Even though it’s not full featured and needs another coat of polish, it show a heck of a lot of promise. You knew it had to come to FPS video gaming sooner or later, and now it has: death by flying toilets.
What you get and what they’re like:
Only 2 maps. One is a prison-themed map with lots of exploding barrels and fixtures to toss around. The other is a more outdoorsy City 17 scene with some larger physics objects and more vertical action. They both seem decent though some more polish and better lighting couldn’t hurt.
Lots of player models (various combine troops vs. City 17 resistence fighters), though of course mostly all the same. No Barney Alyx Gman or Gordons at the moment.
Most of the SP weapons (but, oddly, no crowbar included) seem to work fine, though the magnum is a little too overpowered. HL1’s lack of creative weapons is a dissapointment that shows through to the MP (HL1 DM had tripwires, homing guns, guns that could blast through walls, and all these creative little bits made the DM much more tactical and interesting than standard ( I HAVE A ROCKET LAUNCHER!) DM games)
The gravity gun (everyone starts with it). Obviously the selling point, and what a selling point it is.
I’ve already:
Caught a tossed grenade and slammed it back into the suprised tosser. Did the same with a sink.
Killed plenty of people with radiators, toilets, cars, even a chunk of broken masonry.
Used grenades to knock a desired weapon off a high perch (with the added bonus of seeing a previously unseen ragdolling enemy flying off the same ledge as a bonus).
Fired a filing cabinet at someone who was firing a computer monitor at me and had the two collide in midair.
And so on. Great great fun.
Only real downside is laggy play. Since it shares the same netcode as the usually smooth CS:S, I’m going to guess this is because a lot of servers are listen servers (i.e. a person is actually trying to play the game on the server which is a recipe for severe latency) and few people have taken the time to scale or configure their servers properly. There are also so few servers that tons of high pingers are flooding things.
Free with every purchase of HL2. The full SDK also came out tonight, which means that this is only the first tantilizing taste of what’s in store. As first tastes go, this is very, very promising for FPS gaming.
Just played it this morning. Very fun as mentioned above but considerably more laggy then CS:S, especially when 30 ppl at once decide to start hurling barrels and cars at each other.
One awesome trick I pulled off was using the G-gun to roll a car ahead of me and use it as cover, trap the guy that was shooting me between the car and the wall and then surprise him with some grenades while he was stuck, made my day that did
As with all newly released games, the initial lagginess is less from any difference in netcode (has the same as CS:S) and more from the fact that a very high proportion of the servers available are listen servers: i.e. games in which the computer is both server and a client (taking a huge portion of the CPU’s power away from simply running the server). Generally these sorts of servers are also on ADSL, meaning they have terrible upstream bandwidth. As larger server banks add more real, dedicated servers (which take longer to set-up and aren’t updated or checked as often), we’ll see lots more servers with good latency.
The same thing happened with CS:S, and cleared up within a couple of days without any changes in netcode.
I was thinking that if the code is the same why would they wait to release the HL2DM and not do it the same time as the rest of the game. That made me wonder if perhaps the gravity gun and all the other interactivity forced the players to exchange more information. I guess that little theory can be debunked completely once the speed picks up in a couple of days.
They just didn’t have it ready in time. They had to modify the maps, balance everything, package it, bugtest it and so forth. And even with that, they apparently had a bit of a rocky start for some people.
Been playing all week. For a release with only two maps and a grand total of only 8 weapons, it’s still amazingly good. I just played a match where I and a teamate ended up knocking a wrecked car and other large objects around a basement room trying to wipe out our opponents who were trying to do the same: total madness! Tons of huge objects that feel and sound huge, all careening around the screen with nary a dropped frame or seeming lag. Unbelievable stuff.
The best achievement is that the gameplay, outside of a bit overpowered magnum and underpowered shotgun and crossbow, is that it is remarkably balanced: you can use the grav gun (one hit kills wih most objects), just conventional weapons, or both, and it’s all fairly viable. The gravity gun can help you shield yourself from gunfire, and while you can unleash a devastating barrage of toilets, filing cabinets, hubcaps, and even the game’s health pickups, these items also block your view and make it hard to target people precisely. Not to mention that you are vulnerable as heck, especially when scavaging around for something else to throw.
A semi-functional version of the old “Crossfire” map (the one with the bunker that calls in a nuclear strike to wipe out the rest of the map, though thte nukes and some ladders currently aren’t working) is out, and it’s also still a blast for teamplay even though it’s far less grav gun oriented (fewer objects, more open space)
I do miss a lot of the HL1 weapons though, and while I’m not so crazy that I’m demanding an exact remake of HL1DM, the arsenal in HL2 does seem pretty lacking in the creative/complex department that HL1 filled with all sorts of diverse weaponry. Manhack grenades? Antlions? It can be new and creative, but just as long as there’s something other than conventional gunfire. Because outside of the gravity gun and the wacky pulse rifle grenades, it’s basically all just guns of varying power and usability. They are supposedly adding in a crowbar and stunstick soon (along with more maps and gametypes), but the game cries out for goofy physicsy weapons and tactical things like the tripwires.
