are no events or changes that occur these areas are just large and intermittently featured wilderness areas meant to add an element of player choice to the progression and better suggest the true size and scale of this empty dying world in some reviews i've seen people suggest that this is an underutilization of the open world format but i think is actually a very clever compromise that allows the game to radically shake up the structure for content delivery while still maintaining the pace and style of a fully linear action game none of the side content feels frivolous like grinding or purely interactive like discovering a secret they're just extremely short supplementary chapters within the larger chapters of the main plot in choosing not to go for a maximalist approach to their open world elements gears NUMBER_TOKEN stayed truer to the pacing and purpose of the older gears of war titles blended those older titles with new in a way that makes it feel effortlessly correct as if the games had always been intending to do this sort of thing but hadn't really gotten around to it until now another element of what makes it feel so connected to what came before is the choice of setting the environment around new hope and mount kadar the wintry mountain highlands of gears of war ii out in the hills is a cornucopia of gears of war history there's side content that features lost equipment from the time around emergency there's primary content about a deep and dangerous mind that was a locust gravesite there's side stories about scavengers who fell victim to grizzly ends arena battles among the wreckage of grindlift transports destroyed during gears NUMBER_TOKEN little rusty piles in the snow that turn out to be a vehicle that bared and coal piloted once upon a war plus the center of the actual part of the act pivots around returning to new hope the scene of the crime for the locust and discovering more of the backstory than marcus did as he roamed from place to place on your rather beautiful windsail vehicle you roam backwards and forwards in the timeline placing these different points in history in better context by using a landscape instead of an encyclopedic codex to arrange them it's spectacularly done and uniquely paced for what it is a wide linear vessel in which to hold a multitude of classic traditional gears of war moments act NUMBER_TOKEN hits on what really is a winning ratio of side content to main content linear design to player choice gears NUMBER_TOKEN demonstrates the strength of this formula by miscalculating it in its very next instance of the wide linear approach the red desert of vasgar is one of the most strikingly violently scenic settings in the entire franchise but its reliance on a recursive backtracking heavy main progression paired with more monotonous side content keeps it from feeling as creative as the previous act this act is completely centered on one long enormous task that every single part of the main progression serves in a much narrower way than the previous act act NUMBER_TOKEN was a search and scavenger hunt you weren't sure what you would find and you found a wide variety of surprising things act NUMBER_TOKEN is a procedure sure you can do some parts before the others but it's less of a wide linear experience and closer to a classically linear design
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