Nothing like seeing people get temporarily banned, and their posts deleted, for completely innocuous joke posts that don't in any way fulfill the criteria they were infracted for.
TWI are like Bioware Lite. If you have the balls to do anything other than mindlessly fellate the devs, you're on the chopping block. Haven't done anything bannable? No matter! Tripwire's excellently-chosen sycophantic moderators will dream one up and then remove any evidence that proves otherwise.
Don't buy games from these assholes.
Showing posts with label first-person shooters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label first-person shooters. Show all posts
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
RO2 got an update (finally); time for me to update my griping!
Tripwire finally got around to releasing the most recent patch for RO2, the one adding the two new game modes, Mamayev Kurgan, and various tweaks to the UI and gameplay.
...Except by TWI's own words, it is a "content pack". They are touting the fact that this "content pack" is not DLC, but a free update for everyone with the game. Well done, Tripwire, at least you realise that about the only way my opinion of you could drop any further is if you were to charge us for the necessary fixes to the game.
As with all RO2 news, this starts with a bungle. Somehow, TWI thought it would be a good idea to make a 'beta' version that installed over the regular game on Steam. At this time, it meant there were three versions of the game in circulation - Red Orchestra 2 proper, the beta patch, and the original RO2 beta (which had been used as a test platform for the patch before its release). Three separate, totally incompatible versions of a game which had a seriously ailing community. Incredible. For a company that is more concerned about profit now than actually making a worthwhile product, Tripwire seem remarkably close to accidentally driving away all their players by splitting the already-small community into tiny, meaningless fragments.
This situation persisted until the patch dropped in preparation for a free weekend. I still distinctly remember the free weekends in Ostfront, and while they did bring in some legitimately good new players, mostly they were a complete mess of mainstream gamers whining endlessly about everything being too hard. Well, this time they would be happy - 'Action' mode was introduced, which removes freeaim, reduces weapon damage, increases the speed of pretty much everything, and adds a crosshair. Essentially it turns the game into some kind of class-based Call of Duty 2 with artillery. TWI's rationale for making this a thing was that they had 'a huge number of clans contact [them], saying they wished to enter the community but their members were finding the game too inaccessible'. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant either way; looking at the server browser, the action servers are largely empty, most longtime Red Orchestra players either avoiding playing it or actively deriding it. I belong to the latter camp, and any of you who have subjected yourself to my rants would know why - it goes against everything I stand for, trying to cater to everybody at once and making the overall product worse as a result.
So, that's 'Action' out of the way, and we'll see how long it lasts before the servers start going down through lack of use. Let's now move onto 'Classic', TWI's big sugar pill that was supposed to placate the 'hardcore Ostfront fans'. You know, the fans TWI has been making offensive jibes towards ever since the complaints began (around the time that it became clear the MKb was not going to be as rare as TWI suggested). 'Classic' mode's stated purpose is to make the game feel as much like the original as possible, thus pretty much proving that Tripwire don't know why the game was popular - rather than using it as a basis on which to improve, like everyone thought they would with RO2, they are now going straight back to it and dropping many of the things that they did get right with the new game.
'Classic' is not just a homage to the first game. It is, in fact, little more than a direct port of it to the new engine. The weapon loadout for each side, touted by community rep Yoshiro as 'historically accurate', is anything but; what it is is a direct counterpart to Ostfront's loadouts. They opted for the PU-scoped 91/30 sniper - which was entering service around the time of Stalingrad but was not really seen in meaningful numbers until later - over the historically correct PEM on a side mount, which is seen in every photo of snipers from the Don and Stalingrad areas that I have ever seen, including stars such as Zaytsev and Chekhov. While this may seem like a minor goof, it is telling that they chose the rifle featured in Ostfront over the one that actually belongs in the game. It also puts Soviet snipers at a mechanical disadvantage to the Germans, as the PU has slightly less (3.5x vs. 4x) magnification than the PEM and a much smaller field of view, while the German Zeiss ZF 39 is comparable to the PEM in magnification power and the ingame field of view is similar.
More telling still is the decision to include the G 41 with ZF 4 as the German semi-automatic sniper rifle. I have been over this before, but a brief recap - the ZF 4 was not in service until well after Stalingrad ended, was never mounted on the G 41 by the German military, and the mount shown ingame is a swept Kar98k mount introduced in 1944 and used only on a very specific group of those rifles. The setup as shown ingame would simply not work, as the scope is mounted too far forwards - about twice its eye relief distance - meaning the sniper would see approximately 'shit all' through it. Any of you who have used a rifle scope know what I mean. For those who don't, think of the way a magnifying glass will blur things if you are too close or too far from it; now imagine that instead of blurring, it simply blacks out your image. So yeah, good luck actually making that work. Tripwire have so far ignored calls from myself and a couple of others to remove or at least review it, no surprises there. Why was this fairytale weapon included? Because the 4x ZF 4 is the same scope used on the G 43 sniper rifle in Ostfront. Again, they choose something similar to the first game, rather than something which makes sense.
As you cannot detach or affix your bayonet at will in the game - a feature of Ostfront that TWI have excused themselves from adding because 'it is very difficult in the new engine and will take a lot of time and effort' - you are stuck with them permanently fixed to both sides' bolt-action rifles and semiautos. Complaining about this is mostly me being a giant history nerd (the Soviets almost always had bayonets fixed, the Germans were the opposite), but also somewhat disappointed in the removal of player choice. Oh, because that's a thing, by the way - in Classic, you cannot alter your loadout beyond selecting weapon type. While this removes bullshit like the MP 40-II and ensures everyone with a PPSh-41 has the period-correct drum magazine, it also means you can't select the historically correct 91/30 PEM or even take a rifle without a bayonet.
To sum up a number of the othersteps drunken lurches backwards that Classic takes:
So far, 'Classic' seems to have flopped somewhat. Most people are still playing 'Realism' servers, and several of the 'Classic' servers have tweaked their server settings somewhat to try and make it more palatable. It seems to have placated some, but as far as I am concerned, both it and 'Action' should be abolished so TWI can focus on making the default mode what it should be. Of course, this isn't going to happen. If I wanted to play Ostfront, I'd... well, I'd go play Ostfront.
Oh, we finally have officially-supported clientside hit detection. I'd imagine John Gibson had to be dragged kicking and screaming on this one, given his attitude towards Mekhazzio's original mutator. Server owners have an option between the original serverside detection and the new clientside system. I am not sure if the latter is actually an official adoption and release of Mekhazzio's mutator or something done in-house, but I would certainly like to know whether it includes an option for the advanced ballistics behaviour that Mekhazzio put together, which improved weapon function drastically. Knowing Tripwire, probably not.
Various changes were made to the UI, making it easier to read. A welcome improvement, but it still has that really cheesy Hollywood feel to it - stereotypical 'Russian' fonts and heavily stylised icons rather than using the actual Soviet crest and some kind of official Wehrmacht icon (presumably not a Reichsadler, since TWI didn't bother to make a separate, censored version of the game for countries where the Swastika is banned this time). Whatever, at least reading the scoreboard isn't a complete headache now. Weapon kill icons and selection screen pictures were added for those that were missing them, as well as the upgraded variants. Personally, the UI is the one area I would be glad if TWI copied directly from the first game.
Also somewhat tied to the UI is the ability to select weapon level. Notice I said weapon level, not weapon attachments, because they aren't the same thing. You cannot select a level 50 91/30 sniper for the side-mounted PEM, but without the bayonet. You get both upgrades or you get neither, your choice!
This game has a hell of a long way to go before I will even consider trusting its developers again, and the way they seem so confident in themselves in the dev diary released with the patch doesn't help. John Gibson himself makes an apology, but entirely misses the point of what he should be apologising for - rather than apologising for misrepresenting the game to prospective buyers to net those preorder dollars, or apologising for TWI's horrible attitude towards their previously fiercely loyal fans, or apologising for taking the game in a direction nobody who actually plays it wants - he was apologising for being overambitious. Not even in the sense that they tried to appeal to too broad an audience, oh heavens no! They simply tried to make the game too good. By dropping features the first game had, right? He then goes on to promote the new game modes as if they are some wondrous device that will solve all the game's problems at a stroke. It is arrogant and rather offensive that he seems to think simply throwing out 'Classic' mode to the hardcore realism fans is a suitable solution to all their many and varied complaints, rather than working on the core game.
Of course, I wouldn't expect any different. Tripwire today is not the same Tripwire that openly mocked the idea of adding crosshairs, unlocks, or gamey HUD mainstays like minimaps to the game.
...Except by TWI's own words, it is a "content pack". They are touting the fact that this "content pack" is not DLC, but a free update for everyone with the game. Well done, Tripwire, at least you realise that about the only way my opinion of you could drop any further is if you were to charge us for the necessary fixes to the game.
As with all RO2 news, this starts with a bungle. Somehow, TWI thought it would be a good idea to make a 'beta' version that installed over the regular game on Steam. At this time, it meant there were three versions of the game in circulation - Red Orchestra 2 proper, the beta patch, and the original RO2 beta (which had been used as a test platform for the patch before its release). Three separate, totally incompatible versions of a game which had a seriously ailing community. Incredible. For a company that is more concerned about profit now than actually making a worthwhile product, Tripwire seem remarkably close to accidentally driving away all their players by splitting the already-small community into tiny, meaningless fragments.
This situation persisted until the patch dropped in preparation for a free weekend. I still distinctly remember the free weekends in Ostfront, and while they did bring in some legitimately good new players, mostly they were a complete mess of mainstream gamers whining endlessly about everything being too hard. Well, this time they would be happy - 'Action' mode was introduced, which removes freeaim, reduces weapon damage, increases the speed of pretty much everything, and adds a crosshair. Essentially it turns the game into some kind of class-based Call of Duty 2 with artillery. TWI's rationale for making this a thing was that they had 'a huge number of clans contact [them], saying they wished to enter the community but their members were finding the game too inaccessible'. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant either way; looking at the server browser, the action servers are largely empty, most longtime Red Orchestra players either avoiding playing it or actively deriding it. I belong to the latter camp, and any of you who have subjected yourself to my rants would know why - it goes against everything I stand for, trying to cater to everybody at once and making the overall product worse as a result.
So, that's 'Action' out of the way, and we'll see how long it lasts before the servers start going down through lack of use. Let's now move onto 'Classic', TWI's big sugar pill that was supposed to placate the 'hardcore Ostfront fans'. You know, the fans TWI has been making offensive jibes towards ever since the complaints began (around the time that it became clear the MKb was not going to be as rare as TWI suggested). 'Classic' mode's stated purpose is to make the game feel as much like the original as possible, thus pretty much proving that Tripwire don't know why the game was popular - rather than using it as a basis on which to improve, like everyone thought they would with RO2, they are now going straight back to it and dropping many of the things that they did get right with the new game.
'Classic' is not just a homage to the first game. It is, in fact, little more than a direct port of it to the new engine. The weapon loadout for each side, touted by community rep Yoshiro as 'historically accurate', is anything but; what it is is a direct counterpart to Ostfront's loadouts. They opted for the PU-scoped 91/30 sniper - which was entering service around the time of Stalingrad but was not really seen in meaningful numbers until later - over the historically correct PEM on a side mount, which is seen in every photo of snipers from the Don and Stalingrad areas that I have ever seen, including stars such as Zaytsev and Chekhov. While this may seem like a minor goof, it is telling that they chose the rifle featured in Ostfront over the one that actually belongs in the game. It also puts Soviet snipers at a mechanical disadvantage to the Germans, as the PU has slightly less (3.5x vs. 4x) magnification than the PEM and a much smaller field of view, while the German Zeiss ZF 39 is comparable to the PEM in magnification power and the ingame field of view is similar.
More telling still is the decision to include the G 41 with ZF 4 as the German semi-automatic sniper rifle. I have been over this before, but a brief recap - the ZF 4 was not in service until well after Stalingrad ended, was never mounted on the G 41 by the German military, and the mount shown ingame is a swept Kar98k mount introduced in 1944 and used only on a very specific group of those rifles. The setup as shown ingame would simply not work, as the scope is mounted too far forwards - about twice its eye relief distance - meaning the sniper would see approximately 'shit all' through it. Any of you who have used a rifle scope know what I mean. For those who don't, think of the way a magnifying glass will blur things if you are too close or too far from it; now imagine that instead of blurring, it simply blacks out your image. So yeah, good luck actually making that work. Tripwire have so far ignored calls from myself and a couple of others to remove or at least review it, no surprises there. Why was this fairytale weapon included? Because the 4x ZF 4 is the same scope used on the G 43 sniper rifle in Ostfront. Again, they choose something similar to the first game, rather than something which makes sense.
As you cannot detach or affix your bayonet at will in the game - a feature of Ostfront that TWI have excused themselves from adding because 'it is very difficult in the new engine and will take a lot of time and effort' - you are stuck with them permanently fixed to both sides' bolt-action rifles and semiautos. Complaining about this is mostly me being a giant history nerd (the Soviets almost always had bayonets fixed, the Germans were the opposite), but also somewhat disappointed in the removal of player choice. Oh, because that's a thing, by the way - in Classic, you cannot alter your loadout beyond selecting weapon type. While this removes bullshit like the MP 40-II and ensures everyone with a PPSh-41 has the period-correct drum magazine, it also means you can't select the historically correct 91/30 PEM or even take a rifle without a bayonet.
To sum up a number of the other
- Run speed and stamina are now similar to Ostfront levels. Which would be fine... if the maps were still strewn with craters and debris. Too bad they aren't, so crossing from one piece of cover to the next is now suicide. This was done with the intent of stopping people from whining about run-and-gun, twitch-like gameplay, but anyone with sense would surely realise that was the fault of the lack of player momentum and the tiny maps, rather than the sprint speed and stamina the game released with. Thanks to this change, the game is even more static than before, with many people opting to simply sit somewhere and try to pixel-snipe rather than risk being hit while advancing, since it takes forever to get anywhere.
- Spawn on squad leader is gone. This was great for keeping squads together, maintaining momentum during an attack, and simply avoiding having to sprint half the length of the map to get to the action - which, of course, now takes several times as long because of the sprint changes. Thanks to the removal of SL spawning, attacks slow and falter with alarming regularity as recently-spawned reinforcements trickle back in dribs and drabs and are generally mown down by MGs as they slow-jog to the front.
- Rather than actually rebalancing other classes or - heaven forbid - allowing class loadouts to be changed by the mapper rather than hard code, TWI opted for removing all assault classes from many maps and replacing them with Elite Assault. That's three MKbs/AVTs per team, since these exceptionally rare, irrelevant, and generally questionable weapons are still included in 'Classic' mode. We're back to square one.
