Amazon has it as a $40 digital download. Given that it’s a Steamworks title, you should be able to just throw the key into Steam and you’re set. While 1-day reactions are never the best, people seem to not hate the multiplayer side of things. Single-player seems to be short and generic. Doesn’t look worth it if that’s all you’re interested in.
I got your message on Steam last night and I have to say that upon checking it out I was very tempted to pre-order Homefront, but held off at the last minute just because I have so many other games that I’m playing right now.
If you guys that have already purchased think it’s worth the money though, I may go ahead and buy it to play the multiplayer with everybody.
I’ve put some hours into it. Good so far, not blown away. The biggest thing is that the players have almost no health, which I don’t mind for realistic games, but for run and gun games it’s a little too low. People die about as fast or faster than hardcore mode in COD. But COD is much more closed off - this game has larger maps with more firing angles, so you tend to get instantly one shot killed from a wider variety of directions, so death feels more sudden and random than in COD hardcore.
The weapons have almost no recoil which dissapoints me. There’s no reason to single shot or burst - just hold down the trigger and aim at the target and you’ll get him, even 100+ yards away. Combined with the low hit points and the game features fast and frequent deaths.
It’s pretty fun though. The battle points system is cool. The battle commander is cool although for some reason most servers are running game modes without the commander on and I can’t understand why. I can only hope as they get more time to configure them they’ll switch it over.
Hit detection seems fine which is good since that’s something that can totally wreck a game.
The matches are too short - the whole idea behind escalating warfare, with everyone starting out with just infantry, maybe a small drone or a rocket launcher - and eventually as people save up you start seeing helicopters and tanks is definitely cool. But the rounds are so short that you rarely reach a point of heavy vehicle warfare - usually only a few people will have managed to save up for a vehicle by the end of the round, and not all at once.
The maps are interesting. They’re very dense with cover, objects are all over the place - but they aren’t boxed in by walls and obstacles everywhere like the COD game. So there’s plenty of cover, but you can have firefights at 100+ yards pretty easily.
I’ll post more later when I have more experience with it.
WTF? I beat it in ~4 hours, that’s bullshit.
The multiplayer better be kick-ass.
Everyone said not to buy it for SP.
It’s a real shame that it’s getting hammered in reviews from people who didn’t play its real mode or are dismissing it as a Battlefield or CoD clone. I didn’t grab it, but I played it over at my buddy’s place and it’s pretty good. I’ve already ordered some TIM so I can cook my 8800s. If that works, I’ll pick it up. My car is leaking coolant into the engine, so buying real cards ain’t going to happen. I saw some DICE employees ragging on the game on twitter. You know what, DICE? At least Homefront has a working service browser. I agree with SenorBeef above. Health is too low or weapon accuracy is too high. Probably both. Sniper rifles are ridiculous. Rounds are too short. The fundamentals are there though, so hopefully Kaos Studios stays in business long enough to ride out the release storm and get it tweaked nicely. Turns out getting this with Metro 2033 was a steal.
Finished single player in about 4 hours. I like the atmosphere and the gameplay, but damn, way too short.
My main complaint with single player, though, was with the ammo system. You can pick up ammo only from fallen guns of the exact type you’re carrying even though most of the guns in the game use M16 mags. I don’t know why this bothered me so much.
Single player is fun, especially since people are still working out the good weapon combinations and tactics. I havent seen any obvious overpowered builds (akimbo 1887s, anyone?) but that’s probably just a matter of time.
Alright, so more thoughts.
There’s a lot of good stuff about the multiplayer. The maps are diverse and big. The vehicles are reasonably well balanced - it takes a lot of resources to call in a tank or helicopter so they’re relatively infrequent (especially with the short default rounds), and powerful, but still fairly vulnerable. The airborne drones are a little underpowered if anything - but it’s better to go in that direction than to give people like ac130s with magical targetting boxes.
The fundamental mechanics of the battle points system and battle commander are good - although I’d like to see more variety of missions from the battle commander. Most of them are of the “this guy is killing a lot of people, so kill him” type without enough go capture this/defend this/spot people/etc. type. Though strangely the majority of servers are running non-battle commander modes. As far as battle points, price wise, the vehicles are pretty well priced and the drones generally are. Body armor is too expensive for its ineffectiveness, the hellfire strike doesn’t seem remotely worth its cost, and some of the other stuff I haven’t unlocked yet. The perks system is kinda cool with being able to combine high and low value perks instead of having fixed perk slots, but I haven’t played enough to get a feel for whether or not they’re balanced.
The main problem in multiplayer is the lethality of the guns. Fights are almost always won by the first guy to see the other. Sometimes this can work - for example in the cramped maps of call of duty, you can play hardcore because chances are you and the other guy will see each other at roughly the same time and then the twitch skill wins. But the homefront maps are much bigger and more open than the call of duty maps - so very often you have very little chance of seeing the person that spots you, and then they 1-2 shot kill you. This incentivizes camping because moving makes you more obvious and you can park yourself in a place with large fields of fire.
