Gears of War 3 raising standards for third person shooters?

[Reasonable]

xS7SxSNIPER said:

Reasonable said:
Gears "popularized" cover and survival mode and therefore did influence other games. I'm not getting into arguments about who had stuff first as anyone with a fair knowledge of games history will know few of the mechanics of Gears were original. What Epic did was polish, blend and meld a mix of proven and less proven mechanics and made them popular.

All popular games influence other games. For example the critical success of Uncharted 2 in terms of SP narrative and writing clearly influenced the improvements in Gears 3 SP narrative.

Most games are trying to be popular, and they therefore happily crib for any other source or title.

I doubt Gears influenced Uncharted directly though, they were both too far into development for that and early on it was clear both would feature cover based shooting, but the "vibe" of Gears visible during development coupled with the success of Halo and similar titles clearly influenced Sony's desire to have games that were less whimsical and more grounded, and this obviously had an impact on Uncharted's tone for example.

Gameplay wise though they are clearly different and I doubt for example Uncharted has cover based shooting because Gears did.

I read in a post serveral years ago saying that Naughty dog saw Gears of war demo years back in 2005, they said they got the idea from epic to make it cover system

Got a link?  Could be true but I'd be surprised if so early in a games development someone said something like that - cribbing goes on all the time but its rare you'd annouce very early in your titles development that you were directly lifting something from another game still in development itself.

EDIT:

Searching myself I can see no sign of such a claim but I did find this from an IGN interview which seems to confirm that ND were working off the same source as Epic - i.e. kill-switch - and that they were reacting to the overall title rather than focusing on a specific mechanic:

EGM: So, how much did Gears of War influence Uncharted's development?

Evan Wells: Certainly we all played Gears of War and liked it. It set a bar visually that we knew we wanted to compete with.... As far as gameplay, I think I've heard them cite the same game that put us on this path: kill.switch. Gears of War obviously took that to another level, and again, that level of polish helped push us