Some complaints. They still don’t have a difficulty selector in versus, which is unfortunate. They made the campaigns harder for the survivors (although I expect the balance of power to shift back as people get better and more familiar with the campaigns), but I just don’t get why they can’t leave in difficulty levels (which affects normal zombie damage and friendly fire damage) in versus. If you could play versus on the advanced level, suddenly you’d have to be very careful about friendly fire - whereas in default versus (which is equivelant to normal) friendly fire is barely a concern because no matter how badly you screw up you won’t hurt your teammates much.
Speaking on the issue of friendly fire, I’ve never liked the way that when a special infected has a player in their grasp, that player becomes immune from friendly fire. Imagine how much more interesting it would be if the smoker had your friend across the map held your friend in front of him so that only the smoker’s head and maybe limbs were visible with your friend’s body blocking most of the shot, like how hostage situations work on tv. You’d have to be careful - there’d be more of an incentive to run up to your friend and free him, or you’d take a knee and aim carefully to take out the smoker’s head. The way it works instead is that you can just throw 200 shotgun pellets at your friend and not worry about hurting him, because you can’t. I think that aspect may be a console compromise given the lack of precision in the controls.
I also wish there was an “invite only” mode when making lobbies, rather than “friends only” - it wouldn’t be so bad if it was confined to the friends list of the host, but sometimes I’ll open a game, a friend will join, and then his friend will see him join and join the game, and then their mutual friend sees them both join and joins the game - meanwhile my game has filled up before I even had the chance to invite the people I actually wanted to bring to the game. So now I either have to keep playing with people I don’t know but who are friends of people I do know instead of the people I intended to invite, or rudely (?) ask them to leave.
Which isn’t to say I don’t want friends of friends to be able to join - but it should be by invite only.
I think that by setting the campaign to a set level, and not the hardest level, it’s casting the net to draw in as many players as it can, as opposed to having different games of varying degrees, it’s all standardized, which is fine for me, because as you noted, it’s harder for the survivors to escape anyways.
What computer games handle the lobby the best? On the console, and the games that I’ve played, it’s clearly Halo 3.
Again, an inability to aim with a controller (your inability) doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is dumbed down completely to fit the consoles because you can’t hit the broad side of a barn. I’d say that the friendly fire is off when special infected have you because it’s a helluva lot easier to shoot your teammates because of the constant motion the special infected put you through. Well, that, mixed with the increased difficulty.
As far as the game goes and my impressions of it, I don’t know. I like the varying weapons, and I like the AI Director’s increased role, but I don’t like the melee weapons, at least not as much as I’m supposed to like them. Really? A frying pan? A crowbar? Right.
How is that superior in any way? Removing options and game modes to standardize the experience just robs from it. It’s stupid that I can’t play a certain game mode that’s already implemented into the game with a group of likeminded people.
Yeah, you don’t have to be King Defender Of Consoles. Were you in your bat cave when a blinking light came on saying that someone said something about consoles and you rushed your way to the thread? I wasn’t even console bashing - I was speculating as to why they chose to implement a feature in a certain way when it seems intuitive to me that another way would be superior. That seems like a likely explanation.
Sure, you can pull the “you can be as accurate with a joystick!” bullshit all you want, but pretty much no one that switches between the two control types agrees with you, and the fact that console games are loaded with autoaim systems and reverse 180 degree buttons and level design to de-emphasize the vertical argues against that.
I don’t see how taking out options is a good idea. I’m with you. I’m trying to figure out something that makes some kind of sense, as to why they’d do it.
That’s exactly what it was. There’s a thread about a game that I like and have, and I impart some knowledge, and we get a blowup. If it’s all the same to you, I’d very much like to reset the dialogue that we’ve been having. There’s no console-basing that you’ve done and none that I’ve read. You’re just saying that it could or should be attributed to the console control scheme, but it’s really not as bad as you make it out to be.
The one argument I can see for not allowing difficulty settings in Versus is that it keeps them from having to adjust different values for them between campaign and vs. They can tweak Normal as needed to deal with versus and then leave the others for what’s acceptable under AI control. Giving players access to Boomers with expert-level Common would be fantastically broken. Pretty much any decent team attack is a guaranteed KO with that kind of damage output. The whole point of the difficulty settings is to try to compensate for AI stupidity - in Versus, the enemy players are supposed to be taking care of that. A straight handicap feature would be more effective at adjusting team levels.
That said, since it’s a Source game, not only can you mod such a thing in but I’d be willing to bet that someone already has (for L4D1 at least…)
Expert would be overkill, but I think there’s room for a game mode where normal infected damage actually matters, and you really need to be careful about friendly fire. Either advanced, or something between normal and advanced.
