Gears of War to offer four DLCs in one season pass

By Ryan Fleming August 29, 2011

For the hardcore fans of the Gears of War series, make sure your debit card is limbered up and ready to put some work in on September 20. Assuming you haven’t already dropped the cash and pre-ordered Gears of War 3, you are looking at a minimum purchase of $59.99 for the standard retail game. If you have your eye on the Limited Edition, plan on spending $79.99, and if you are slightly obsessed with the franchise and want the Epic Edition, be prepared to shell out $149.99.

But wait, as the TV pitchman might say, there’s more!

For the low low price of 2400 Microsoft Points ($30), you can purchase the Gears of War 3 Season Pass and receive four upcoming add-ons, a 33-percent saving over purchasing them individually. Included with the purchase will be the Liquid Metal Weapon Set as well.

The Pass will be available to purchase on September 20, and the first DLC has been announced for November with the remaining three planned over the course of a year. Details on the add-ons are still scarce, but you can likely expect a handful of new multiplayer maps, and probably a new weapon set or two.

The Season Pass idea seems to be catching on, and Gears 3 won’t be the last to offer something like it. Rockstar released a similar pass to grant purchasers all the L.A. Noire add-ons, EA Sports is offering a Season Pass for all its titles and Call of Duty will include expansion maps as part of the Call of Duty XP fee, to name a few. Expect to see this trend of a one-time fee for DLC continue.

Gears of War 3 hits shelves as an Xbox 360 exclusive on September 20.

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Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…

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The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future

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Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
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What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort.

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Death Stranding

While Xbox Game Pass frequently adds new games to its library, some titles do leave the service every fifteen days. Sometimes, those games are fantastic and PC Game Pass will lose a heavy hitter on August 15: Death Stranding. If you aren't familiar with this game, it, ironically, is a PlayStation console exclusive that's part of Microsoft's subscription service only on PC. Death Stranding first released on PS4 in November 2019 and tells a story about a man who is trying to reconnect a post-apocalyptic while dealing with lots of supernatural threats along the way.

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It's all connected
Death Stranding follows the journey of Sam Porter Bridges, the adopted son of the President of the United Cities of America, as he attempts to reconnect what's left of America with a Chiral Network and save his sister. Of course, this game has Kojima's signature eccentricity, as Sam also carries around and starts forming a deeper connection with a baby in a pod (called a BB) that helps him avoid deadly creatures called BTs and gives him visions of a mysterious figure played by Mads Mikkelsen. On that note, Death Stranding has a stacked Hollywood cast as it stars people like Norman Reedus, Lea Seydoux, and Margaret Qualley and features characters modeled after Lindsay Wagner, Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn, and more.
I'm not a huge fan of this game's melodramatic dialogue exchanges and arduous pacing that leaves a lot of the most interesting reveals for the end. Still, it undeniably has some prescient themes about how important connection is, something that became even more apparent and relevant in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Few video game writers can craft narratives that are as engaging and memorable as the ones in Hideo Kojima's games. Though what I like most about Death Stranding is its gameplay, which isn't quite like anything that came out before or since.
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Gaming

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A player conversation in Baldur's Gate 3.

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Xbox Game Pass is home to dozens of RPGs, many of which share the same computer-RPG roots as Baldur's Gate 3. While Xbox players might not be able to enjoy Larian Studios' shockingly thorough and immensely enjoyable Dungeons & Dragons CRPG just yet, they can't go wrong playing these six titles right now.
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Where Baldur's Gate 3 may be the pinnacle of fantasy RPG games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Fallout: New Vegas is that for postapocalyptic RPGs. This game from Obsidian Entertainment and Bethesda Softworks -- both of which are now owned by Microsoft -- first released in 2010. Despite some in-game glitches that still persist, the Xbox 360 version of Fallout: New Vegas on Xbox Game Pass is just as enthralling of a role-playing experience as it was nearly 13 years ago. The Xbox 360 version can even be played at 60 fps on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, thanks to the FPS Boost feature.
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