Some of the guys from Infinity Ward (who created the first Call of Duty:Modern Warfare) started their own company called Respawn Entertainment and are about to release their first FPS - about 11 March IIRC.
I managed a few games thanks to a spare beta key a clan-mate sent me. After the first one I was a bit “meh…it’s OK” but there was a moment during the second match when I somehow managed to get behind most of the opposing team, called in my Titan and went on a fantastic spree of mayhem & destruction (if you’ve seen Army of Darkness - it felt kind of like when Ash arrives in the Deathcoaster - his car with the giant windmill on the front - “Yeahhhh Babyyyyyy!!!”).
Bagged a bunch of mooks, three pilots and two titans
Looks to be a good alternative to COD if you like fast-paced FPS action. Not sure at the moment how much longevity it has but the online campaign looks pretty intersting.
More environmental destruction and melee weapons for Titans would be nice. I was thinking something along the lines of the spaxe-axe from “Doc” Smiths old Lensman series of books:
The game does look like it could be good. I like the parkour moves you can pull on foot. Looks fast and fluid. Unfortunately the game on PC is Origin only and no dedicated servers so I think I’ll pass.
The sens of movement that you get in this game while on foot is not something I’ve ever felt before. Jumping through windows, bounding past obstacles, sprinting up walls, jetting up onto titans - it’s super smooth and fluid and fun.
The titans are like the frosting on this FPS cake, they’re cool, and the definitely make an impact on the gameplay, but the action on foot is tremendously rewarding. Which is really weird. When I first heard about the game I thought that it would be a huge challenge to balance out being on the ground vs being in a mech. But they done good.
You need Origin to download it but it has it’s own internal matchmaking/server browser so you don’t need something like the BF4 Battlelog website to play.
It was good enough that I bought a key through one of the discount game shops. I doubt I would pay the full A$80 they are asking on Origin for it :eek:
Didn’t spend enough time playing to see how the ‘Invite Friends’ function worked but with a few buddies on Teamspeak or Ventrillo it could be intense.
Kinthalis: what wall-running I did was OK, I probably needed to spend more time working out my key & mouse setup. There were a few times I would have liked the action to slow down a bit so you could have a slightly more “tactical” experience.
The ability for your Titan to do more enviromental damage would be my big ask. Punching through a wall to get to a sniper hiding in a top floor room etc.
It would probably be a nightmare to code but the ability to use mundane objects as weapons would be amazing. Picking up a chunk of damaged wall or a car and hurling it at an opponent or being able to rip a lightpole out of the ground and beat on an opposing Titan
I agree that the movement and free running elements are fluid and natural, which is why it’s too bad they don’t really fit the game. The movement is too fast - combined with almost instantaneous time to kill, maps that are way too big for 6v6, and weapons that require very little skill to operate and do tons of damage, there’s almost no function of movement within combat. The first person to see the other person wins, but rarely does the victim even see the attacker. You’re just running across the map at warp speed and occasionally you fall over dead because woops, some in the third floor on that building to your right has a shotgun or a motherfucking lock on pistol.
They made the maps big enough for titans to be able to run around in, but the game is limited to 6v6, so it ends up being very sparse (which is part of the reason, I suspect, for the turbo running speeds). They put in hapless bots to make the world feel a little less empty, but they’re just moles to be whacked - they don’t actually contribute to combat very much - while technically they can kill you if you stand in front of them for 5 minutes and wave your ass at them, I killed hundreds of them in the beta while either not dying to them - or I think I recall dying to them once when I was wounded running from another player. It doesn’t feel like the bots have a role to play in the game. They could’ve made them more MOBA-like to give them a purpose (and a purpose to protecting and killing them), but instead they’re just target practice for your lock on pistol on your way to the enemy.
Lock on pistol. Lots of lock on weapons in the game. Lock on weapons are terrible, terrible game design and I’ve got about an hour’s worth of rant on this subject but it baffles me that it isn’t immediately obvious to everyone else why lock on weapons (except in simulators where they’re necessary and complex) aren’t terrible, terrible gameplay for everyone. The lock on pistol isn’t as dumb as I thought it would be when I heard about it - most of the time you end up not waiting for the lock and just shooting people yourself - but the prevalence of lock-on weapons for various roles across the game is just awful game design.
The Titans were actually pretty good. I felt like the mechanics for generating them and using them were actually pretty well done. Their relative strength is good. So props for that.
So while the infantry controls are fluid and feel really good (IW has always been good at this, even as the COD games got dumber and dumber, they still had awesome controls, and I’m a guy who’s super super finicky about controls. If I detect even the slightest bit of acceleration or smoothing I will shit on your existence), the actual combat ends up being very dumb - following the trend of fast movement, magic guns that require no skill to operate, and instant time to kill ensuring that no one actually fights, they just see people first and those people die. As if that weren’t skilless enough, added to this trend are a plethora of lock-on weapons to make sure we understand just how dumb it is.
That said, it’s still kinda fun. It scratches that quick paced, smooth controls deathmatch itch that I get from time to time. Since it’s not an activision game, maybe the pricing will be sane and one day I can buy it for $10.
Although they’re going to DLC the shit out of it I’m sure, which does not combine well with console style matchmaking at all. It works okay with BF3/BF4 because if you don’t have the DLC maps, you can just find a server that doesn’t run those maps in the rotation (or just be kicked out when they hit that part of the rotation) - but with console style matchmaking, at least in the COD games, what ends up happening is that you can only be matched up against people who have the exact same DLC configuration as you. And since having a wide matchmaking base is required for that style of matchmaking to even function, splitting up the player base in that fashion really hurts the latency, game type variety, and general ability to form a game. At one point I had cod:mw2 and the first expansion pack when there were 3 expansions (I had a friend who worked at activision that got these things free sometimes) - what end up happening is that most people either had no DLC or all the DLC - and the population slice that had just the 1 DLC was small. So even though there might be 40,000 people playing at that moment, I could only be matched up against a few hundred of them. Across all game types. Which meant that I would often have to leave the matchmaker seeking another game for 10-20 minutes to find one, and then sometimes I’d be dropped into a game in Poland. Console style matchmaking is awful enough by itself, but when you mix in lots of map DLC with that, it can become too frustrating to even deal with.
I think, Beef, this is ultimately a console shooter. They don’t want a high skill ceiling, they want that skill space as compressed as possible, hence the super easy weapons coupled with quick kills and the dumb cannon fodder.
I also agree with the maps being a tad too big. Numerous times I was stuck huffing it back to the action.
I can’t imagine it’s worth $60. It’s fun, but shallow and forgetable. I’ll wait until it’s $15ish. Unless it has broken console style matchmaking with the DLC, where you have to buy all the DLC to get full access to matchmaking, in which case it’d still be too expensive.
I’ve been playing this the last week and I’ve been having a blast. I really do hate the smart pistol, however, and will mentally judge everyone who uses it.