Even if expert mode meant that people only made it 20% of the way through a map - that’s fine too. I mean, both teams are subjected to the same conditions, so if everyone involved wanted to try a real challenge that way, why not? Plus it would make for quick games, if people only had a half hour to kill.
in l4d, I always thought the default should be that the survivors… don’t. Thus the score would be determined by how far you managed to get, and not how many medpacks did you take into the saferoom. That’s how l4d started and it was a lot of fun. As the survivors discovered every trick and exploit in the book, it became nearly impossible to stop a semi organized team from making the safe room.
Shoot ahead to l4d2. The level design has made it more complicated to survive. The levels are longer (IMO at least) and contain much more difficult sections. Additionally, the new infected make accepted ideas from l4d moot. You just can’t corner camp if there is a spitter around.
But, I’m fairly sure that the newness will wear off and survivors will be king again. And since they took health out of the equation, it’s going to be possible, if unlikely, to have a tie. What do we do then? Well, I think the difficulty slider is the only serious alternative.
Normal difficulty puts too many advantages in the hands of the survivors. That’s fine to start and until people learn all the tips and tricks they need. But later, I think advanced mode offers a better balance. The safe room isn’t guaranteed, and it shouldn’t be.
The alternative is what we had in l4d. Some servers will alter INI files to pump up the difficulty. But they won’t be marked and they won’t be search able. They’ll just be random bad luck for those that prefer normal, and occasional bliss for those that want advanced.
I agree. It was pretty hard when we all started L4D for the survivors to survive, but towards the end I’d say I survived about 75-80% of the time on average. I’d rather see that number closer to 20-25% so it feels like you actually accomplished something. Especially with the new scoring that better accounts for how much progress you made towards the end. I like the battles we’re having now where one team gets 75% through and the other one gets 60% through and it’s a close game. After another month or two of survivor experience, we’ll all be surviving and we’ll have lots of ties.
This just made my day. I posted links to these pics in a Halloween thread somewhere else on the board a month or two ago, but you guys seem like the kind of folks who’d dig them.
I don’t think I’ve seen you on the SDMB steam group unless you’re under a different name. You should sign up, we have full SDMB games going usually daily.
I’m not…I just bought the game a couple days ago. I also can only play it late at night. I made the mistake of letting my oldest son (eight) watch the opening movie on the demo (I hadn’t seen it before either and I had to shut it off before he could see all of it) and now he asks about it too much, even though it gave him nightmares. Don’t know what I was thinking there. I’d never played the game before and I guess I underestimated the violence and the amount of cursing in the game.
I have a question (though I think I already know the answer): is there any difference between the characters in the survivors other than appearance? Coach is a big dude, can he sustain damage longer/better than say, Rochelle? Or all they all the same?
Coach is big, sure, but he’s definitely out of shape. It’s a wonder he can even keep up in the sprints. All the survivors do indeed have identical gameplay stats.
I’ve been playing it a fair bit lately, and at least in terms of Versus, it’s a good improvement on the original. The spitter and charger fill great roles, the maps are better designed, and the scoring is smoother. But…I find myself missing the gloomy atmosphere of the first game. It’s hard to take a game too seriously when you’re smashing clowns in the face with a frying pan, and the entire jockey character concept is outlandish (what, they can’t just sit down when jumped?). The original survivors had more variety in their map-specific chatter, too.
I have never played the first one, but I think this game has plenty of atmospheric qualities for what is essentially a shoot 'em up zombie game. Especially during the quiet scenes in between battles, you can hear rain pattering on the ground, crickets chirping, the faroff song of the witch…I find it downright eerie playing it alone in the house late at night with all the lights off and the sound cranked up, with my face peering into the monitor from about eight inches away!
There’s a couple good gotcha moments, too. The first time I entered a restroom, it was pitch black, and I discovered that the darker it is, the narrower the focus of your flashlight is in terms of the area it can cover(which is a neat effect). Turn left, a toilet, turn right OH MY GOD A FREAKING ZOMBIE A FOOT FROM MY FACE! BLAM BOOM BLAM!!
Its good fun! I think the game is really well done and I haven’t even ventured into multiplayer at all yet. I gets no time to play generally with kids and work, so I end up punishing myself and staying up waaaaaay too late on work nights to squeeze in an hour or so of gametime. I’m still slogging through the singleplayer campaign.
Its harder than I thought it would be on normal difficulty level in some places. Right now I just got to the scene where you crank up the rock music on the stage, the helo flies in and all hell breaks loose. I have died a couple times now trying to finish that map. That stage thing is incredible though…I never thought I’d be killing zombies in massive hordes in front of rock show pyrotechnics while hard rock music is blaring away. How awesome is that?