- Hero classes can no longer spawn in with enemy weapons. While I was against allowing all classes on both teams to do this, as it led to a rather immersion-breaking proliferation of German weapons in the hands of Soviet troops and the DP becoming an endangered species - allowing the German team a PPSh or SVT-40 or two is entirely realistic and a perfectly fair choice for experienced players to have. Most German players seem to still prefer the MP 40, but I personally chose the PPSh every time. Not any longer, it seems.
- Hero classes have no distinction from others except for their appearance. All the class bonuses are gone, rendering Heroes essentially worthless except for flavour (and even in that regard, they are not particularly useful). Remember TWI's statements about the Hero system, the game's titular feature, their new and interesting twist on the franchise? Yep.
- The compass from Ostfront makes a return, except (as far as I can tell) there is no way to turn it off. Enjoy having a fairly large and obtrusive compass in the bottom right corner of your screen - oh, it also tells you exactly which grid square you're in on the map, just in case you had any crazy ideas about having to navigate for yourself - which is largely useless. The only maps in the game in which a compass has a single iota of worth are Mamayev and Gumrak. Every other map has a very distinct N/S or E/W distinction, so even if you aren't familiar enough with Stalingrad's geography to know which direction the Volga (and therefore east) is, there is no possible way a functional human being could get directionally confused on them. The compass doesn't have actual bearings marked, just little tickmarks, so it's not even useful for shooting bearings to objectives or targets. It just sits there twiddling around aimlessly.
- Kill messages default to instant, removing the tension of RO2's delayed ones - a feature that was so popular the Darkest Hour mod team included it in their mod.
So far, 'Classic' seems to have flopped somewhat. Most people are still playing 'Realism' servers, and several of the 'Classic' servers have tweaked their server settings somewhat to try and make it more palatable. It seems to have placated some, but as far as I am concerned, both it and 'Action' should be abolished so TWI can focus on making the default mode what it should be. Of course, this isn't going to happen. If I wanted to play Ostfront, I'd... well, I'd go play Ostfront.
Oh, we finally have officially-supported clientside hit detection. I'd imagine John Gibson had to be dragged kicking and screaming on this one, given his attitude towards Mekhazzio's original mutator. Server owners have an option between the original serverside detection and the new clientside system. I am not sure if the latter is actually an official adoption and release of Mekhazzio's mutator or something done in-house, but I would certainly like to know whether it includes an option for the advanced ballistics behaviour that Mekhazzio put together, which improved weapon function drastically. Knowing Tripwire, probably not.
Various changes were made to the UI, making it easier to read. A welcome improvement, but it still has that really cheesy Hollywood feel to it - stereotypical 'Russian' fonts and heavily stylised icons rather than using the actual Soviet crest and some kind of official Wehrmacht icon (presumably not a Reichsadler, since TWI didn't bother to make a separate, censored version of the game for countries where the Swastika is banned this time). Whatever, at least reading the scoreboard isn't a complete headache now. Weapon kill icons and selection screen pictures were added for those that were missing them, as well as the upgraded variants. Personally, the UI is the one area I would be glad if TWI copied directly from the first game.
Also somewhat tied to the UI is the ability to select weapon level. Notice I said weapon level, not weapon attachments, because they aren't the same thing. You cannot select a level 50 91/30 sniper for the side-mounted PEM, but without the bayonet. You get both upgrades or you get neither, your choice!
This game has a hell of a long way to go before I will even consider trusting its developers again, and the way they seem so confident in themselves in the dev diary released with the patch doesn't help. John Gibson himself makes an apology, but entirely misses the point of what he should be apologising for - rather than apologising for misrepresenting the game to prospective buyers to net those preorder dollars, or apologising for TWI's horrible attitude towards their previously fiercely loyal fans, or apologising for taking the game in a direction nobody who actually plays it wants - he was apologising for being overambitious. Not even in the sense that they tried to appeal to too broad an audience, oh heavens no! They simply tried to make the game too good. By dropping features the first game had, right? He then goes on to promote the new game modes as if they are some wondrous device that will solve all the game's problems at a stroke. It is arrogant and rather offensive that he seems to think simply throwing out 'Classic' mode to the hardcore realism fans is a suitable solution to all their many and varied complaints, rather than working on the core game.
Of course, I wouldn't expect any different. Tripwire today is not the same Tripwire that openly mocked the idea of adding crosshairs, unlocks, or gamey HUD mainstays like minimaps to the game.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
The RO2 shitlist
I was going to use this as my review of RO2 on Steam, but there's a 1,000 character limit; how are you supposed to say anything meaningful about a game with 1,000 characters when it's one as troubled as this? Anyway, since I can't post it there, I'll post it here so I can refer people back to it. Apologies for the shitty formatting, I've cleaned it up a little already.
things that are good:
*gunplay is literally unparalleled and you will never see another game do guns this well
*neato tank interiors and the way tanks 'feel' as they lurch about drunkenly (i.e. like real tanks)
*heroes (the concept, at least, the execution is poor)
things that are dumb (grab some popcorn and a coke):
*vanilla ballistics (hitscan at close range, penetration not properly modelled)
*netcode (serverside hit detection on a game with an international community all divided up by server location, and is bad anyway, ties in with ballistics somewhat - both ballistics and hit detection are fixed by a mutator the devs refuse to support and openly opposed). ro's was just as iffy, but at least it had the excuse of being an otherwise good game.
*historical inaccuracies out the wazoo (minor stuff i could sort of ignore like some maps taking place in the wrong season, wrong markings on weapons, etc. is to be expected, but tripwire literally made shit up that never existed to add more stupid unlocks and then justified it with "PROVE IT WASN'T THERE" which is the worst burden of proof ever)
*unlock system, which could have been actually almost okay if they had made it use historical sidegrades instead of fairytale upgrades
*tank combat is shit since you now can't leave your tank to see over/around obstacles easily, turret control is by mouse which blows and is awful to use, tanks themselves feel rather odd and sometimes die in one shot and at others bounce everything, it's just really inconsistent)
*visuals (the maps range from okay to super nice visually but the weapon textures are absolute trash, the character textures are unimpressive, and in general it feels like twi think current gen dynamic lighting is an excuse for your textures to literally be flat colours - the models are excellent but a good model with a shit texture still looks bad)
*level design (nearly every level consists of wide open streets or plazas or just huge fields with little or no cover, what cover there is tries to shoehorn you into using the inbuilt cover system which is useless at best and actually a detriment to your chances of not being shot at worst). so far the only level which even approaches having decent design is mamayev kurgan, which is still in beta, and still not perfect. twi apparently lost all their good level designers between ro1 and ro2, no konigsplatz here. the maps are unfun meatgrinders or retarded sniperfests where one class dominates all others and the cap order on most of them makes no sense. the fact they had a great custom pavlov's house map in ro1 to work from and yet churned out the shitty stalemate version seen in this game is just mind-blowing
*everything is too fast. you aim too fast, you reload too fast, you move a little too fast but you can stop on a dime, ironsight and shoot someone at the drop of a hat. the game literally feels like every other shooter ever. fluid movement is a godsend after how clunky ro1 was, but jesus christ fluid doesn't necessarily mean fast
*single-player campaign they hyped so much is just playing multiplayer maps with slightly different cap orders and bots. that's it. it's practice mode from ro1 except instead of sprinting around hipspraying, the bots in ro1 spend 90% of their time behind walls popping up and down. you may as well play whack-a-mole, it's the same experience for much cheaper.
*terrible support. i seriously think twi must've lost all their good people between ro1 and ro2. ro1 had regular free updates with several new maps each, occasionally new vehicles, regular bugfixes, and so on. this game has two vehicles and the additional ones that were promised to "follow soon after release" are still nowhere to be seen - not even ANNOUNCED - seven or eight months later. the devs are still busy trying to figure out what actually made people like ro1 (not kidding, they have no idea, they have to keep asking), new vehicles any time this year are unlikely which is pretty poor. oh yeah, and the devs still haven't fixed numerous bugs, some game-breaking, that have been in since beta. in fact they seem to introduce more with each new update which is fucking amazing. while they should be fixing bugs or removing unlocks from the game they are actually busy adding a mode which is literally call of duty 2 to the game, because they want to try rope in casuals and somehow believe that will revive the community. not likely, call of duty is still far better than ro2's casual mode, i doubt anyone but idiotic tripwire fanboys will even play it.
*devs are openly hostile to criticism, including the constructive sort, and will ban you from the forums, delete all your posts, and even CENSOR YOUR USERNAME perpetually if you prove enough of a thorn in their side by daring to point out the many, many flaws in the game or just how poor their attitude is. they're like bioware, except they actually alienated most of their fans, so the few left white-knighting them are either idiots or new kids on the block trying to brown-nose to the devs. oh by the way, while they're off deleting posts which politely but harshly and honestly criticise them as well as posts which outright flame them or their yes-men, said yes-men and devs will verbally abuse people at will and those posts will be lauded. it's like they are channeling goebbels himself, fucking unbelievable.
*game is sparsely populated, even compared to ro1's final few weeks of life, so good luck playing against anything other than bots unless you a) live in the us and are lucky enough to get a slot in the 2.fj server or b) live outside the us, are lucky enough to get a slot in the 2.fj server, and can tolerate playing with an awful ping on bad netcode
*features promised for launch - notably the multiplayer 'campaign' gametype - are still nowhere to be seen
*heroes, which we were told would be visually impressive, are literally dudes with rolled sleeves and unbuttoned collar (summer) or different cold weather gear (winter). every other rank from recruit to veteran is an imacculately-clad soldier with varying levels of brown grunge brush overlayed onto the texture. zero fucking effort. oh yeah, and for some reason, the german heroes are the only germans who get any cold weather gear; they have a parka, regular troops get nothing. not even a fucking greatcoat. remember all the iconic photos of german troops wrapped head to toe in blankets, tattered coats, boxes for shoes, etc.? none of that here! they just wear the standard summer uniform with some half-assed white shit brushed onto it to look like snow.
*the devs actually ruined the one good competitive ladder this game had. i am not fucking kidding. the president of tripwire himself is responsible for there being no serious competitive play in this game. several people were completely excommunicated from the tripwire forums over this.
*while it adds neat features ro1 lacked, like adjustable sights, it takes away just as many. you can't fix or unfix your bayonet at will; it has to be UNLOCKED at level 25 and then cannot be removed (until the devs finally patch in selectable weapon levels, which is a shitty 'fix' at best). yes, a piece of equipment that was standard issue to every soldier is a level 25 unlock for those who don't own the first ro. oh, and the bayonet makes you a million times more effective in close combat, so it's pretty unfair on guys who don't have it yet.
i could literally go on for hours, this game was the single biggest gaming-related disappointment i have experienced in my entire time playing games and it almost ruined them totally for me. i was an idiot, i preordered a game from a studio i loved and expected it to be good. turns out tripwire lucked out with ro1 and killing floor and are actually one of the shittiest devs you will find, anywhere. don't buy games from them.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Welp, that's it folks; all hope for Red Orchestra 2 is gone
Tripwire just announced that they are planning to add crosshairs, camera-anchored weapons, and more resilient players into the game. It is unclear how they're implementing this, but from what I gather this new gametype is to replace the default "relaxed realism" gametype - the one where you already had a minimap, pistols for every class, and so on - with RO2's current "realism" level remaining as-is and "Classic" mode (essentially RO1 with better graphics, flaws and all - in many cases a step backwards).
Needless to say, there was a huge backlash, followed by more arrogance and strawman arguments by TWI, along with some pretty intriguing moderation. Posts openly flaming the "0.01%" of the community that railed against the many mistakes made in the game were let be, but any post that could even tangentially be construed as infractable were not only infracted but also deleted. This is nothing new from the developers who delete entire accounts, along with all of their posts, and then censor their usernames for expressing dissent, and try to press slander charges in response to perfectly legitimate criticism. The author of that blog was a longtime supporter of Red Orchestra; I saw him nearly every other game I played. A truly dedicated fan who fell out of favour because he didn't accept Tripwire's new direction of appealing to the masses to make a quick buck, regardless of the knock-on effects. Like, say, your game being a barren, deserted wasteland a mere seven months after its big release.
Speaking of which, who else is wondering just what wisdom Tripwire sees in dividing their already dying community even further with three entirely separate modes of play? These are not simple gameplay differences like CTF versus team deathmatch, these are fundamentally different games.
I've already had a post deleted (as did another goon who made a pretty good argument against a "whiners" post - which, by the way, was not deleted while his was), so I wouldn't be surprised if I soon find myself banned from the forums and totally excommunicated, too. But you know what? I'm not entirely sure I care. My hopes for the game are clearly never going to come to fruition as long as Tripwire is at the helm, the only portion of the community allowed to have a say is the one that agrees with TWI's decisions, and frankly I am appalled at the arrogance displayed by the devs when not so many years ago, it was the now-beloved casual gamers they were mocking and banishing from the forums.
Quite frankly, their next game could give me a blowjob while I play, I still won't be buying it. Congratulations on losing a customer who had, until RO2's release, regarded Tripwire Interactive as their favourite developer by a country mile and intended to buy all their games well into the future.
Needless to say, there was a huge backlash, followed by more arrogance and strawman arguments by TWI, along with some pretty intriguing moderation. Posts openly flaming the "0.01%" of the community that railed against the many mistakes made in the game were let be, but any post that could even tangentially be construed as infractable were not only infracted but also deleted. This is nothing new from the developers who delete entire accounts, along with all of their posts, and then censor their usernames for expressing dissent, and try to press slander charges in response to perfectly legitimate criticism. The author of that blog was a longtime supporter of Red Orchestra; I saw him nearly every other game I played. A truly dedicated fan who fell out of favour because he didn't accept Tripwire's new direction of appealing to the masses to make a quick buck, regardless of the knock-on effects. Like, say, your game being a barren, deserted wasteland a mere seven months after its big release.
Speaking of which, who else is wondering just what wisdom Tripwire sees in dividing their already dying community even further with three entirely separate modes of play? These are not simple gameplay differences like CTF versus team deathmatch, these are fundamentally different games.
I've already had a post deleted (as did another goon who made a pretty good argument against a "whiners" post - which, by the way, was not deleted while his was), so I wouldn't be surprised if I soon find myself banned from the forums and totally excommunicated, too. But you know what? I'm not entirely sure I care. My hopes for the game are clearly never going to come to fruition as long as Tripwire is at the helm, the only portion of the community allowed to have a say is the one that agrees with TWI's decisions, and frankly I am appalled at the arrogance displayed by the devs when not so many years ago, it was the now-beloved casual gamers they were mocking and banishing from the forums.
