The Gears 5 campaign, for many players in the early-access period, was a barely-functional mess of broken checkpoints and busted scripting. The objectives would randomly break, leaving you stuck in limbo, forced to hard reset the console. Every time the game stopped functioning, which happened more than a dozen times in my twelve hour playthrough of the Gears 5 campaign, my progress would change randomly.
I would restart levels in new places, or sometimes find that every single chapter was prematurely unlocked. Once I returned to the game to find that an entire cutscene and in-game character went missing — again, I returned to find all of Jack’s abilities mysteriously unlocked. Later, I loaded into an act to find that all of my unlocked Ultimate Upgrades were now locked for no reason at all. Frustration, thy name is Gears 5.
Put simply, Gears 5 was a buggy mess, but it might not be the same for you. I’m not writing this article to bag on The Coalition, the new developers. Instead, this is all about one mind-boggling decision. According to the Gears 5 developer Twitter, all the single-player problems players are experiencing this weekend across the board on Xbox One are server related. For some reason, even the single-player side of Gears 5 is tied into the XBL servers, and when the server hiccups, the entire game goes down.
These issues weren’t experienced by early-reviewers, and very likely when the initial population rush slows down, new players won’t have to deal with it. This isn’t an on-going problem, or even an indictment of Gears 5 — I just had to share the wild, buggy mess I experienced while trying to get through the campaign. It was certainly unique.