The power of the sniper class amplifies this. The scope view isn’t too restrictive, there’s a semi-auto rifle, and you can get 1 hit kills in the head or chest. There’s plenty of little cover spots to hide in. Unlike COD games, firefights can frequently occur at a range where the zoom is useful. Really - sniper classes ruin any game they’re in. Is there any game where they actually add to the gameplay? No - it always caters to people who just want to camp and rack up a kill:death ratio while never actually paying attention to team objectives or anything. It’s nothing but a drain on games and I don’t know why games feel it necesary to always include them.
There’s also a prone function which makes it easy to hide in little bits of cover. I know some games have tried to remove prone and everyone whines about it. Obviously it’s unrealistic to not be able to go prone - but these run and gun shoot em up games only have a passing relation to realism. If you’re going to have people sprinting across the map throwing grenades and spraying their weapons wildly and reloading in a quarter second, are you really that concerned about the realism of your games? By all means, keep prone in arma 2 and serious shooters, but for the run and gun games they’d be better without it. This goes for the lethality in the game too - people say “oh right because you’re supposed to be able to survive 4 shots to the chest” - yeah, well, you’re not playng a sim here, you’re playing a run and gun game. You’ve obviously already made a ton of compromises of fun over realism, so why not this one? It’s fun to have firefights with people, to take cover and try to out-shoot your enemy. It’s not terribly fun to die before you even know where the fire is coming from over and over again.
I know I tend to blame a lot on consoles, but I have to wonder if this sort of thing came up because the balance/playtesting was done on consoles. When you’re looking at a 1000x600 image rendered on a TV across the room, you can’t even really see guys crawling around at 100+ yards away from you, and you don’t have the controller accuracy to quickly get a shot off at them. So I’m guessing on consoles people camping and sniping others from far across the map isn’t as big a problem - there’s less incentive to camp and less disincentive to move.
I haven’t found a fix for the mouse acceleration in this game. Who the hell is it that actually likes mouse acceleration that every game apparently caters to? At least it has a relatively high threshold, so it doesn’t throw off small aiming movements too much - but still, what the hell? I can sort of maybe see having an option for it, with the default being off, but there’s no way to turn it off that I can figure out. Ironically, when aiming down the sights, it turns the acceleration off - so they understand that acceleration ruins aiming, yet decided to force it in the rest of their game. The mouse controls work great when aiming down the sight - which makes it so stupid that they work badly for everything else. It actually ruins what would’ve been a good option too - it has a seperate mouse sensitivity for aiming down the sights, as a fraction of your normal sensitivity - so you can custom set how much slower your aiming mouse speed is, if at all. And in theory, if you wanted to keep aiming the same, you’d just set it to 1.0, 100% of mouse speed. Except because it’s accelerated while not aiming down the sights, but accelerated otherwise, setting 1.0 actually makes the ADS speed way slower than normal mousing speed. So you need to choose - do you want your normal mouse speed preference while not aiming, or while aiming? Can’t have both. Gah, so stupid.
Anyway, the fundamentals of a fun game are here. If they release the dev kit and allow people to mod the game, the community could turn this into a very good game. Right now the level of camping isn’t too bad - most people still move around - but I think as people learn the game, and realize how much incentive there is to camp, there’s going to be a camping arms race until the game eventually turns into a lame ass sniper battle with drones being the only thing moving.
So after a little experimentation I figured out a fix for the mouse issue.
These two settings will substantially improve your mouse controls. I can’t confirm that they 100% turn off acceleration because something still feels a little bit funky about it, but it’s a huge improvement over default.
Go to your \steam\steamapps\common\homefront\engine\config directory. Make a copy of all those files before you change anything just for backup purposes.
Then open baseinput.ini - at the top of the file is a section called [Engine.PlayerInput]
Under that section, you will see “bEnableMouseSmoothing=true”, change this to “bEnableMouseSmoothing=false”
Then right under that, in the same section, add the line “bViewAccerlationEnabled=false”
After this your in-game mouse settings may reset, or you may have to adjust your sensitivity because non-accelerated sensitivity is different. But after that, you should notice the mouse control is much improved. It doesn’t quite feel like 100% direct mouse input to me - something is going on - but it’s massively better than the default.
More thoughts:
So far most of the weapons feel pretty samey. The submachine gun can function decently at long range, the assault rifles feel like they have roughly the same accuracy/recoil/power/etc.
Another issue with snipers in this game is that quickscoping is effective and there’s not much sway. There are essentially none of the limitations that other games try to put on snipers to keep them under control.
But even if the sniper rifles were gone, the game would still be fairly camping friendly. The lack of recoil makes blasting away at full auto at a target 100+ yards away way too effective anyway, and it only takes 1-2 of those shots to land to kill them.
If you’re controlling a UAV and someone kills you, your control over the drone immediately ends. Seems obvious and good - but in COD when you’re controlling a killstreak it doesn’t matter if someone kills your body holding the briefcase, you’ll finish the killstreak out.
The game actually has a somewhat tough unlock schedule. You need to invest 20+ hours before you get some basic stuff like grenade launchers (which I haven’t actually even seen in action yet) and having access to all the drones and airstrikes and stuff. I mean - 20-30 hours isn’t that much, but most games with persistent unlocks usually give you access to most of the basic forms of weaponry before that point.