Quite frankly, their next game could give me a blowjob while I play, I still won't be buying it. Congratulations on losing a customer who had, until RO2's release, regarded Tripwire Interactive as their favourite developer by a country mile and intended to buy all their games well into the future.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Red Orchestra 2 - she loves me, she loves me not
Oh, Tripwire.
I was going to make a bunch of posts between last August and now. I have about five or six drafts kicking around and a bunch of half-formed thoughts still lingering at the back of my mind, or scribbled down on various sheets of paper that litter my desk (and much of my floor). In the end, though, there's really only one game that I feel strongly enough to write about. Not because the others weren't good, or I didn't think some features revolutionary and others counterproductive, but because Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the gaming industry, and everything that is right about it, at the same time.
As anyone who knows me even vaguely will know, I am a diehard Red Orchestra fan. From the day I got the game in late 2006 - on the suggestion of a good friend and curiosity stirred by various Steam ads - I fell in love with it. I've never been good at most shooters, as I spent my childhood playing combat flight sims and then RTS games. They're too fast for me, or demand too much fine motor control too suddenly. They're also... well, kind of bland, honestly. You can only play so many rounds of Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (grav gun volleyball excepted), or even the early Battlefield games before it all starts to feel like one big blob of sameness. Now before anyone sends me death threats for implying that HL2 and Battlefield were samey dross, I'm not saying that - what I'm saying is that the core mechanics were always the same. Moonwalk around with WASD, put crosshair over bad guy, shoot mans. Half your bullets will miss unless you have a sniper rifle and hit detection and damage output are done by hitscan calculations on a giant invisible refrigerator box your enemy is encapsulated within. If you hit them enough times and luck is on your side, they fall over. No matter how many revolutionary or genre-defining features games have introduced, nearly every shooter on the market has fallen into that same category.
Then I discovered Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Developed by modders-turned-studio Tripwire Interactive, the game was an improved retail version of a mod they had used to win the Make Something Unreal competition. In terms of gameplay, I understand it was similar to the later versions of the mod (which I have sadly never played) but featured considerable polishing. The game was still a fairly recent release when I bought it, and it immediately proved to be a different beast to Day of Defeat: Source, Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault, and Call of Duty, which had been the only WWII shooters I had really logged any play time with up to that point. There was no crosshair; my weapon would move around the screen and deviate from centre, and the bullets would go where the muzzle was pointing, not where the camera was looking. The only method of aiming reliably was to use ironsights or a scope. Hitboxes were no longer gigantic boxes, but so detailed that I began to make a habit of shooting enemy snipers' rifles out of their hands to annoy them. Players couldn't heal and their health didn't regenerate, and they couldn't take many shots before they went down, either. The gameplay was slow compared to the games I had come from, and yet far more tense and astronomically more rewarding. There was a definite sense of your actions having consequences - if you tried to race across a street being covered by a machine gun, you couldn't take a couple of hits and then change your mind halfway. You were dead. It was also a game (probably one of the first) where teamwork wasn't just a suggestion - it was a necessity.
It wasn't just this that made RO appealing to me. I've always been mesmerised by WWII history, and this was the first game to really explore the Eastern front in any considerable depth (since CoD did little more than reinforce make-believe Hollywood stereotypes). Maps were based on real engagements, and in some cases they almost perfectly replicated locations that existed or even still exist today. Weapons and vehicles handled as close to their real-life counterparts as possible in the Unreal 2.5 engine (well, except the recoil-o-matic submachine guns). Uniforms were based on the real things. Visuals were gritty, but not overly dramatic.
Red Orchestra was not a game that would appeal to a vast majority of gamers. Free weekend promotions from Steam would see an influx of players from mainstream shooters, and while some would stay, the majority had little or nothing positive to say about the game. Tripwire realised they had a niche market, however, and continued to support the game and its community without sacrificing the things that made it great in the name of a larger profit. They continued this tradition of excellent support with Killing Floor afterwards, although that game enjoyed a much larger playerbase, likely because gamers can't say no to a zombie game.
With all that said, you can imagine how excited I was when Tripwire finally announced that "our next project" was indeed a sequel as many had expected. Initial screenshots and gameplay videos confirmed my suspicions it would blow everything else out of the water, including the preceding game - Tripwire had taken all the things that made RO great, and improved upon them. They'd also listened to the community's suggestions over time, incorporating sight adjustment, functional ironsights on sniper rifles, improved weapon deployment, and a drastically improved tank element. They'd also added a whole bunch of new gamemodes. Everything looked set to astonish.
Except it didn't. Well, not the way I had hoped.
You see, somewhere along the line, the decision was made that the game should appeal to a wider audience. You may recognise this as the scourge that is currently plaguing the gaming industry (and even many mod teams); instead of picking a solid audience and sticking to it, developers are trying to make their games all things to all men and the result is seldom a good one. I've said it on here before: you can't do everything and do it well. You can do it mediocre, and make your game a bland experience for everybody rather than an excellent one for a specific audience. RO found its niche and catered to it exclusively, and was dearly loved for it. Its successor seems to have gone astray somewhere along the line.
RO2 is much, much faster paced. You move faster, you bring up your sights faster, you reload faster, and automatics rule the day. Long gone are the times of bolt-action rifles making up the overwhelming majority of a team's arsenal; in any given RO2 match, you're lucky if a third of your team is using them. Exceptionally rare, experimental weapons - which may not have (and in some cases almost certainly did not) seen action anywhere near Stalingrad - shift the balance even more, with the MKb.42 (H) giving the Germans a decisive upper hand reminiscient of the StG.44 in RO. The difference here is that the Soviets have no real answer to it until players unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh, and even then the MKb's versatility is unmatched.
Yep, you read that right, folks. There's an unlock system. This is quite different from the titular 'Heroes' system, which was by no means a bad idea; this is purely weapon-based, and it unlocks improvements for some weapons, cosmetic changes for others, and nothing for some. As well as improving the way your character handles the given weapon (which is just fine by me), you will magically upgrade it as time goes on. This could have worked if it hadn't been cobbled together in such an arbitrary way. Already good weapons like the MKb and MG34 - both of which totally outmatch their direct counterparts - can be extensively upgraded, while the DP-28 remains in its normal state regardless. Players must unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh-41, despite the 35-round stick magazines the weapon starts with only becoming widespread in the year following the battle the entire game is centred on. They must also unlock select-fire for the weapon... despite the fact that this feature was standard on it until its deletion in a 1944 revision of the design. Similarly, Soviet snipers start with the PU scope for their M91/30, and must work towards the side-mounted PEM. The PEM was almost ubiquitous until 1943, when it began to be replaced by the PU. I'd like to remind you that the Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942 and ended in February of 1943.
I could write a small book about the sheer mess of bugs that the game has been since the early-access beta, and how very few have been fixed despite constant patching, but I won't. I'm here to talk about game design, not technical details.
As you can hopefully glean from the above, the game has a lot of historical inaccuracies; it also has maps accurate to the last brick (not exaggerating) and uniforms that are absolutely on the money. Despite the changes to weapon balancing, the weapons themselves are the best I have ever seen in a game and I seriously doubt they will ever be surpassed - they are as close as you will get to shooting an actual firearm in any game. At times, I can feel the gameplay that made RO my one true gaming love struggling to shine through. That's the most infuriating thing about this game; under the mountains of slutty makeup and MKb.42s, there is the true heir to RO's throne as the reigning monarch of tactical realism in games, and everything we could ever have asked for. The problem is getting to it under the aforementioned, and Tripwire's attitude so far has not been promising. The game's sales figures were excellent - it far outsold Ostfront and at one point was well ahead of Modern Warfare 3 in number of preorders on Steam - but only a few weeks from release, the servers are barren wastelands and many, many people have been left with a sour taste in their mouths. Is the game doomed? I really hope not. The core gameplay and mechanics are far superior to anything, and I don't just mean in its class - not even Battlefield 3 can scratch the surface, and the latter comes off as gamey and shallow in comparison. All the game needs is some love and for Tripwire to go back and undo the haphazard and ill-advised design changes they kept quiet until release, and give us the game we expected - the game that wants to get out.
This, people, is why you do not ever try and leave your niche once you've found it. Please remember this lesson.
I was going to make a bunch of posts between last August and now. I have about five or six drafts kicking around and a bunch of half-formed thoughts still lingering at the back of my mind, or scribbled down on various sheets of paper that litter my desk (and much of my floor). In the end, though, there's really only one game that I feel strongly enough to write about. Not because the others weren't good, or I didn't think some features revolutionary and others counterproductive, but because Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the gaming industry, and everything that is right about it, at the same time.
As anyone who knows me even vaguely will know, I am a diehard Red Orchestra fan. From the day I got the game in late 2006 - on the suggestion of a good friend and curiosity stirred by various Steam ads - I fell in love with it. I've never been good at most shooters, as I spent my childhood playing combat flight sims and then RTS games. They're too fast for me, or demand too much fine motor control too suddenly. They're also... well, kind of bland, honestly. You can only play so many rounds of Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (grav gun volleyball excepted), or even the early Battlefield games before it all starts to feel like one big blob of sameness. Now before anyone sends me death threats for implying that HL2 and Battlefield were samey dross, I'm not saying that - what I'm saying is that the core mechanics were always the same. Moonwalk around with WASD, put crosshair over bad guy, shoot mans. Half your bullets will miss unless you have a sniper rifle and hit detection and damage output are done by hitscan calculations on a giant invisible refrigerator box your enemy is encapsulated within. If you hit them enough times and luck is on your side, they fall over. No matter how many revolutionary or genre-defining features games have introduced, nearly every shooter on the market has fallen into that same category.
Then I discovered Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Developed by modders-turned-studio Tripwire Interactive, the game was an improved retail version of a mod they had used to win the Make Something Unreal competition. In terms of gameplay, I understand it was similar to the later versions of the mod (which I have sadly never played) but featured considerable polishing. The game was still a fairly recent release when I bought it, and it immediately proved to be a different beast to Day of Defeat: Source, Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault, and Call of Duty, which had been the only WWII shooters I had really logged any play time with up to that point. There was no crosshair; my weapon would move around the screen and deviate from centre, and the bullets would go where the muzzle was pointing, not where the camera was looking. The only method of aiming reliably was to use ironsights or a scope. Hitboxes were no longer gigantic boxes, but so detailed that I began to make a habit of shooting enemy snipers' rifles out of their hands to annoy them. Players couldn't heal and their health didn't regenerate, and they couldn't take many shots before they went down, either. The gameplay was slow compared to the games I had come from, and yet far more tense and astronomically more rewarding. There was a definite sense of your actions having consequences - if you tried to race across a street being covered by a machine gun, you couldn't take a couple of hits and then change your mind halfway. You were dead. It was also a game (probably one of the first) where teamwork wasn't just a suggestion - it was a necessity.
It wasn't just this that made RO appealing to me. I've always been mesmerised by WWII history, and this was the first game to really explore the Eastern front in any considerable depth (since CoD did little more than reinforce make-believe Hollywood stereotypes). Maps were based on real engagements, and in some cases they almost perfectly replicated locations that existed or even still exist today. Weapons and vehicles handled as close to their real-life counterparts as possible in the Unreal 2.5 engine (well, except the recoil-o-matic submachine guns). Uniforms were based on the real things. Visuals were gritty, but not overly dramatic.
Red Orchestra was not a game that would appeal to a vast majority of gamers. Free weekend promotions from Steam would see an influx of players from mainstream shooters, and while some would stay, the majority had little or nothing positive to say about the game. Tripwire realised they had a niche market, however, and continued to support the game and its community without sacrificing the things that made it great in the name of a larger profit. They continued this tradition of excellent support with Killing Floor afterwards, although that game enjoyed a much larger playerbase, likely because gamers can't say no to a zombie game.
With all that said, you can imagine how excited I was when Tripwire finally announced that "our next project" was indeed a sequel as many had expected. Initial screenshots and gameplay videos confirmed my suspicions it would blow everything else out of the water, including the preceding game - Tripwire had taken all the things that made RO great, and improved upon them. They'd also listened to the community's suggestions over time, incorporating sight adjustment, functional ironsights on sniper rifles, improved weapon deployment, and a drastically improved tank element. They'd also added a whole bunch of new gamemodes. Everything looked set to astonish.
Except it didn't. Well, not the way I had hoped.
You see, somewhere along the line, the decision was made that the game should appeal to a wider audience. You may recognise this as the scourge that is currently plaguing the gaming industry (and even many mod teams); instead of picking a solid audience and sticking to it, developers are trying to make their games all things to all men and the result is seldom a good one. I've said it on here before: you can't do everything and do it well. You can do it mediocre, and make your game a bland experience for everybody rather than an excellent one for a specific audience. RO found its niche and catered to it exclusively, and was dearly loved for it. Its successor seems to have gone astray somewhere along the line.
RO2 is much, much faster paced. You move faster, you bring up your sights faster, you reload faster, and automatics rule the day. Long gone are the times of bolt-action rifles making up the overwhelming majority of a team's arsenal; in any given RO2 match, you're lucky if a third of your team is using them. Exceptionally rare, experimental weapons - which may not have (and in some cases almost certainly did not) seen action anywhere near Stalingrad - shift the balance even more, with the MKb.42 (H) giving the Germans a decisive upper hand reminiscient of the StG.44 in RO. The difference here is that the Soviets have no real answer to it until players unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh, and even then the MKb's versatility is unmatched.
Yep, you read that right, folks. There's an unlock system. This is quite different from the titular 'Heroes' system, which was by no means a bad idea; this is purely weapon-based, and it unlocks improvements for some weapons, cosmetic changes for others, and nothing for some. As well as improving the way your character handles the given weapon (which is just fine by me), you will magically upgrade it as time goes on. This could have worked if it hadn't been cobbled together in such an arbitrary way. Already good weapons like the MKb and MG34 - both of which totally outmatch their direct counterparts - can be extensively upgraded, while the DP-28 remains in its normal state regardless. Players must unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh-41, despite the 35-round stick magazines the weapon starts with only becoming widespread in the year following the battle the entire game is centred on. They must also unlock select-fire for the weapon... despite the fact that this feature was standard on it until its deletion in a 1944 revision of the design. Similarly, Soviet snipers start with the PU scope for their M91/30, and must work towards the side-mounted PEM. The PEM was almost ubiquitous until 1943, when it began to be replaced by the PU. I'd like to remind you that the Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942 and ended in February of 1943.
