I usually play Gears as a random on social but it would be great to have a AR15 team, especially for Horde 3.0.  Anyone?

I will be playing.... once I pick up the game that is...

I will be. Can't wait to download it!

My GT: Spinone F5
I usually play for a couple hours after 8 p.m.

Add me!  Let's get an AR15.com team together.

Got the early access.  This is my first Gears game and so far I'm impressed.  It's like a more action packed Dead Space, and I love those games.

lightfighter501

Just getting started myself.

Hydro556.

Slow connection though

I'm gonna wait to see how Battlefield One plays out and if there's any possibility of the Modern Warfare Remaster coming out solo before I make my FPS choice for the year.

I'll be on via PC as soon as I get another SSD.

Gears is 3rd-P, so your not violating policy if you get both.

I hope modern warfare releases as a solo.

I'm playing on PC, so no versus for me (except for custom games). I'm down for co-op/horde though, add my GT: ChorizoWaffle

Ditto.

CaptFrost7 here on XBL. I left the world of consoles and went PC a couple years after Gears 3, but fortunately we've got crossplay on Gears 4! So I can play with all you Xboners.

Could definitely use folks to play with. The grind on this one is ridiculous compared to Gears 3, and I'm already losing motivation to play with randoms. Would love to blast shit with you guys though.

is it worth picking up? I really liked gears 1 and 2 but gears 3 kind of curbed my appetite for the series.

I never played gears 3. I dumped at least a hundred hours of co op into the original gears. This one reminds me of that. I only read reviews of GoW 3 but after playing 4 it doesn't seem like most of the negatives from 3 made it into 4. The only complaint I have is a sharp framerate dip on pc when loading a new area. It lasts about 1 second and it hasn't dipped during combat so it isn't a huge deal, no hiccups other than that. Seems to be something they can patch since it doesn't look to be performance based and the whole game is well optimized. I have a 1080, 4690k, running the game at 1080p, 16gb ram, loaded onto a HDD. My friend is running it an 1080p with 980ti in sli (guess just one right now, sli is coming "soon"), 32gb ram, loaded onto a SSD and a 4690k too. Doesn't seem to be tied to VRAM, RAM, or SSD/HDD performance, seems like a coding issue that can be ironed out. Anyways, tl;dr is that it's probably the cleanest playing game I've had recently other than Doom. It in no way shape or form plays like a port on PC which is surprising considering how forza plays. My 980ti buddy was playing it on his xbox as well and said it's very well optimized there too. The cross platform coop works great, not really anything to complain about yet.

So far I love it; the only problem is their card game upgrade/progression system for Horde and cosmetic unlocks S-U-C-K-S and involves so much grinding you'd think it's a free to play phone game. Gears 3's upgrade system was an order of magnitude better. That being said, Halo 5 was pretty bad in exactly the same way at the start and it was revised to be much more reasonable, so hoping that will happen here. As far as the core gameplay though, this is one of the best Gears releases in quite a while.

I agree with Frost, couldn't have said it better. I like it so far.

We've only coordinated one horde with 5 friends and managed to get to wave 30. It's tough getting 5 people together to box, but it's better than playing with random people. The campaign is typical gears which is awesome.

GT: ChorizoWaffle, I'm down for horde if you get a group rolling.

Will do man!

I read about the pay-to-progress scheme they're trying (again) with this.  Doesn't surprise me, though.  The $60 price point probably doesn't pay the bills, so they have to try to bait consumers for a little more.

I'm a Gear head for sure, & still need to get a SSD for this, but I'm starting think ammo might be a more immediate priority now.

If it helps any you really don't need a SSD for it IMHO. It's well optimized but mostly anything that comes from an Xbox Is still going to be HDD optimized. My friend is playing on a similar rig as mine, he has it on SSD, I have it on HDD, we have pretty similar if not the same loading times mostly.

I'll echo this. Most games there's a HUGE difference. Gears 4 I honestly cannot tell the difference between running it off my 512GB 950 Pro or the 10TB Barracuda Pro (albeit that HDD is fast).

Yup, anything else it's great. I can't find the video I'm thinking of, but they tested the speeds between the two and looked a little deeper at the game. They're set up for an xbox HDD essentially so the extra speed goes to waste.

Which is funny because most console games do benefit from an SSD. You can't put one in an Xbox 360/Xbone, but you can put one in the PS3 and PS4, and most games you can tell the difference in loading times. Especially games where you're loading tons of very small files like the Gran Turismo series. On the PS3, the Nurburgring loads in 5 seconds off an SSD versus ~30 seconds off a HDD, even with the SATA I bottlenecking the SSD. Destiny, you shave 5-10 seconds off your load times every time you load a new level, and accessing your inventory is much snappier.

I'm guessing Gears 4, since 8th gen consoles have tons more RAM than 7th gen, they probably programmed the game to hold the majority of data in RAM 100% of the time and only pull levels from storage as needed, so an SSD doesn't make much of any difference.

Ya, seems odd, but nobody really seems to have an explanation. The other weird thing is for those running pascal GPUs it's one of the few games that shows a massive improvement when using an i7 over an i5 processor, like a 20% jump. The difference is only a couple frames when using a maxwell or AMD GPU though so who know's what's going on with it. It's very well optimized for a windows title, but the SSD and CPU issue on Pascal cards is weird.