Directly Comparing Gears of War Trilogy's First 30 Minutes

The idea for this video originated when I first booted up Gears of War 3. Unfortunately, I could not replicate the experience despite deleting my save data on the console and the cloud but essentially the game logged me into Xbox Live and gave me a bunch of pop ups saying "Unlocked [X] Item" for multiplayer modes and I had just come off of playing a good amount of the first Gears of War and I thought, "How far we've come." Then upon starting Gears of War 3 it does what I denote as a "prestige game" thing of fading the credits in and out as you play the game. I then thought about using Gears of War 3 compared to Gears of War as a way of determining what makes a game "prestige," but ultimately decided to just do a direct feed comparison of all three games of the trilogy in order to directly show its evolution from the 2006 original to the 2011 Epic Games capstone.

The three areas I synced the footage are:
Pressing the Start button 0:40
When the introductory cutscene begins 1:07
When the player takes control 4:38

Audio used is Gears 1 for the beginning until the start button, Gears 3 for start button to intro cutscene, Gears 2 from intro cutscene to player control, and Gears 3 for the rest of the video.

Some further notes after reviewing the synced footage:

Gears of War is definitely the most pure and barebones of the trilogy as expected. The main menu simply has four options, Gears 2 has eight, and Gears 3 has seven with a party window in the top right.

Gears 2 takes its sweet time giving the player control whereas Gears of War and Gears 3 get you right into the playable game with Gears 3 being a direct dream-remake of the introduction cutscene for Gears of War. I made the mistake of choosing "Training" in Gears 2 which extended the time to get right into the action.

Gears 3 is immediately more flashy and impressive with its dream sequence followed by an extended walking segment allowing you to just meander about the base and take in the environment, very Last of Us despite being released 18 months earlier. Gears 3 has many more interstitial cutscenes whereas Gears of War and Gears 2 only really had them bookending missions/levels.

Something you can't really experience without playing the games yourself is that Gears 3 feels much lighter in its default control settings compared to its predecessors, both in movement and in aiming sensitivity. Something that is easy to see is that Gears 3 has much more color than the other two games which are very similar in color palettes of black, grey, and brown.

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