I could write a small book about the sheer mess of bugs that the game has been since the early-access beta, and how very few have been fixed despite constant patching, but I won't. I'm here to talk about game design, not technical details.
As you can hopefully glean from the above, the game has a lot of historical inaccuracies; it also has maps accurate to the last brick (not exaggerating) and uniforms that are absolutely on the money. Despite the changes to weapon balancing, the weapons themselves are the best I have ever seen in a game and I seriously doubt they will ever be surpassed - they are as close as you will get to shooting an actual firearm in any game. At times, I can feel the gameplay that made RO my one true gaming love struggling to shine through. That's the most infuriating thing about this game; under the mountains of slutty makeup and MKb.42s, there is the true heir to RO's throne as the reigning monarch of tactical realism in games, and everything we could ever have asked for. The problem is getting to it under the aforementioned, and Tripwire's attitude so far has not been promising. The game's sales figures were excellent - it far outsold Ostfront and at one point was well ahead of Modern Warfare 3 in number of preorders on Steam - but only a few weeks from release, the servers are barren wastelands and many, many people have been left with a sour taste in their mouths. Is the game doomed? I really hope not. The core gameplay and mechanics are far superior to anything, and I don't just mean in its class - not even Battlefield 3 can scratch the surface, and the latter comes off as gamey and shallow in comparison. All the game needs is some love and for Tripwire to go back and undo the haphazard and ill-advised design changes they kept quiet until release, and give us the game we expected - the game that wants to get out.
This, people, is why you do not ever try and leave your niche once you've found it. Please remember this lesson.
Monday, August 2, 2010
I hate modern gaming, and here's why
There are a lot of reasons I'm growing increasingly frustrated with gaming. Some are to do with the developers, both commercial and mod, and some are to do with the community. This won't be a comprehensive guide to my pet hates, but a list of things that do irritate me and why. Feel free to chip in - the comment section is there for a reason.
Let's start with the sudden, almost unanimous swing from 'quality' to 'quantity'. While this is at least understandable on some level for some of the larger commercial developers and their publishers, what really gets me is how infectious it seems to be. The mentality of modders almost reflects this to a tee: pack in more shiny features, and focus on blinding players with a plethora of new toys before worrying about 'small' problems like game-breaking bugs or substandard gameplay. It's astounding just how rapidly this has spread; I've been hard-pressed to find a game or mod in development which isn't more concerned about adding in more filler than delivering what's needed most: consistent, enjoyable gameplay. It's another example of how devs are trying to be average at everything, but good at nothing, and it's not something that works well.
Back in the old days of gaming (read: last decade), the focus was almost solely on improving gameplay. Indeed, devs would cut enough content to create an entire new game just to streamline the experience. Some games were cut and restarted altogether, like Half-Life 2. There was no DLC, patches were entirely devoted to bugfixes and gameplay improvements, and people seemed happy with this arrangement. I certainly was. If we wanted more, we could add it ourselves; it wasn't the devs' job to pack the game full of whatever whimsical wants each and every player possessed. No longer! Devs will now go out of their way to accomodate for as many people as possible, broadening their target audience from a well-chosen niche to literally anyone. We high-and-mighty PC gamers usually attribute the overwhelming dumbing-down of games (particularly when favourites are ruined in this manner) to console gamers, but that's not entirely true. We, too, are the ones causing this downfall. More on this later, as now I'll explore some of the effects.
There's no two ways around it: modern games are becoming increasingly easy. I don't mean that we're all getting so good at them it seems easy, I mean that developers are deliberately dumbing these games down so they're more accessible. In a lot of cases, this is absolutely not a good thing. A game with a steep learning curve will usually have a strong, dedicated fanbase (no matter their size), and more often than not, this fanbase have become very good at the game through a lot of hard-learned lessons. Opening up that game to the 'drooling masses' usually results in a much bigger and more mainstream fanbase, but very likely will drive the old hands away. We'll look at two examples: Red Orchestra: Ostfront and its mods, and Il-2 Sturmovik.
From its earliest days as an Unreal Tournament mod, Red Orchestra has been aimed squarely at those looking for a more immersive and realistic WWII shooter. It's hard to pick up and even for veteran players, it remains unforgiving. There's very little room for error, and what room there is tends not to exist for very long. It says a lot about Tripwire's dedication to staying true to their roots that upon making the retail game, Ostfront, they did very little in the way of making the game more accessible to new players. While this means RO has a comparatively tiny community for its age, those players tend to be fairly close-knit and have stayed the course, despite newer shooters coming out in the years since. I recall watching a G4 review of the game shortly after I got into it, and sitting there in disbelief as it was labelled pretty much the worst game ever just because the presenters - who presumably don't care about any game that isn't Quake - thought it took "forever" to reload the bolt-action rifles. The video accompanying this review showed quite plainly why they had such a horrible experience: they were trying to play the game as if it was a typical fast-paced FPS. They were running around in the open with a 91/30, trying to hipshoot enemies from across the map. At the time I was pretty mad that such a good game was reviewed by such idiots and thus given a bad image, but now I'm rather glad that was the case. It's kept the CS:S kiddies away and kept bullshit to a minimum.
Let's start with the sudden, almost unanimous swing from 'quality' to 'quantity'. While this is at least understandable on some level for some of the larger commercial developers and their publishers, what really gets me is how infectious it seems to be. The mentality of modders almost reflects this to a tee: pack in more shiny features, and focus on blinding players with a plethora of new toys before worrying about 'small' problems like game-breaking bugs or substandard gameplay. It's astounding just how rapidly this has spread; I've been hard-pressed to find a game or mod in development which isn't more concerned about adding in more filler than delivering what's needed most: consistent, enjoyable gameplay. It's another example of how devs are trying to be average at everything, but good at nothing, and it's not something that works well.
Back in the old days of gaming (read: last decade), the focus was almost solely on improving gameplay. Indeed, devs would cut enough content to create an entire new game just to streamline the experience. Some games were cut and restarted altogether, like Half-Life 2. There was no DLC, patches were entirely devoted to bugfixes and gameplay improvements, and people seemed happy with this arrangement. I certainly was. If we wanted more, we could add it ourselves; it wasn't the devs' job to pack the game full of whatever whimsical wants each and every player possessed. No longer! Devs will now go out of their way to accomodate for as many people as possible, broadening their target audience from a well-chosen niche to literally anyone. We high-and-mighty PC gamers usually attribute the overwhelming dumbing-down of games (particularly when favourites are ruined in this manner) to console gamers, but that's not entirely true. We, too, are the ones causing this downfall. More on this later, as now I'll explore some of the effects.
There's no two ways around it: modern games are becoming increasingly easy. I don't mean that we're all getting so good at them it seems easy, I mean that developers are deliberately dumbing these games down so they're more accessible. In a lot of cases, this is absolutely not a good thing. A game with a steep learning curve will usually have a strong, dedicated fanbase (no matter their size), and more often than not, this fanbase have become very good at the game through a lot of hard-learned lessons. Opening up that game to the 'drooling masses' usually results in a much bigger and more mainstream fanbase, but very likely will drive the old hands away. We'll look at two examples: Red Orchestra: Ostfront and its mods, and Il-2 Sturmovik.
From its earliest days as an Unreal Tournament mod, Red Orchestra has been aimed squarely at those looking for a more immersive and realistic WWII shooter. It's hard to pick up and even for veteran players, it remains unforgiving. There's very little room for error, and what room there is tends not to exist for very long. It says a lot about Tripwire's dedication to staying true to their roots that upon making the retail game, Ostfront, they did very little in the way of making the game more accessible to new players. While this means RO has a comparatively tiny community for its age, those players tend to be fairly close-knit and have stayed the course, despite newer shooters coming out in the years since. I recall watching a G4 review of the game shortly after I got into it, and sitting there in disbelief as it was labelled pretty much the worst game ever just because the presenters - who presumably don't care about any game that isn't Quake - thought it took "forever" to reload the bolt-action rifles. The video accompanying this review showed quite plainly why they had such a horrible experience: they were trying to play the game as if it was a typical fast-paced FPS. They were running around in the open with a 91/30, trying to hipshoot enemies from across the map. At the time I was pretty mad that such a good game was reviewed by such idiots and thus given a bad image, but now I'm rather glad that was the case. It's kept the CS:S kiddies away and kept bullshit to a minimum.
The mods Mare Nostrum and Carpathian Crosses follow the same path as the game itself, providing quality content and not dumbing the gameplay down at all. Both mods are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Mare Nostrum is under continuing development, but I've yet to see a populated server; the last time I recall anyone playing it was after its release on Steam. This is an almighty shame, as it's one of the better mods I've played for any game.
On the other hand, we have Darkest Hour. The mod takes place in Western Europe - chiefly France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - but I suppose someone had to do it. Unfortunately, this immediately ropes in a whole lot of gamers with little or no interest in RO or any of its other mods; all they want to do is relive scenes from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. A whole Day of Defeat clan, numbering somewhere beyond two hundred members at last count, immediately came into the mod, bought up a whole lot of servers, and set about trying to turn it into their previous platform by making replicas of maps like Donner. Any other RO vets should know how this turned out - for the rest of you, 'badly' doesn't even begin to cover it. The map was dominated by SMG classes and an exercise in misery for everyone else. By the time they finally got over their hard-on for bringing DoD:S into the mod, they decided to play realism with the long-standing units. At time of writing, they own the only frequently-populated mixed-map server outside of Europe, and take a generally hostile stance to anyone and everyone. In short, a single external influence has a monopoly on the game servers. You work it out.
Even if there were some less strictly-run (and equally populated) servers to play on, the community has been so saturated with imports from other games that each passing update makes it that little bit less fun for the old hands. Rather than adapt to the RO way of gaming, the overwhelming impression I get from the Darkest Hour community is "this is too boring, it's too realistic, it's not fun, change the game to make it perfectly balanced". Balance is not something that works out so well in a game like RO or its mods; you end up with the Tiger situation (i.e. the Tiger was nerfed to the point of uselessness in the retail game) or the SMG situation (they suffer worse muzzle climb than rifle-calibre semiautomatics). Both of these were measures to try and prevent complaints from the less attentive players, and both (in the opinion of this writer and also many others) is the game's biggest downfall. Mare Nostrum did away with both issues and is far better for it; Darkest Hour got rid of both issues and replaced them with ten more. Grenades, as of the last patch, are utterly useless; they have to land within three feet of your target, and even then it's not a sure thing. The reason? To prevent "grenade spam". Never mind that oftentimes during not just WWII but before and since, whole sections would throw a grenade or two each into a building to clear it out. There is currently a lot of debate about putting Pershings or even Super Pershings into some maps, because apparently no Allied tanker has the sense to just flank their German counterparts and kill them from behind. The 'Super Stuart' is so incredibly buffed that it's preferred over most Sherman variants.
Unlike the other two mods, DH also suffers from an acute case of 'Shiny Kit Sindrome' - every update, scores of new features (usually of questionable value) are added, while the basic art assets remain less consistent than my shooting scores. Some of the art is beautiful and a handful of the maps are on par with the best commercial offerings, while a good deal of the weapons look horrible and most of the other maps are a few boxy buildings on some flat ground. Calling for these issues to be addressed will earn you a lot of abuse from the community, whose only concern is how many more updates they need to wait for X super tank which saw little to no combat in the war, or Y useless fantasy feature I wouldn't expect from ArmA II let alone a mod running on the UE2.5. I'm not kidding; some of these people unironically beg over and over for a single, massive open-world map, field repairs for vehicles, and logistics chains. Of course, they also ask for the team they don't play as to be nerfed into oblivion as well.
Like RO, the Il-2 Sturmovik series is extremely hard for new players to get into; going online is like attending the Hartmann family reunion, even for someone who's been playing flight sims since CFS 1 (like myself). While the original developer works on the next game, Storm of War: Battle of Britain (which looks to be continuing the tradition of realism over all else), a third party released Il-2 Birds of Prey on consoles, and later Wings of Prey on PC. Playing the latter was a serious eye-opener; even with the settings on full realism, I felt more like I was watching the aerial combat sequences from Pearl Harbour than playing a game in the Il-2 series. While the graphics were gorgeous, they were stylised to hell and back; everything was either desaturated or over-saturated with no middle ground; the aircraft models, while detailed, lacked the accuracy of the former games; the aircraft paint schemes weren't even vaguely close to what they should have been (even the average Hollywood flick does a better job of replicating RAF markings than was done in WoP) and overall, the flight models just felt... wrong. I still can't pin the exact problem, but I do know that I didn't feel like I was playing an Il-2 game at all. It felt more like Battlefield flying.
In previous posts (if memory serves correctly, as it's been a long time since my last update), I have spoken about how Fallout 3 suffers horribly from this dumbing-down. It's not so much a hardcore post-apocalyptic survival game (like the true Fallout games) as it is babby's first venture into post-apocalyptic games. Apparently New Vegas remedies this, but I am going to have to wait and see; it doesn't unlock here until tomorrow. Why we still have to deal with staggered release dates and regional pricing in these days of Steam is anyone's guess - mine is publishers are concerned only about profits and not about actual gamers. Prove me wrong.
Jesus, I go on a bit when I'm irritated, don't I?
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Atmosphere vs. Gameplay - Round Two
Back to gaming, finally.
Lately (mainly due to the two more recent STALKER games being broken, and me having played Shadow of Chernobyl through about six or seven times by now), I've been playing more Fallout 3. Technically, I've finished the game once; however, on my first run I was still in the 'hurry up and finish the main quest, before it all goes down the pan on you' mindset of nearly every other game I've played. This sense of inevitability drove me to blast through the main quest at such a rate that I had barely explored the map beyond the central area of the Capital Wasteland, as well as the most direct routes between quest objectives. In doing so, I missed probably a good 50-60% of what the game had to offer, and it was too late to do anything.
Thankfully, I'd saved halfway through the assault on the Jefferson Memorial. After the credits finished, I immediately loaded up and put as much distance between myself and the ensuing battle as possible, before wandering off to explore. This broke the game pretty badly, but at least I got to explore a little.
Recently, I started the game over for the sake of altering my playing style a little. It's this character I've been playing on, and it was halfway through a trip between Meresti and Arefu that I decided on the topic for my next post.
Fallout had a very tangible time restriction on the main quest, and this was very apparent. You were told in your briefing, you had a countdown timer accessible from your Pip-Boy, and it added the very real risk of not getting things done in time and suffering for it. Fallout 3, on the other hand, seems happy to do away with this utterly. STALKER used time constraints on its side quests, but Bethesda wouldn't even take this step; even where a sense of urgency seems logical, there is absolutely none. The Big Town residents you're supposed to save from the Super Mutants in Germantown can and will wait for as long as you want. You could feasibly spend a year ingame; they'd still be there, and you'd still be able to rescue them. With this in mind, it's not entirely strange to ponder whether they really need saving at all.
