hype and all the anti-hype from haters, and actually enjoyed it, no actually I like it better than most FPS games period haha, it really surprised me.
On top of that, the fact that I can run this game 25-30fps(perfectly playable for me) and keep it still looking AMAZING(i run on 1024×768 on a GeForce 7300GS, that’s unbelievable compared to how other games for me have run) just makes me hate Epic/Microsoft even more that they focked it up with such a crappy interface like LIVE to cause all these problems.
If you guys know any better links to tweaking sites other than sifting through the hate mail on the Epic forums I’d really appreciate it. I can’t even understand how the game handles the INI’s when it should be really straightforward
Hey Cliche, you can run Gears at 1024×768 on a GeForce 7300GS? Holy cow. What’s the rest of your system?
I can only run mine at medium, and I’m using the lowest resolution just to keep things smooth. And here I was, thinking those stutters were being caused by my aging PC.
I’m still using an Athlon 64, so that’s probably why I’m stuck at medium, but your machine’s performance surprised me. Congrats to you. ;)
As for more useful links, don’t worry. I’ll look for more good ones when I’m home (I’m on the road as I type this).
Yes, Gears actually delivers on the gameplay side, so I really like the game. Shame about the technical difficulties though.
I did get to tweak the ini files, so I’m wondering why yours don’t save. And yes, I double-checked if they were saved.
@ the other readers
Hey fellas, got any links to share on tweaking Gears? We’d really like to get a piece of the action too. Just paste all the links here. Just don’t spam me with any pr0n.