It’s a blast from the past for me watching the Gears of War tournament here at Major League Gaming, a parent company of GotFrag.com. Having seen the monster PC Gaming title, Counter-Strike, grow competitively before my eyes, I could instantly see the comparison to Gears of War.

From the Boomslang to AWP, to the respawn of players every round; Gears was, to a certain extent, Counter-Strike on the Xbox 360 competitively.

That’s not all positive news though.

Just like CS, Gears of War has competitive growing pains to go through. A big one that both MLG and the makers of the game should have seen coming is ghosting.

The monster cheating that is ghosting has plagued the CS competitive scene since the beginning. Ghosting comes from the fact that respawn games feature a concept where a player who dies must wait until the end of the round before they can respawn. This creates a greater emphasis on individual lives. This differs from Halo 2 where players can throw themselves into combat with less fear of death because they will respawn right away a few seconds later.

Gears forces a delay in respawn as punishment for anyone who dies. An early death could force the player to wait up to 5 minutes for the round to end and to return to life.

CS’ response was to add Fade to Black. The idea of Fade to Black is to completely black out any player who dies not allowing him to look around the map for the opposing team and tell his teammates where they are. Hence the name, Ghosting. CliffyB could definitely learn from the mistakes of CS and how they fixed them.

Major League Gaming didn’t see this coming and lacked the necessary admins to spot ghosting so they just allowed all teams do it. This drastically changed the game. Teams were often seen having their first player dead scrolling around the map views to spot opposing players and calling out his position.

The big negative to this is it removed a large portion of the suspense in the game. Players almost always knew where the enemy was, leaving little chance for amazing chainsaw finishing moves.

One more aspect of Counter-Strike which is amazing for the audience and improves the games viewing is situational irony. As the fan you know more then the players themselves. You can see that the players maybe right next to each other but the players may never see each other. This creates massive amounts of suspense and really heightens the experience of the fans.

This just didn’t happen as players were always a step ahead.

CliffyB needs to look to the PC for inspiration and borrow mp_fadetoblack from Counter-Strike. Add that concept to Gears of War and the game play will improve by leaps and bounds for competitive play, while also heightening the view-ability of the game itself for fans.

Other MLG Content
Gears of War: Gears of War Championship Wrapup | Championship Melee | Early Rounds Melee | Day 1 In Depth | Gears of War Preview

Halo 2: Halo 2 Melee | FFA Championship Preview | Final Boss Earns Top Seed in Halo 2 4v4 | Halo 2 Preview