Bethesda seem to half-do things a lot. The potential for character variation is decent at worst, yet everyone looks and sounds the same. Some areas of the Wasteland shine in their own desolate way, while others look like they simply took rocks, puddles, dead trees and grass and scattered them willy-nilly around the landscape. I haven't been to Washington DC (or at least not that I can remember), but I'm fairly certain even all-out nuclear war wouldn't make it look like some kind of incredibly rocky hinterland. Most pertinent to this post, they try and create a sense of urgency through the briefings for your quests, but they utterly fail to follow this through by creating any kind of consequence at all for not completing them as soon as possible.
Of course, this would present problems for players like me, who try to do everything at once: it'd result in a lot of failed quests and a lot of bad consequences. Presumably the main reason for their choice is to comply with the ever-worsening trend of molly-coddling players, making things nice and easy for them while making sure they never feel a sense of failure or regret. Fallout was made back in the day where games were challenging to the point of frustration, and the player was left on their own to work things out. Very few games seem to opt for this philosophy anymore, and that's a sad loss on our part.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little of the openness of the game world for the improvements to the overall atmosphere that such a change would bring about. Sure, you might have to decide whether to save those settlers or not in order to complete another quest. You may even need to drop everything halfway through and run back to the other side of the Wasteland in order to complete something of a much higher priority. Having said that, though, it's important to realise that the way the game works is a large part of why quests will always wait for the player.
Basically, nothing happens without your presence. Until you show up at the quest start location, it simply hasn't started. Once it's completed, that's it, there's no more. Everything that happens within the Capital Wasteland hinges upon the player, and the player alone. In some ways, GSC did get something right with Clear Sky and its faction war system: things will happen, whether you're there or not. If your friends in the Cordon are attacked while you're in Yantar, then hard luck. Life (and death) will go on with or without you or any other given character. This created some frustrating scenarios, but in the eyes of this gamer, that's preferable to a magical world where everybody simply sits around, waiting for that inevitable protagonist to show up.
The Zone feels fluid, almost real. If you're not there to help your friends, they die. If you die, nobody really cares. Your body will be looted, maybe eaten, and will decay back into the irradiated earth it lies upon. The Capital Wasteland feels like some kind of bizarre dream. If you're not there, your friends won't even be attacked; if you die, everything stops.
I doubt we'll see anything change in New Vegas, but I certainly hope that as more open-world games are released, we'll start to see more believable environments and less shallow facades.
Lately (mainly due to the two more recent STALKER games being broken, and me having played Shadow of Chernobyl through about six or seven times by now), I've been playing more Fallout 3. Technically, I've finished the game once; however, on my first run I was still in the 'hurry up and finish the main quest, before it all goes down the pan on you' mindset of nearly every other game I've played. This sense of inevitability drove me to blast through the main quest at such a rate that I had barely explored the map beyond the central area of the Capital Wasteland, as well as the most direct routes between quest objectives. In doing so, I missed probably a good 50-60% of what the game had to offer, and it was too late to do anything.
Thankfully, I'd saved halfway through the assault on the Jefferson Memorial. After the credits finished, I immediately loaded up and put as much distance between myself and the ensuing battle as possible, before wandering off to explore. This broke the game pretty badly, but at least I got to explore a little.
Recently, I started the game over for the sake of altering my playing style a little. It's this character I've been playing on, and it was halfway through a trip between Meresti and Arefu that I decided on the topic for my next post.
Fallout had a very tangible time restriction on the main quest, and this was very apparent. You were told in your briefing, you had a countdown timer accessible from your Pip-Boy, and it added the very real risk of not getting things done in time and suffering for it. Fallout 3, on the other hand, seems happy to do away with this utterly. STALKER used time constraints on its side quests, but Bethesda wouldn't even take this step; even where a sense of urgency seems logical, there is absolutely none. The Big Town residents you're supposed to save from the Super Mutants in Germantown can and will wait for as long as you want. You could feasibly spend a year ingame; they'd still be there, and you'd still be able to rescue them. With this in mind, it's not entirely strange to ponder whether they really need saving at all.
Bethesda seem to half-do things a lot. The potential for character variation is decent at worst, yet everyone looks and sounds the same. Some areas of the Wasteland shine in their own desolate way, while others look like they simply took rocks, puddles, dead trees and grass and scattered them willy-nilly around the landscape. I haven't been to Washington DC (or at least not that I can remember), but I'm fairly certain even all-out nuclear war wouldn't make it look like some kind of incredibly rocky hinterland. Most pertinent to this post, they try and create a sense of urgency through the briefings for your quests, but they utterly fail to follow this through by creating any kind of consequence at all for not completing them as soon as possible.
Of course, this would present problems for players like me, who try to do everything at once: it'd result in a lot of failed quests and a lot of bad consequences. Presumably the main reason for their choice is to comply with the ever-worsening trend of molly-coddling players, making things nice and easy for them while making sure they never feel a sense of failure or regret. Fallout was made back in the day where games were challenging to the point of frustration, and the player was left on their own to work things out. Very few games seem to opt for this philosophy anymore, and that's a sad loss on our part.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little of the openness of the game world for the improvements to the overall atmosphere that such a change would bring about. Sure, you might have to decide whether to save those settlers or not in order to complete another quest. You may even need to drop everything halfway through and run back to the other side of the Wasteland in order to complete something of a much higher priority. Having said that, though, it's important to realise that the way the game works is a large part of why quests will always wait for the player.
Basically, nothing happens without your presence. Until you show up at the quest start location, it simply hasn't started. Once it's completed, that's it, there's no more. Everything that happens within the Capital Wasteland hinges upon the player, and the player alone. In some ways, GSC did get something right with Clear Sky and its faction war system: things will happen, whether you're there or not. If your friends in the Cordon are attacked while you're in Yantar, then hard luck. Life (and death) will go on with or without you or any other given character. This created some frustrating scenarios, but in the eyes of this gamer, that's preferable to a magical world where everybody simply sits around, waiting for that inevitable protagonist to show up.
The Zone feels fluid, almost real. If you're not there to help your friends, they die. If you die, nobody really cares. Your body will be looted, maybe eaten, and will decay back into the irradiated earth it lies upon. The Capital Wasteland feels like some kind of bizarre dream. If you're not there, your friends won't even be attacked; if you die, everything stops.
I doubt we'll see anything change in New Vegas, but I certainly hope that as more open-world games are released, we'll start to see more believable environments and less shallow facades.
Monday, March 8, 2010
A little originality, please.
Some time ago, I posted an article on the generic locations used by many games, and put forth the proposal of developers going to a war far removed from any they've portrayed (however accurately or poorly) so far. Perhaps I was setting the bar too high. Perhaps it's too much to expect from the modern PC gaming industry, where large developers are so single-mindedly fixated on churning out the next reiteration of the same game in time to seize the Christmas market (yes, Activision, I am talking about you right now) that any suggestion of originality warrants the deposing of a studio's chiefs.
Maybe we should take this a little slower, then. So here's my new proposal: why not stick with the same locations, but go to a different war. Surely this isn't too much to ask? There have been plenty of wars in every developer's favourite areas, so it's not as if there's a lack of choice. In Europe alone, war has been raging since the dawn of time and it's only since WWII that things have settled down. The Middle East has probably never been at peace in human history. Likewise, central and south-east Asia have been hotbeds for conflicts through the ages.
As the favourite of late seems to be the Middle-Eastern Area of Operations, let's go to Afghanistan. But how about we do it differently this time? No more ACU-clad Americans. No more high-tech rifles which will never actually end up replacing anything, let alone the M4. No, let's take a trip back in time to the 1979-1989 conflict with the Soviet Union, in what has come to be known as their own Vietnam.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I watched Charlie Wilson's War recently. By recently, I actually mean yesterday. I see no reason this game does not exist, aside from the industry's apparent reluctance to make anyone who isn't American (or sometimes British) appear good at all, let alone a heroic character. The war was long, was bloody, and had a distinct turning point; it had a spectacular victory by the underdog, only to plunge back into chaos due to cessation of support from the US government; it had plenty of intrigue, thanks to the incredible scheme that saw the utterly outgunned and outmatched mujahideen armed with Stinger missiles. The Soviet helicopters, in particular the Mi-24 gunships, had been the absolute scourge of the Afghan resistance fighters. However, as the imposing machines began to fall from the sky, the entire course of the war changed and the eventual withdrawal by the unsuccessful Soviet invasion force was considered a contributing factor in the crumbling of the USSR.
So once again, I'm putting out a challenge. Quit working on the tenth samey re-release of a tired series, and put the love back into games that has been missing from the mainstream for years now. Eventually even the drooling diehards, who are currently oblivious to the sharp decline in quality of their favourite franchises, will come about. Try actually doing something different, something which sets you apart from the rest of the industry. Who knows, you may even make a killing.
Maybe we should take this a little slower, then. So here's my new proposal: why not stick with the same locations, but go to a different war. Surely this isn't too much to ask? There have been plenty of wars in every developer's favourite areas, so it's not as if there's a lack of choice. In Europe alone, war has been raging since the dawn of time and it's only since WWII that things have settled down. The Middle East has probably never been at peace in human history. Likewise, central and south-east Asia have been hotbeds for conflicts through the ages.
As the favourite of late seems to be the Middle-Eastern Area of Operations, let's go to Afghanistan. But how about we do it differently this time? No more ACU-clad Americans. No more high-tech rifles which will never actually end up replacing anything, let alone the M4. No, let's take a trip back in time to the 1979-1989 conflict with the Soviet Union, in what has come to be known as their own Vietnam.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I watched Charlie Wilson's War recently. By recently, I actually mean yesterday. I see no reason this game does not exist, aside from the industry's apparent reluctance to make anyone who isn't American (or sometimes British) appear good at all, let alone a heroic character. The war was long, was bloody, and had a distinct turning point; it had a spectacular victory by the underdog, only to plunge back into chaos due to cessation of support from the US government; it had plenty of intrigue, thanks to the incredible scheme that saw the utterly outgunned and outmatched mujahideen armed with Stinger missiles. The Soviet helicopters, in particular the Mi-24 gunships, had been the absolute scourge of the Afghan resistance fighters. However, as the imposing machines began to fall from the sky, the entire course of the war changed and the eventual withdrawal by the unsuccessful Soviet invasion force was considered a contributing factor in the crumbling of the USSR.
So once again, I'm putting out a challenge. Quit working on the tenth samey re-release of a tired series, and put the love back into games that has been missing from the mainstream for years now. Eventually even the drooling diehards, who are currently oblivious to the sharp decline in quality of their favourite franchises, will come about. Try actually doing something different, something which sets you apart from the rest of the industry. Who knows, you may even make a killing.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Ghillie suits in the Modern Warfare games: a perfect example of concealment done right
Too many games use unrealistic, easy-way-out devices to render concealed players invisible. In many cases, they fade into nothing, or become literally no more than a shadow. In some - ArmA 2, looking at you - they would barely stand up to a cursory glance. But of all the games I've seen so far, only one series has really done concealment right. You might be surprised to know that it's the Modern Warfare series - then again, if you play the game, probably not.
Without a doubt, this is as good as it gets. Unlike ArmA 2, your suit matches the grass sprites perfectly. Colour, density, shape - it's all there. You don't fade as you lie there on the ground, as seen in Empires or many RTS titles. Instead, your suit is what renders you invisible. To discover exactly how effective the suit was in a controlled (i.e. not mid-game in a crowded TDM server) environment, and partially to kill some time, Kolby and I took to an empty server on Overgrown, by far one of my favourite maps and easily the best map for concealment. I had long suspected the suit as modelled by Infinity Ward's artists would be effective, but it wasn't until we put it to the test that I realised just how incredibly so it was.
The guidelines were simple: one of us would stare into a corner of the barn, the other would find a position and conceal themselves. To make things fairer and a little faster, the concealed man would give a rough location so the seeker would know which area to concentrate on; if this didn't result in a find, the location would be narrowed down until the former was standing up and talking the seeker onto his position.
The results were astounding. Even when I knew exactly where Kolby was, I could only just make out his outline - if it hadn't been for the outline of his rifle, I would never have seen him. Numerous times I stepped on him, and when my turn came, he walked past me some six times before I rose up into a crouch; he passed me again twice before I stood and talked him to a point only a few feet in front of me, by which time he only noticed me because the muzzle of my rifle was right in his face.
While browsing Youtube out of boredom I happened upon the following video, which demonstrates this rather well - notice how the sniper remains nigh invisible even when he takes a knee, and how hard he is to see while prone, even while moving slowly:
If only as many developers followed the example set by IW, the gaming world would be a much better place - particularly for people like myself.
Without a doubt, this is as good as it gets. Unlike ArmA 2, your suit matches the grass sprites perfectly. Colour, density, shape - it's all there. You don't fade as you lie there on the ground, as seen in Empires or many RTS titles. Instead, your suit is what renders you invisible. To discover exactly how effective the suit was in a controlled (i.e. not mid-game in a crowded TDM server) environment, and partially to kill some time, Kolby and I took to an empty server on Overgrown, by far one of my favourite maps and easily the best map for concealment. I had long suspected the suit as modelled by Infinity Ward's artists would be effective, but it wasn't until we put it to the test that I realised just how incredibly so it was.
The guidelines were simple: one of us would stare into a corner of the barn, the other would find a position and conceal themselves. To make things fairer and a little faster, the concealed man would give a rough location so the seeker would know which area to concentrate on; if this didn't result in a find, the location would be narrowed down until the former was standing up and talking the seeker onto his position.
The results were astounding. Even when I knew exactly where Kolby was, I could only just make out his outline - if it hadn't been for the outline of his rifle, I would never have seen him. Numerous times I stepped on him, and when my turn came, he walked past me some six times before I rose up into a crouch; he passed me again twice before I stood and talked him to a point only a few feet in front of me, by which time he only noticed me because the muzzle of my rifle was right in his face.
While browsing Youtube out of boredom I happened upon the following video, which demonstrates this rather well - notice how the sniper remains nigh invisible even when he takes a knee, and how hard he is to see while prone, even while moving slowly:
If only as many developers followed the example set by IW, the gaming world would be a much better place - particularly for people like myself.
The dust settles: MW2 and matchmaking
Wow.