The game has a lobby/intermission which is just annoying. This isn’t a console game, nor does it lack servers - so why do we need to sit in the lobby at the end of every round? You can switch around your loadouts in that time, but by the time you settle into the game you won’t change those every rounds, and besides that, you can just change them before/after you leave the server. Or you could just be able to do it from the options menu like COD4.
The squad system doesn’t seem to actually do anything in this game. You can join squads like in BC2, but you can’t spawn on each other and you don’t get special information about your squadmates or rewards for helping them. The only thing it does is give you a seperate comms line to your squad, which I guess is useful, but bc2 did this much better.
The spawn areas are actually relatively fixed, which is too bad. One of the great things COD does is having a dynamic spawn system that keeps you close to the action but without being in danger when you spawn. When people learn the maps better, I wonder if spawn camping will be a bigger problem.
This game doesn’t have as many random fun challenges and stuff like COD series, which is something I liked. It basically just has a kill counter for every weapon/vehicle/drone, and if you get X kills with a weapon you unlock a new accessory. But it doesn’t have all of those fun “kill a guy who’s engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation by hitting him in the face with a flashbang right as he blows his load” type challenges like COD.
Woops, should be: bViewAccelerationEnabled=false
I don’t have a precise enough mousing surface to confirm that this 100% turns off acceleration (it still feels weird to me, though better) but it helped.
The ending was stupid.
In order to let the air assets know where the enemy and friendlies were Connor grabbed the flare and ran towards the enemy and told the planes to bomb the flare. That’s stupid, that’s not how they do things in the military. They did this in Blackhawk Down with the strobe and that was stupid as well. What they would have done was say, “Shoot everywhere that’s not the flare.”.
After a week of playing I have found that I enjoy the multiplayer a lot better than I did. I gave up on sniper and have been focusing on SMG, which is crazy fun.
My complaint is that it’s possible to kill someone from far away with just a pistol. You don’t have to lead a target or worry about drop, which I think would make sniping a lot harder.
This is a really bad game. The servers are horrendous, it’s very difficult to join someone else’s game, there’s a very rudimentary lobby system, the graphics are weak, but I can overlook that with good gameplay, which it doesn’t necessarily have. Unseen geometry stops bullets and there’s some head glitching, with people being on one side of an obstacle being able to shoot the hell out of you, and you not being able to return the favor, despite seeing their head (the B objective point on one map comes to mind. It’s the point with the gas station. If someone is on the other side of that white fence, I’m not sure you can kill them from the gas pumps.)
However, it’s got some interesting ideas. I like how they meter out their perks, and I’ve been hoping that Call of Duty does something similar for two games now. I thought it’d be a horrible vehicle fest, but it’s really not that bad.
Unfortunately, I’m trading it in. It’s pretty bad.
I wouldn’t say it’s “really bad” because it could be fixed into being a good game with some patches. The battle commander and battle mechanics are good. Not sure how your lobby system/server thing works but it’s fine on PC. The maps are fairly interesting, although they should have more areas to put capture points in to better use the full size of all the maps. I like the drones and the level of vehicles.
The weapon lethality/recoil/hitscan issue is the biggest problem, and the invisible walls issue is definitely a problem.
I wouldn’t recommend it for $50 (or $60) definitely, but I’m happy with getting that and metro 2033 for $25. Maybe after some patches and a 50% off sale it’d be worthwhile.
At 10 bucks, it might be worth a spin. By that time, the population of folks playing it would be tiny, though.
I ran into my first cheater the other day. Or at least, I think he was cheating. The person with the second highest kills had 34. This guy had 9 deaths and 140 kills. And when they’d show him running around after he killed me he was all jumpy. It looked like really bad lag, but he was fast.
Vehicles aren’t really a problem, at least I don’t think. If it were just me and a tank I’d be able to take out the tank. It starts sucking because of all the support infantry are killing me while I’m distracted.
For any that still care there’s supposed to be a pretty big patch to be released early next week. The big things, to me at least, include:
[ul]
[li]Easier way to report cheating[/li][li]RPG’s now deal additional damage to HMMWV’s[/li][li]Lowered m200 and m110 sniper rifle damages. The only 1 shot possible is now headshots.[/li][li]Flak jacket now has a lower BP cost, and a slight effectiveness buff.[/li][li]Text chat is now possible in the kill cam, spawn selection, and intermission lobby screens.[/li][/ul]
I’m really glad about the lowered sniper damages and the cost for flak jackets. They’re also lowering accuracy while jumping, which I think is good.
Not enough changes to save the game. They need to rework the lethality of all guns pretty fast, although the sniper changes are welcome. The flak jacket needs more than a slight buff - it’s effectively useless so far as I can tell.
Nice to see they’re adding an option to fix the mouse acceleration. Who in their right fucking mind likes that?
Think all of the guns need to be turned up or down, as far as damage goes?
Down. Easy to shoot, highly lethal weapons and maps with lots of long distance shots are a terrible combination. This is something I wrote when I was talking to a guy who works at digital extremes: