I'm going to be a good little enraged gamer and actually respond to the topic of the thread first.
I love shooters. I loved the first Halo. I loved Half-Life 2. I love Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor. Gears of War is one of my very favorite games of all time. I love capping a ***** as much as the next guy.
I love RPGs, mainly MMOs. I liked Final Fantasy XII. I liked Dungeon Siege. I loved Kingdom Hearts. I love City of Heroes. I loved what of WoW was done right. I love developing a character and roleplaying.
I love when the two are put together well. I loved Bioshock and I loved Mass Effect. Action and roleplaying, two great things put together.
But they don't always need to be put together. Gears of War is great because it's action. Nothing but action, and non-stop action, nothing to get in the way of the storyline or the combat. Achievements are all well and good, but you don't need any kind of RPG system in Gears. Ever. For any reason. You hear me, Bleszinski? You already took my Gears 2 on PC from me. Don't you go and screw this great franchise up. I will hunt you down.
With that out of the way... to all you
fine gentlemen who say that the Gears story is crappy? Are you writers yourselves? I doubt it, because the storyline of Gears (at least Gears 1 - thanks to our good friends at Epic I haven't had the opportunity to play the second one) is the purest form of storytelling I've seen in quite a while. Gears' story isn't really a story, it's a plot. It's a sequence of events that run quickly after one another - with characters that fully understand that they are in the world they are in - they never acknowledge the camera. Things happened in the past. Marcus and Dom know that they happened. You don't. That doesn't matter to them. They're talking to one another - not to you. Not to the camera. Events flow into events - one after another in a logical progression until the story reaches its climax. It's storytelling in an incredibly pure form and it's never sacrificed for gameplay.
The characters? Sure, they're stereotypical and full of testosterone. They're soldiers. In a future fighting a merciless inhuman enemy and where Starcraft-esque stimulants are probably commonplace. Of course they are. And they're not stereotypical because they're characters. they're stereotypical because they're archetypes of all the people who fight in a war.
Marcus is the career soldier. The one who's devoted his life to fighting because he has no choice and he believes in what he's fighting for. "If we don't, we're gonna spend the rest of our lives running from shit like this."
Dom is the one who tries to hide the fact that the war has ruined his life and taken away everything he loves by pretending he's having fun.
Cole is the one who couldn't care less - to him, war is just a game, and will stay that way until his bloody-mindedness and dumb luck run out. Certain quotes of his when he's incapped, though, hint at a vulnerable shell under his cocky exterior...
Baird is the man who's been destroyed by the war; Already distrustful and independent; he loves to be in control. The chaos and unpredictability of war has made him paranoid and afraid.
I love Gears' story. F.E.A.R. was a horror movie in game form? This is an action movie in game form. But it's one with a story. It's another reason I'm looking forward to the Gears of War movie. They don't have to express the subtleties of Gears. They could make it just like the game, where you can choose to appreciate them or just have fun with the chainsaws and bullets. I would enjoy both movies. But I'll be hopeful until it comes out.
Gears will never be remembered as one of the great stories of the time. But don't you ever tell me it's badly written.
Edit:
I think BioShock is perfect proof of that: they went out and made an FPS before it so when they got to BioShock, Irrational were ready to make a great game that they promoted the hell out of, had an iconic image for--Big Daddy is SUCH a great mascot--that people could identify it by, and launched in a great late summer slot where it had the video game news cycle and shelf space all to itself.
A very good point: Gears is another good example - it had that AMAZING first trailer - the Mad World one - the iconic image of the Lancer, and the Epic name behind it. I'll also mention the Watchmen movie as being extremely well marketed. If you'd just said "Watchmen movie" everyone who read the book would have seen it, and a few other people who like comic book movies would have seen it.
But then you had the Smashing Pumpkins trailer and I think everyone in the theater was IN. Sacrifice should have been a huge hit with how good a game it was - a flawless melding of RPG and RTS - and yet no one has heard of it. Why? Search me.