I was just wondering if MGS created the cover system that has been popularized by Gears of War? Gears of Wars' cover system is probably more complex - compared to the other mgs games. But the whole cover system in MGS works the same as it does for Gears.  So did Gears of war take from - games like MGS.

I know the over the shoulder view is Gears, so I can see that MGS had taken that idea - which I really enjoyed in MGS4 and MGO. 

 So what do you think?

Winback has a system that's very comparable to Gears (albeit less-sophisticated, but it came out in '99 on the N64) and is much closer to what Gears has than MGS.

Kill.switch from 2003 had also the system where it was the most distinguishing characteristic of the game.. Take cover, aim, shoot.. the tagline of the game was: "Take cover, Take aim, Take over"

gears didn't so much create it more refine it and popularise it.

WINBACK!!!!!

I'd forgotten about that FANTASTIC game.

Killswitch came up with it in terms of the TPS game

MGS's cover system was nothing like Gears of War's. In MGS you could slowly scale across walls if you kept the button pressed down and couldn't switch cover at all on the fly.I can't comment on the other games mentioned because I haven't played them, but I can assure you MGS was in no way a real inspiration for GOW's cover system.

Also the over the shoulder view was popularized by Resident Evil 4, not Gears of War. In fact I believe that Blezinski fella from Epic actually stated in an interview that they didn't know which direction to take the game until they saw RE4 in action and said they had to have it look like that. They were also considering first person shooter for the title.

Oh, you all should know: Contra invented cover :P

yeah i agree with FaRmLaNd

MGS is much closer to Splinter Cell than it is RE or Gears. The original SC came out in 2002, I believe. MGS4's controls are extremely similar to SC.