What a drama that was, and how unwarranted it was, too. As I'm painfully aware, there are still plenty of people who will waste no time in extolling the horrors of matchmaking and just what a low and depraved group of individuals comprise Infinity Ward; no doubt they do this despite begrudgingly playing (and probably enjoying) the game. MW2 created such an uproar that despite being literally half the world away from my own PC, I figured it pertinent to look back on the entire fiasco and share my thoughts here. I've also got little else to do for the next few hours, so naturally, typing this will amuse me enough to kill some of that time.
Right from the outset, my predicament varies drastically from that of many MW2 owners; I had the game pre-loaded, all ready to go, but I couldn't play it. It wasn't until four weeks after its release - nearly five, in fact - that I finally got to fire up the game which has caused one of the biggest online shitfights I can recall. Communities fractured, friends became arch enemies... it was absolutely ridiculous, and in the end, it was also absolutely pointless. While I have no doubt at all that various people will disagree with me, I thought MW2's multiplayer a drastic improvement over the ever-frustrating experience of the original Modern Warfare. The touted lag was nowehere to be seen; in fact, I ran into no more trouble with it than I have in any of the locally-based dedicated servers I frequent. Yes, occasionally the game has to pause for a minute or two while it migrates hosts, and yes, that has resulted in my painful and very avoidable death on multiple occasions. So what? It's a minor annoyance. It happens maybe once every five games for me, and that's at most - some days it won't happen at all. One unfair death or missed kill a day is hardly justification for the mess that followed the big announcement.
One of the other major concerns was the tactical nuke; again, this was something I found to be a non-issue. If one person can seriously get that many kills in a row without dying, it's a pretty sure sign to me that there's a severe skill stack going on, and most of the time that results in the game being little to no fun at all for those of us who still whoop with glee when we get killstreaks of more than five. An early ending to a game is hardly a life-ruining experience, and if it keeps happening, there's nothing stopping you from dropping out to find another match. I guess we're all just so used to being spoon-fed by developers that today's gamers will suffer a severe mental breakdown at the thought of actually needing to act on their own behalf.
Another concern - the customisable killstreaks. Again, non-issue. Don't like getting hammered by that C-130? Then find some cover and stay there, like any sensible being equipped with a survival instinct would do. I don't see how the new killstreaks are any worse than MW's helicopters or airstrikes were - in fact, a number of them are significantly less destructive and in the case of the care package, even useful to the other team if captured. Truth be told, the two killstreaks which proved most disruptive were - and brace for a shock here - the air strike and the helicopter. Amazing.
After several days solid of enjoyable play in various gametypes using matchmaking, I can honestly say that I'm glad Infinity Ward dared to rattle the cage of the PC gaming community. I'd even go so far as to say I'm glad that they went on to thrust a gigantic middle finger at those who couldn't accept this change.
What a drama that was, and how unwarranted it was, too. As I'm painfully aware, there are still plenty of people who will waste no time in extolling the horrors of matchmaking and just what a low and depraved group of individuals comprise Infinity Ward; no doubt they do this despite begrudgingly playing (and probably enjoying) the game. MW2 created such an uproar that despite being literally half the world away from my own PC, I figured it pertinent to look back on the entire fiasco and share my thoughts here. I've also got little else to do for the next few hours, so naturally, typing this will amuse me enough to kill some of that time.
Right from the outset, my predicament varies drastically from that of many MW2 owners; I had the game pre-loaded, all ready to go, but I couldn't play it. It wasn't until four weeks after its release - nearly five, in fact - that I finally got to fire up the game which has caused one of the biggest online shitfights I can recall. Communities fractured, friends became arch enemies... it was absolutely ridiculous, and in the end, it was also absolutely pointless. While I have no doubt at all that various people will disagree with me, I thought MW2's multiplayer a drastic improvement over the ever-frustrating experience of the original Modern Warfare. The touted lag was nowehere to be seen; in fact, I ran into no more trouble with it than I have in any of the locally-based dedicated servers I frequent. Yes, occasionally the game has to pause for a minute or two while it migrates hosts, and yes, that has resulted in my painful and very avoidable death on multiple occasions. So what? It's a minor annoyance. It happens maybe once every five games for me, and that's at most - some days it won't happen at all. One unfair death or missed kill a day is hardly justification for the mess that followed the big announcement.
One of the other major concerns was the tactical nuke; again, this was something I found to be a non-issue. If one person can seriously get that many kills in a row without dying, it's a pretty sure sign to me that there's a severe skill stack going on, and most of the time that results in the game being little to no fun at all for those of us who still whoop with glee when we get killstreaks of more than five. An early ending to a game is hardly a life-ruining experience, and if it keeps happening, there's nothing stopping you from dropping out to find another match. I guess we're all just so used to being spoon-fed by developers that today's gamers will suffer a severe mental breakdown at the thought of actually needing to act on their own behalf.
Another concern - the customisable killstreaks. Again, non-issue. Don't like getting hammered by that C-130? Then find some cover and stay there, like any sensible being equipped with a survival instinct would do. I don't see how the new killstreaks are any worse than MW's helicopters or airstrikes were - in fact, a number of them are significantly less destructive and in the case of the care package, even useful to the other team if captured. Truth be told, the two killstreaks which proved most disruptive were - and brace for a shock here - the air strike and the helicopter. Amazing.
After several days solid of enjoyable play in various gametypes using matchmaking, I can honestly say that I'm glad Infinity Ward dared to rattle the cage of the PC gaming community. I'd even go so far as to say I'm glad that they went on to thrust a gigantic middle finger at those who couldn't accept this change.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Epiphany
I can't believe it took me this long to work it out, but I've finally cracked the mystery of why ArmA 2's terrain, while being nearly photorealistic, feels unnatural.
There's no dead ground.
I'm not talking about huge valleys or sprawling basins, because as we all know, there's no shortage of those. No, what I'm talking about is the smaller-scale stuff - the stuff yours truly would seek refuge in with his mates in a contact. Drainage canals, creekbeds, culverts along the sides of the road, berms, craters, fissures, erosion channels... the list goes on. Nowhere in the entire game world - and now I think about it, nowhere in that of the first game, either - do I recall seeing any of these. Considering that ArmA 2 is regarded a sim rather than a shooter, and also considering the heavy emphasis on infantry combat, wouldn't you think that the infanteer's favourite forms of cover would be included from the outset?
I'd gladly sacrifice a few forests, truck-sized boulders, and locked buildings to see these included in ArmA 2. Don't even start me on the gates and doors, though.
There's no dead ground.
I'm not talking about huge valleys or sprawling basins, because as we all know, there's no shortage of those. No, what I'm talking about is the smaller-scale stuff - the stuff yours truly would seek refuge in with his mates in a contact. Drainage canals, creekbeds, culverts along the sides of the road, berms, craters, fissures, erosion channels... the list goes on. Nowhere in the entire game world - and now I think about it, nowhere in that of the first game, either - do I recall seeing any of these. Considering that ArmA 2 is regarded a sim rather than a shooter, and also considering the heavy emphasis on infantry combat, wouldn't you think that the infanteer's favourite forms of cover would be included from the outset?
I'd gladly sacrifice a few forests, truck-sized boulders, and locked buildings to see these included in ArmA 2. Don't even start me on the gates and doors, though.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Borderlands
Over the past few days, I've been gaming hard. I'm leaving very shortly to go to basic training, where I will remain for four weeks (or so I hope); few things bother me more than to leave a story unfinished, so I was intent on completing Borderlands before my departure.
At first, I wasn't sure what to think. The effort put into the game's intro sequence alone was pretty impressive; however once I embarked upon my journey, it began to feel a lot like I imagine Fallout 3 would have if Bethesda had left out a lot of the extraneous bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I like the sheer amount of features in that game; VATS makes up for the awful manual aiming (although I would rather they fixed that instead), and I wasted no time in setting about rescuing every teddy I could find from the horrors of the Capital Wasteland. The ability to just mess about doing things like this was kind of entertaining, but at the same time it diverted me away from the main story time and time again; I'd take on one side mission and end up trying to complete ten all at once. While Borderlands presented me with a lot of the same issues - particularly the one where I would have a small nervous breakdown trying to work out which areas to explore, for fear of forgetting to look somewhere else - it did it a lot less often and the side quests were generally fairly short, which was nice.
The game started out at a rather leisurely pace; in fact, it remained that way for most of its duration, again echoing the things about Fallout 3 which irritated me. Forgive me for comparing the two almost exclusively, but it's for reasons of simplicity, not a belief that Borderlands is any attempt at a copy of that game. Fallout 3 is the most recent game I've played which I can really compare Borderlands to at all. To get back on track, the reasons for this were twofold: slow-paced missions, or plenty of missions. As the game progressed, the number of quests available skyrocketed and it took me about two days to get through the New Haven phase of the game alone. That said, I was enjoying myself. While a lot of the side objectives tended to repeat themselves - searching for objects scattered either locally or over an entire map segment being the worst offenders, followed by elimination challenges - they usually coincided fairly nicely with my more important tasks or even each other, allowing me to wrap up anything from two to six all at once. I'm not entirely sure how, but Gearbox have somehow managed to stop this from boring me to death, like it would in most games. Gearbox have also managed to reference a variety of absolutely brilliant movies without making things seem cheesy, and I got a good laugh out of spotting these. At times things became a little tedious, but never enough for me to quit the game for days, weeks or months on end like I generally do; I took breaks every few hours, but then I was right back into the game.
I think that the sheer uniqueness of the game's art style played a large part in appealing to me. It's something I haven't seen for a long time, and it's always nice when a dev decides to fly completely in the face of the current trends, even when there's no real guarantee that the gamble will pay off. Originally, Borderlands subscribed to the same gritty over-realistic, Hollywood-esque style that many recent titles have used; although it still featured far more colour than most of those games, there wasn't much else to distinguish it visually. In changing to a completely unrealistic, almost cartoony art style, Gearbox not only managed to make it stand out from the crowd, but they also proved that you don't have to follow everyone else's lead to produce a popular game. Even in the absence of the usual long cinematic sequences or rooted-to-the-spot exposition dialogues, I found it relatively easy to lose myself in the world of Pandora; I developed an almost parental over-protectiveness of Claptraps, and took great glee in mowing down any who I found near a hurt one. I developed something of a 'feel' for the characters' personalities, usually spotting a betrayal or a helping gesture before it came. Most importantly, I felt the kind of drive to reach the Vault while keeping Lilith as safe as possible that I needed to finish the game (despite there being no real penalty for dying). Even though no real backstory was provided for the characters ingame and scant details were all I had seen elsewhere, it was fairly easy to work out what made Lilith (who is an absolute force to be reckoned with in good hands) tick. That said, I would've liked the chance to actually learn more about each character at some point in the game; like L4D, vague details and subjective guesswork are all that are available.
Returning to the gameplay itself, once again, the Fallout 3 comparison rears its ugly, desolate head. Both games featured a slow lead-up to a tipping point after which no amount of willing the game to slow down would help. That's it, really; the story just hit its climax and ran away wildly, like a kid tyre-rolling down a hill. In the case of Fallout 3, I actually went back and loaded an earlier save before buggering off and setting out to explore the remaining two-thirds of the game world, abandoning the final quest as it neared its close. I genuinely hadn't expected things to take off so fast, and as I'd finished the game, I knew how I would end it. To this day, Fallout 3 appears confused as to whether I've finished the main quest or not, evidenced by the mixed news updates on GNR. This is essentially the same problem I had with Borderlands; I had a few side quests I was partway through, and whole areas of the game world I had only given a cursory glance to. In particular, the latter areas of the game were all but unexplored to me, as I'd been so single-mindedly intent on reaching the Vault. I'm trying to keep this relatively spoiler-free, so I won't go into specifics; however, Thor was the tipping point, and from there on I didn't stop for hell nor high water. I did stop for hurt Claptraps, but I digress.
Once the inevitable had happened, and I had finished the game - the ending of which, by the way, felt like a bit of a slap in the face - I sat and watched the credits roll, and began the inevitable comedown that follows a long binge on a game which has managed to really draw me in. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the credits stopped rolling and I found myself standing alone in the snow, a single objective marked on my HUD.
Borderlands isn't quite done with me yet, and in a way, I'm kind of glad. While the actual main story was incredibly short and wonkily paced, much like Fallout 3's, I wasn't ready to just leave Pandora, or Lilith, to gather proverbial dust. In conclusion - because I have to end this barely-coherent mess of thoughts somewhere - Borderlands is something like a donut to me: thoroughly enjoyable, but leaving you wanting more. Gearbox is already working on DLC which will add new areas, enemies, and quests, but in this gamer's mind, a more filled-out main story would be worth more than all the DLC in the world. Borderlands will probably suffer somewhat upon my return as I'll no doubt binge on MW2 and L4D2, but it can certainly rest assured that I won't be able to leave it alone for any longer than necessary.
Like a hurt Claptrap, really.
Edit - and this does contain something of a spoiler - I should probably make one final note, which is that my disappointment with regards to the ending was due to the speed at which it arrived, not what it entailed. A lot of people seem upset that they couldn't do what they expected to do; well, you can't always get what you want. If anything, it's nice to see a game which leaves the player feeling well and truly stitched up and wondering if anything they'd experienced was what it seemed to be. Nearly every game I've ever played ended well for the player; this is a welcome change.
At first, I wasn't sure what to think. The effort put into the game's intro sequence alone was pretty impressive; however once I embarked upon my journey, it began to feel a lot like I imagine Fallout 3 would have if Bethesda had left out a lot of the extraneous bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I like the sheer amount of features in that game; VATS makes up for the awful manual aiming (although I would rather they fixed that instead), and I wasted no time in setting about rescuing every teddy I could find from the horrors of the Capital Wasteland. The ability to just mess about doing things like this was kind of entertaining, but at the same time it diverted me away from the main story time and time again; I'd take on one side mission and end up trying to complete ten all at once. While Borderlands presented me with a lot of the same issues - particularly the one where I would have a small nervous breakdown trying to work out which areas to explore, for fear of forgetting to look somewhere else - it did it a lot less often and the side quests were generally fairly short, which was nice.
The game started out at a rather leisurely pace; in fact, it remained that way for most of its duration, again echoing the things about Fallout 3 which irritated me. Forgive me for comparing the two almost exclusively, but it's for reasons of simplicity, not a belief that Borderlands is any attempt at a copy of that game. Fallout 3 is the most recent game I've played which I can really compare Borderlands to at all. To get back on track, the reasons for this were twofold: slow-paced missions, or plenty of missions. As the game progressed, the number of quests available skyrocketed and it took me about two days to get through the New Haven phase of the game alone. That said, I was enjoying myself. While a lot of the side objectives tended to repeat themselves - searching for objects scattered either locally or over an entire map segment being the worst offenders, followed by elimination challenges - they usually coincided fairly nicely with my more important tasks or even each other, allowing me to wrap up anything from two to six all at once. I'm not entirely sure how, but Gearbox have somehow managed to stop this from boring me to death, like it would in most games. Gearbox have also managed to reference a variety of absolutely brilliant movies without making things seem cheesy, and I got a good laugh out of spotting these. At times things became a little tedious, but never enough for me to quit the game for days, weeks or months on end like I generally do; I took breaks every few hours, but then I was right back into the game.
I think that the sheer uniqueness of the game's art style played a large part in appealing to me. It's something I haven't seen for a long time, and it's always nice when a dev decides to fly completely in the face of the current trends, even when there's no real guarantee that the gamble will pay off. Originally, Borderlands subscribed to the same gritty over-realistic, Hollywood-esque style that many recent titles have used; although it still featured far more colour than most of those games, there wasn't much else to distinguish it visually. In changing to a completely unrealistic, almost cartoony art style, Gearbox not only managed to make it stand out from the crowd, but they also proved that you don't have to follow everyone else's lead to produce a popular game. Even in the absence of the usual long cinematic sequences or rooted-to-the-spot exposition dialogues, I found it relatively easy to lose myself in the world of Pandora; I developed an almost parental over-protectiveness of Claptraps, and took great glee in mowing down any who I found near a hurt one. I developed something of a 'feel' for the characters' personalities, usually spotting a betrayal or a helping gesture before it came. Most importantly, I felt the kind of drive to reach the Vault while keeping Lilith as safe as possible that I needed to finish the game (despite there being no real penalty for dying). Even though no real backstory was provided for the characters ingame and scant details were all I had seen elsewhere, it was fairly easy to work out what made Lilith (who is an absolute force to be reckoned with in good hands) tick. That said, I would've liked the chance to actually learn more about each character at some point in the game; like L4D, vague details and subjective guesswork are all that are available.
Returning to the gameplay itself, once again, the Fallout 3 comparison rears its ugly, desolate head. Both games featured a slow lead-up to a tipping point after which no amount of willing the game to slow down would help. That's it, really; the story just hit its climax and ran away wildly, like a kid tyre-rolling down a hill. In the case of Fallout 3, I actually went back and loaded an earlier save before buggering off and setting out to explore the remaining two-thirds of the game world, abandoning the final quest as it neared its close. I genuinely hadn't expected things to take off so fast, and as I'd finished the game, I knew how I would end it. To this day, Fallout 3 appears confused as to whether I've finished the main quest or not, evidenced by the mixed news updates on GNR. This is essentially the same problem I had with Borderlands; I had a few side quests I was partway through, and whole areas of the game world I had only given a cursory glance to. In particular, the latter areas of the game were all but unexplored to me, as I'd been so single-mindedly intent on reaching the Vault. I'm trying to keep this relatively spoiler-free, so I won't go into specifics; however, Thor was the tipping point, and from there on I didn't stop for hell nor high water. I did stop for hurt Claptraps, but I digress.
Once the inevitable had happened, and I had finished the game - the ending of which, by the way, felt like a bit of a slap in the face - I sat and watched the credits roll, and began the inevitable comedown that follows a long binge on a game which has managed to really draw me in. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the credits stopped rolling and I found myself standing alone in the snow, a single objective marked on my HUD.
Borderlands isn't quite done with me yet, and in a way, I'm kind of glad. While the actual main story was incredibly short and wonkily paced, much like Fallout 3's, I wasn't ready to just leave Pandora, or Lilith, to gather proverbial dust. In conclusion - because I have to end this barely-coherent mess of thoughts somewhere - Borderlands is something like a donut to me: thoroughly enjoyable, but leaving you wanting more. Gearbox is already working on DLC which will add new areas, enemies, and quests, but in this gamer's mind, a more filled-out main story would be worth more than all the DLC in the world. Borderlands will probably suffer somewhat upon my return as I'll no doubt binge on MW2 and L4D2, but it can certainly rest assured that I won't be able to leave it alone for any longer than necessary.
Like a hurt Claptrap, really.
Edit - and this does contain something of a spoiler - I should probably make one final note, which is that my disappointment with regards to the ending was due to the speed at which it arrived, not what it entailed. A lot of people seem upset that they couldn't do what they expected to do; well, you can't always get what you want. If anything, it's nice to see a game which leaves the player feeling well and truly stitched up and wondering if anything they'd experienced was what it seemed to be. Nearly every game I've ever played ended well for the player; this is a welcome change.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Brown Brown Brown (Red Blue Green)
Over the past few days, I've been playing two games in particular: Mirror's Edge and Borderlands. Here, though, we have two very different ways of avoiding the 'brown problem'.
Let's start with the former. Mirror's Edge makes use of white like most games make use of brown. The buildings, streets, drainage canals, walkways, AC units... virtually everything in the city is pure, eye-burningly stark white, right down to the cardboard boxes and benches and other detritus that you encounter during the course of the game. Obviously, this is as much a device to tell the player they're in a sterile, utopian society as it is a design choice; accents of orange, green, blue, pink, and various other vivid colours are used to draw the player's attention to where they're meant to go, or to detail an area. In places, even the lighting and shade are coloured. This is the all-out, dead-opposite approach to what we're becoming used to, as brown usually represents something dirty or old.
Perhaps the credit for the more interesting of the two approaches, though, goes to Borderlands. While the game itself is largely brown by necessity (Pandora, of course, being one giant wasteland), the player's weapons - the things they will see every second they are playing the game, in the bottom right corner of their screen - are so vividly coloured they put even the Halo series to shame. Kill a lot of enemies in one area, and you will find a veritable rainbow of weapons lying on the dusty ground. The fact that Gearbox found a way to add some colour to a game which takes place on a dustbowl planet is impressive; the fact that they did so without hurting the atmosphere is even more so. If only more developers would try to inject some variety into the sea of brown... as even deserts have colour.
Let's start with the former. Mirror's Edge makes use of white like most games make use of brown. The buildings, streets, drainage canals, walkways, AC units... virtually everything in the city is pure, eye-burningly stark white, right down to the cardboard boxes and benches and other detritus that you encounter during the course of the game. Obviously, this is as much a device to tell the player they're in a sterile, utopian society as it is a design choice; accents of orange, green, blue, pink, and various other vivid colours are used to draw the player's attention to where they're meant to go, or to detail an area. In places, even the lighting and shade are coloured. This is the all-out, dead-opposite approach to what we're becoming used to, as brown usually represents something dirty or old.
Perhaps the credit for the more interesting of the two approaches, though, goes to Borderlands. While the game itself is largely brown by necessity (Pandora, of course, being one giant wasteland), the player's weapons - the things they will see every second they are playing the game, in the bottom right corner of their screen - are so vividly coloured they put even the Halo series to shame. Kill a lot of enemies in one area, and you will find a veritable rainbow of weapons lying on the dusty ground. The fact that Gearbox found a way to add some colour to a game which takes place on a dustbowl planet is impressive; the fact that they did so without hurting the atmosphere is even more so. If only more developers would try to inject some variety into the sea of brown... as even deserts have colour.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
L4D2, and Atkinson and the OFLC; round two.
I played the Left 4 Dead 2 demo for the first time today. I then went on to play it several more times, record a machete run and upload it to Youtube for shits and giggles, and advise numerous frustrated Australian gamers of the wonderful loopholes of Steam's gift system. I enjoyed it thoroughly, although it certainly does have a different 'feel' to the first game. Obvious differences in characters, environments, infected, and weapons nonwithstanding, I found L4D2 to be more confusing and cluttered; while I commend the effort they've put into the game, perhaps Valve have given us too much choice. Although it could be due to my lack of experience with the new game and my intimate knowledge of the original, it seems that the level design in the former has moved away from the simple (yet effective) formula that made L4D so fun to play. There were plenty of places you could get slowed down or even stopped, but most of the time that bogging down could be attributed to the set-pieces or horde intervention. The map itself presented you with a clear and relatively uncluttered path, while still convincingly portraying the intended environment.
In L4D2, I found myself getting hung up on walls or disoriented a lot. Sometimes this is good as it can add tension to the game, but in this case it was more annoying than anything else. From what little the demo shows, it seems that Valve has moved away from the original game's level design theory somewhat, following the more recent example, Crash Course. Compared to the retail campaigns, Crash Course was a lot more open and a lot less simple to navigate; it offered wide alleys, courtyards, and warehouse floors, as well as a number of shortcuts and backtracks. The impact on gameplay was immediately apparent. Teams used to the constricted but intuitive layout of the first four campaigns found themselves being drawn apart by the wide expanses and shortcuts; players were running far ahead of the rest of their team, sometimes without even realising it. This new environment certainly provided an interesting new set of problems which players needed to adapt to, but it was severely mismatched from the rest of the game. Instead of narrow, linear hallways dominating each campaign with some open (yet still ultimately linear) areas here and there, players were faced with the polar opposite.
This brings me to L4D2. From the first two segments of The Parish, it seems Valve have opted for medium-sized spaces this time... except they're filled with clutter. Unlike the original levels, which typically had a sort of 'clutter-free zone' through the most likely route to be used, The Parish breaks up this zone with hedges, columns, armco rails, fences, and all manners of detritus. The result is a game which feels as constricted as the original - if not more so - yet is more liberal with open space. I'm honestly not sure what to think of this yet, other than it being interesting that Valve have decided to change even the most basic of the game's rules. Similarly, the vast array of weapons, the new ammunition types, the new special infected, and the use of movement panic areas rather than 'hold until relieved' panic areas (the CEDA quarantine point versus the drain bridge or construction yard) have complicated what was an incredibly simple (gameplay-wise) game. L4D's simplicity is one of the things I liked most; I could jump straight in and have a few hours of fun, but not especially taxing, gameplay with friends. So far, L4D2 seems like an information overload - but whether this means it'll be less enjoyable as a casual game but more so as a serious one remains to be seen. I'll reserve final judgement for when I finally get to play the full game in mid-December, as I won't be around for the release.
With the game itself out of the way, the obvious major issue surrounding the demo's release is just how badly censored the Australian version is. Anyone who keeps track of the OFLC's decisions will know just how inconsistent they are, but I think I can safely say that a new low has been reached. Thankfully, I have the US version; however, a lot of fellow Australian gamers pre-ordered without realising what was coming, and are now incredibly annoyed. I don't blame them. The Australian version lacks any kind of dismemberment, blood sprays, dead bodies (they fade instantly, before they even hit the ground), and even the intro movie has been censored. Whenever someone fires, the camera pans up to their face. When Coach frees Ellis from the Smoker's tongue in the elevator with a chainsaw, it doesn't show the effect on the common infected in the way. If I'd been lumped with such a watered-down version of the game, I'd be pretty mad, too. As if that's not enough of an insult to the gaming community, the game still carries the MA15+ rating, which is the highest available for games in this country (R18+ applies to movies, but not games, thanks to Michael Atkinson's stubborn ignorance and holier-than-thou disregard for gamers). Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, the recently-approved and released Borderlands, and countless other games were not banned or censored with regards to violence by the OFLC, despite all featuring blood, dismemberment, and in some cases extremely violent cinematic sequences. In fact, the only one of those games named which the OFLC disputed at all was Fallout 3, and that was due to the game using the name 'morphine' for what is known in our version as a 'stim pack'.
Once again, an entire nation's gaming community has been colossally flipped-off by a ratings board which panders to the demands of irresponsible or overprotective parents and bad scientists. According to the kinds of people who force these insane decisions through, the responsibility for raising their children lies squarely on the shoulders of the community, the government, the games industry - anyone but themselves. It seems they have better things to do than educate their children properly about violence, much less trust their children not to copy what they see in movies, read in books, or do in games. Of course, games are the rock and roll of the early 21st Century; they have some kind of evil hold over the adolescent mind, while books, movies, and music do not. Ironically more people seem inspired to commit violence due to their parents' ridiculous, ignorant views than they are due to games.
Naturally, anyone who argues against violent games will have stopped reading this article long ago, since I dared to disagree with their unsupported opinions. Anyone can claim games cause real-world violence, and anyone can construct a study which is an absolute affront to proper experimental methods to prove their statement true. The fact of the matter is that every person thinks differently. Some (especially twins) think almost exactly alike, but the word 'almost' isn't there for no reason; many people are polar opposites. Each person will have their own reaction to violent media, be it games, movies, or books. Give me an obscenely violent game, and I'll probably laugh hysterically at just how many pieces I can hack someone's body into. Show me a photograph of an actual, mutilated human being, and I might crack a joke to try and keep myself from thinking about it on any deep level (probably a valuable asset in my part-time line of work). Give me a machete and tell me to hack somebody - stranger, family, worst enemy - to pieces with it for any reason short of defence of self or loved ones, and I'll be escorting you to the nearest mental hospital. The way any anti-gaming campaigner will take great pleasure in listing off every death threat sent to them seems extremely ironic, considering that in a similar situation, their reactions probably wouldn't be much different. Does anyone know what Michael Atkinson's favourite past-time is? If you do, maybe you should persuade a politician in an appropriate position to heavily restrict it or even ban it outright, then get on the telly and make a mockery of him for all the paranoid parents and retirees watching Today Tonight. Let's see just how different you are from us, Mr. Atkinson, when the playing field is actually equal.
See, no matter how depraved, desensitised, and hateful the media portray us as being, or the out-of-touch, ignorant parents, politicians, and bureaucrats alike want us to be, that's just not true. Looking back, it's plain to see that society has chosen something new, something whose following is relatively harmless, and branded it that generation's great evil. Exposed skin, rock and roll... unfortunately for us gamers, we're the fall guys for now. It's up to us to try and prove the ignorant wrong at every turn, but until we can do so on such a level that even they can't ignore or deny, it looks like we'll just have to wait until we're the out-of-touch, overly conservative desk jockeys who make the rules. I can only hope we don't end up being as foolish as those before us.
So get writing to the OFLC (sensibly). Meet up with your friends, your local fellow gamers. If your parents are as open-minded as mine, then get them in on it, too. Organise petitions, organise massed complaints, organise protests, strikes, whatever you like - just do something. Nobody ever got what was right by sitting around picking their noses all day.
In L4D2, I found myself getting hung up on walls or disoriented a lot. Sometimes this is good as it can add tension to the game, but in this case it was more annoying than anything else. From what little the demo shows, it seems that Valve has moved away from the original game's level design theory somewhat, following the more recent example, Crash Course. Compared to the retail campaigns, Crash Course was a lot more open and a lot less simple to navigate; it offered wide alleys, courtyards, and warehouse floors, as well as a number of shortcuts and backtracks. The impact on gameplay was immediately apparent. Teams used to the constricted but intuitive layout of the first four campaigns found themselves being drawn apart by the wide expanses and shortcuts; players were running far ahead of the rest of their team, sometimes without even realising it. This new environment certainly provided an interesting new set of problems which players needed to adapt to, but it was severely mismatched from the rest of the game. Instead of narrow, linear hallways dominating each campaign with some open (yet still ultimately linear) areas here and there, players were faced with the polar opposite.
This brings me to L4D2. From the first two segments of The Parish, it seems Valve have opted for medium-sized spaces this time... except they're filled with clutter. Unlike the original levels, which typically had a sort of 'clutter-free zone' through the most likely route to be used, The Parish breaks up this zone with hedges, columns, armco rails, fences, and all manners of detritus. The result is a game which feels as constricted as the original - if not more so - yet is more liberal with open space. I'm honestly not sure what to think of this yet, other than it being interesting that Valve have decided to change even the most basic of the game's rules. Similarly, the vast array of weapons, the new ammunition types, the new special infected, and the use of movement panic areas rather than 'hold until relieved' panic areas (the CEDA quarantine point versus the drain bridge or construction yard) have complicated what was an incredibly simple (gameplay-wise) game. L4D's simplicity is one of the things I liked most; I could jump straight in and have a few hours of fun, but not especially taxing, gameplay with friends. So far, L4D2 seems like an information overload - but whether this means it'll be less enjoyable as a casual game but more so as a serious one remains to be seen. I'll reserve final judgement for when I finally get to play the full game in mid-December, as I won't be around for the release.
With the game itself out of the way, the obvious major issue surrounding the demo's release is just how badly censored the Australian version is. Anyone who keeps track of the OFLC's decisions will know just how inconsistent they are, but I think I can safely say that a new low has been reached. Thankfully, I have the US version; however, a lot of fellow Australian gamers pre-ordered without realising what was coming, and are now incredibly annoyed. I don't blame them. The Australian version lacks any kind of dismemberment, blood sprays, dead bodies (they fade instantly, before they even hit the ground), and even the intro movie has been censored. Whenever someone fires, the camera pans up to their face. When Coach frees Ellis from the Smoker's tongue in the elevator with a chainsaw, it doesn't show the effect on the common infected in the way. If I'd been lumped with such a watered-down version of the game, I'd be pretty mad, too. As if that's not enough of an insult to the gaming community, the game still carries the MA15+ rating, which is the highest available for games in this country (R18+ applies to movies, but not games, thanks to Michael Atkinson's stubborn ignorance and holier-than-thou disregard for gamers). Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, the recently-approved and released Borderlands, and countless other games were not banned or censored with regards to violence by the OFLC, despite all featuring blood, dismemberment, and in some cases extremely violent cinematic sequences. In fact, the only one of those games named which the OFLC disputed at all was Fallout 3, and that was due to the game using the name 'morphine' for what is known in our version as a 'stim pack'.
Once again, an entire nation's gaming community has been colossally flipped-off by a ratings board which panders to the demands of irresponsible or overprotective parents and bad scientists. According to the kinds of people who force these insane decisions through, the responsibility for raising their children lies squarely on the shoulders of the community, the government, the games industry - anyone but themselves. It seems they have better things to do than educate their children properly about violence, much less trust their children not to copy what they see in movies, read in books, or do in games. Of course, games are the rock and roll of the early 21st Century; they have some kind of evil hold over the adolescent mind, while books, movies, and music do not. Ironically more people seem inspired to commit violence due to their parents' ridiculous, ignorant views than they are due to games.
Naturally, anyone who argues against violent games will have stopped reading this article long ago, since I dared to disagree with their unsupported opinions. Anyone can claim games cause real-world violence, and anyone can construct a study which is an absolute affront to proper experimental methods to prove their statement true. The fact of the matter is that every person thinks differently. Some (especially twins) think almost exactly alike, but the word 'almost' isn't there for no reason; many people are polar opposites. Each person will have their own reaction to violent media, be it games, movies, or books. Give me an obscenely violent game, and I'll probably laugh hysterically at just how many pieces I can hack someone's body into. Show me a photograph of an actual, mutilated human being, and I might crack a joke to try and keep myself from thinking about it on any deep level (probably a valuable asset in my part-time line of work). Give me a machete and tell me to hack somebody - stranger, family, worst enemy - to pieces with it for any reason short of defence of self or loved ones, and I'll be escorting you to the nearest mental hospital. The way any anti-gaming campaigner will take great pleasure in listing off every death threat sent to them seems extremely ironic, considering that in a similar situation, their reactions probably wouldn't be much different. Does anyone know what Michael Atkinson's favourite past-time is? If you do, maybe you should persuade a politician in an appropriate position to heavily restrict it or even ban it outright, then get on the telly and make a mockery of him for all the paranoid parents and retirees watching Today Tonight. Let's see just how different you are from us, Mr. Atkinson, when the playing field is actually equal.
See, no matter how depraved, desensitised, and hateful the media portray us as being, or the out-of-touch, ignorant parents, politicians, and bureaucrats alike want us to be, that's just not true. Looking back, it's plain to see that society has chosen something new, something whose following is relatively harmless, and branded it that generation's great evil. Exposed skin, rock and roll... unfortunately for us gamers, we're the fall guys for now. It's up to us to try and prove the ignorant wrong at every turn, but until we can do so on such a level that even they can't ignore or deny, it looks like we'll just have to wait until we're the out-of-touch, overly conservative desk jockeys who make the rules. I can only hope we don't end up being as foolish as those before us.
So get writing to the OFLC (sensibly). Meet up with your friends, your local fellow gamers. If your parents are as open-minded as mine, then get them in on it, too. Organise petitions, organise massed complaints, organise protests, strikes, whatever you like - just do something. Nobody ever got what was right by sitting around picking their noses all day.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Boycotts, forum raids, and people getting really mad in general
It seems that with its recent decisions regarding Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer arrangements, Infinity Ward has caused a stir to rival that of Valve's first announcement that there would be a new Left 4 Dead game, purchased separately from the original.
Of course, there will always be those who suffer uncontainable kneejerk reactions to even the slightest change to their favourite series. However, the L4D2 boycott, the Healers Against Halos episode, and now the spreading idea of a MW2 boycott have all flared up within such a short timespan that it's nigh impossible to speak to a fellow gamer without them suspiciously questioning your stance with regards to Valve and Infinity Ward. Naturally, being blessed with a short temper and irrepressible need to try and rationalise everything that happens around me, I've wasted no time telling my friends (any anyone else who will listen) my thoughts. I'll tell you, too, and I hope you do take note - rather than argue for any given party, I speak for myself.
I've always bought story-driven games for the story first, and the multiplayer (usually a very distant) second - with the obvious exception of those games intended primarily for online play, such as L4D. In my book, the fact IW are adding new features to the franchise to keep it interesting after so many years and so many games more than offsets the removal of superfluous features. Matchmaking doesn't really bother me, and nor does it instill horrific images of the PC being pushed aside by the console in my mind; it by no means prevents me playing with friends, and it saves me trawling through the myriad of servers looking for one which is actually worth playing on. There are concerns that it will affect competitive play, but I've never been one for that; I have a general distrust and plain dislike for competitive gamers born of many leaving me with distinctly bad impressions. In any case, matchmaking-based games have often had better competitive features, and this has been the case for years. Why MW2 would be any different is beyond me.
Yet despite all this, self-professed IW worshippers are stopping short of no extreme to tell the world just how wrong this is. Because a few relatively pointless online features were docked (how many of you actually browse for servers in L4D? I sure don't), they're cancelling their pre-orders, geting angsty over how much they spent on their Modern Warfare 2 computer, and generally making a mess of IW's forums. This kind of behaviour might be marginally more understandable if the game was primarily intended for multiplayer, but it wasn't; none of the 'true' Call of Duty games were, either, nor Halo for that matter. Initially, multiplayer was simply something added on so you could take the gameplay style and content you enjoy online. It seems that these days, however, it's the story which takes the back seat.
If there's one positive outcome of this absolute first-order shitstorm, though, it's that I'll have a lot less whiners to deal with when I do decide to hit the online mode - provided, that is, that they don't make a policy backflip and become just as rabid for the game upon release as they were a few short weeks ago.
Of course, there will always be those who suffer uncontainable kneejerk reactions to even the slightest change to their favourite series. However, the L4D2 boycott, the Healers Against Halos episode, and now the spreading idea of a MW2 boycott have all flared up within such a short timespan that it's nigh impossible to speak to a fellow gamer without them suspiciously questioning your stance with regards to Valve and Infinity Ward. Naturally, being blessed with a short temper and irrepressible need to try and rationalise everything that happens around me, I've wasted no time telling my friends (any anyone else who will listen) my thoughts. I'll tell you, too, and I hope you do take note - rather than argue for any given party, I speak for myself.
I've always bought story-driven games for the story first, and the multiplayer (usually a very distant) second - with the obvious exception of those games intended primarily for online play, such as L4D. In my book, the fact IW are adding new features to the franchise to keep it interesting after so many years and so many games more than offsets the removal of superfluous features. Matchmaking doesn't really bother me, and nor does it instill horrific images of the PC being pushed aside by the console in my mind; it by no means prevents me playing with friends, and it saves me trawling through the myriad of servers looking for one which is actually worth playing on. There are concerns that it will affect competitive play, but I've never been one for that; I have a general distrust and plain dislike for competitive gamers born of many leaving me with distinctly bad impressions. In any case, matchmaking-based games have often had better competitive features, and this has been the case for years. Why MW2 would be any different is beyond me.
Yet despite all this, self-professed IW worshippers are stopping short of no extreme to tell the world just how wrong this is. Because a few relatively pointless online features were docked (how many of you actually browse for servers in L4D? I sure don't), they're cancelling their pre-orders, geting angsty over how much they spent on their Modern Warfare 2 computer, and generally making a mess of IW's forums. This kind of behaviour might be marginally more understandable if the game was primarily intended for multiplayer, but it wasn't; none of the 'true' Call of Duty games were, either, nor Halo for that matter. Initially, multiplayer was simply something added on so you could take the gameplay style and content you enjoy online. It seems that these days, however, it's the story which takes the back seat.
If there's one positive outcome of this absolute first-order shitstorm, though, it's that I'll have a lot less whiners to deal with when I do decide to hit the online mode - provided, that is, that they don't make a policy backflip and become just as rabid for the game upon release as they were a few short weeks ago.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Broken Records
One thing which has troubled me for a while is the fact that the vast majority of developers focus on one of two time periods when creating an FPS: WWII, or the modern era. The Call of Duty series is a shining example of this. I must cut Infinity Ward, who I recognise as the only legitimate developer of the series, some slack here; publisher Activision wanted more of the same following the second installment, and when those crazy, crazy IW devs decided they'd had enough, Treyarch was ready to step up to the plate with yet another WWII shooter, and then another following the extremely successful Modern Warfare from IW. It seems that even Infinity Ward itself can't get far enough away from the legacy of the Treyarch releases, dropping the Call of Duty title from Modern Warfare 2.
As good as it's looking, though, I can't help but feel a pang of disappointment. They finally got away from WWII... and caught up with every other dev, portraying modern warfare instead. While I must give them serious points for making the Generic Middle-Eastern Nation™ merely a sideshow rather than the chief bad guy, it's still just a modern war being fought with modern weapons by modern soldiers in various locations around the world. Don't get me wrong, I'll be all over MW2 when it goes up for pre-order, but I just feel let down that once again, a whole array of other conflicts have been passed over.
My pet hope is that one day, somebody will make a game set during the Falklands War. It was an exceptionally hard fight in an extremely inhospitable environment; elite British troops of the Royal Marines and the Paras were pitted against a vastly larger force of Argentine conscripts, as well as a small contingent of Argentine Special Forces. An Argentine Exocet hit and sank the Atlantic Conveyer, sending the bulk of the British force's transport to the bottom of the South Atlantic; the soldiers were forced to march over rock-strewn peat bogs and dense scrub, up steep mountains and through heavy fire by day and by night. As can be expected from the South Atlantic, the weather was absolutely vile at best, and as a result, losses on both sides were more or less equal (not counting the 300-odd Argentine sailors lost when HMS Conqueror torpedoed the General Belgrano). The terrain and the distances involved meant that both sides' soldiers had very little in the name of support. It would be hard to even imagine up a harder conflict.
So with that in mind, this is my challenge to any current or hopeful future developers who may be reading:
Give us something we haven't had hundreds of iterations of already. Give us something interesting. Give us something that many people either haven't heard of, or are at risk of forgetting.
Give us a Falklands title.
Royal Marines putting their boots to good use, due to a chronic lack of helicopters
Paras pose for a victory snap after the battle of Goose Green
As good as it's looking, though, I can't help but feel a pang of disappointment. They finally got away from WWII... and caught up with every other dev, portraying modern warfare instead. While I must give them serious points for making the Generic Middle-Eastern Nation™ merely a sideshow rather than the chief bad guy, it's still just a modern war being fought with modern weapons by modern soldiers in various locations around the world. Don't get me wrong, I'll be all over MW2 when it goes up for pre-order, but I just feel let down that once again, a whole array of other conflicts have been passed over.
My pet hope is that one day, somebody will make a game set during the Falklands War. It was an exceptionally hard fight in an extremely inhospitable environment; elite British troops of the Royal Marines and the Paras were pitted against a vastly larger force of Argentine conscripts, as well as a small contingent of Argentine Special Forces. An Argentine Exocet hit and sank the Atlantic Conveyer, sending the bulk of the British force's transport to the bottom of the South Atlantic; the soldiers were forced to march over rock-strewn peat bogs and dense scrub, up steep mountains and through heavy fire by day and by night. As can be expected from the South Atlantic, the weather was absolutely vile at best, and as a result, losses on both sides were more or less equal (not counting the 300-odd Argentine sailors lost when HMS Conqueror torpedoed the General Belgrano). The terrain and the distances involved meant that both sides' soldiers had very little in the name of support. It would be hard to even imagine up a harder conflict.
So with that in mind, this is my challenge to any current or hopeful future developers who may be reading:
Give us something we haven't had hundreds of iterations of already. Give us something interesting. Give us something that many people either haven't heard of, or are at risk of forgetting.
Give us a Falklands title.
Royal Marines putting their boots to good use, due to a chronic lack of helicopters
Paras pose for a victory snap after the battle of Goose Green...Please.
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