After a few months of half-hearted attempts, Aaron from Anyway Games, Oakstout, my non-blogger but fellow pilot friend Scott and I finally all got together for some Frontlines: Fuel of War this past Thursday and had a blast. Come to think of it, all three of us bloggers are also Casualties of War remnants; I wonder if CoW ever got around to creating a presense on XBL?
It was Aaron and Oakstout’s first time playing the game online at all, and they’d only briefly tried out the single-player to get a bit of a grip on the control scheme. Oakstout warned us how much he sucks playing shooters with controllers but jumped right in anyway (take that Hudson! ) and fared quite well.
The four of us created an XBL Party so we could all voicechat then I created a private server so I could give a verbal tutorial on how the control scheme, objectives and the squad system work. After a few scrimmage matches, I switched us over to one of Kaos’ dedicated servers to get them into the real game.
When we joined, we filled the server, which had auto-balancing enabled. Scott and I managed to make the switch quickly to Red Star but Aaron and Oakstout were stuck on Western Coalition for awhile. It was fun, however, being on opposing teams yet chatting together. It almost felt sneaky or something, like we were traitorous spies working for the other side.
I memory serves, I got the first kill against Aaron, who was attempting to sneak up on me. He’d apparently been following me for a bit and was closing for the kill when I spun around and riddled him with bullets. A quick “Hi, Aaron” over party chat got some laughs.
Awhile later, I hear Oakstout giggling like a schoolgirl. “Tee hee hee!” I suspiciously ask what he’s up to but receive just a “oh, nothing…” for a reply. Then I hear him “tee hee hee” again. I know he’s up to something… Then he says “hey, Scott, turn around for me.” Huh? You’re on the other team! What do you mean turn around? So I turn around and see the barrel of a tank’s cannon pointed at my head a split-second before a deafening BOOM! shakes my living room from Oakstout firing a cannon directly into my face. How he managed to sneak up on me in a loud tank I’ll never know, but I’m certain my short attention span had nothing to do with it…
One of the biggest adrenaline-charged laugh-fests came later on the Oilfield map. By that time, Aaron and Oakstout had finally managed to find slots on the Red Star side so all four of us were squad-mates along with the other 21 players on Red Star faction. Aaron was sneaking into one of the Western Coalition objectives while Scott was piloting a helicopter in his direction. Scott picked up Oakstout and myself, who promptly took controls of the turrets and rained a hail of lead down on the unsuspecting Western Coalition troops. Suddenly three WC choppers rose up seemingly out of nowhere and had us triangulated. Scott was frantically jinking left, right, up and down as all three enemy choppers assaulted us with bullets and rockets. Oakstout and I were shouting instructions to Scott and it almost looked like we were going to escape when the WC players tricked us into a bad position. Oakstout yelled “Descend! Descend!” as I’m yelling “Climb! Climb!” when three full volley’s of rockets slammed into our poor chopper and the sky was filled with a fiery blast as the charred, smoking remains of our corpses fell to the ground. Even Aaron said “jeez, I heard that explosion all the way over here!” Oakstout’s laughter over that one was infectious! That was an exciting few minutes attempting to fight out of a hopeless situation and nearly pulling it off.
If you get into a game with Aaron, don’t be fooled: he’s good! That was his first time playing and he continually held the #3 spot for Red Star on that server, while I was typically down in the 7-9 range.
As much as I like MMOGs, sometimes it’s even more fun to get with some friends in a normal multiplayer game and just have fun in a cooperative/competitive environment.
I totally missed this at the time, but the Borderlands NDA was dropped a few days ago for press and players who attended a recent visit to Gearbox HQ to play the game. Focus testers are still bound by their NDA.
There are two post-NDA forums with a lot of information, one at the official Gearbox forums, the other at the fansite Borderlands Guide forums. I’ll highlight a few bullet points here though, since those threads are getting crazy in length already.
All the players who are spilling the beans were careful to mention that they only got 1-2 hours, the games were setup by Gearbox not themselves, and were limited to a few areas, so take that into consideration on some of the bullet points. Platform-wise, it seems everyone played the 360 version. There was only one PC on the scene and no PS3′s. The PC shooter guys didn’t bash too much (that’s a rare thing in and of itself) only saying their preferred controls are mouse and keyboard but that they fared just fine with the 360 controller.
Level cap is 50.
There are no melee weapons in the game, though certain humanoid enemies use melee weapons. Each character has a default melee action: Brick punches, Lilith does a palm strike, Mordecai does a sword slash and Roland does a combat knife slash. You can upgrade your guns with melee addons such as bayonettes. When using the ‘melee’ skill, the game automatically uses whichever (default or weapon upgrade) melee is stronger.
Loot distribution is Free For All. Again, Gearbox started the games for them so it’s possible there are other loot distribution options, but FFA is what they dealt with at Gearbox HQ. However if FFA turns out to be the only mode Borderlands ships with, that will make PUGs a frustrating and risky venture.
Borderlands is a true shooter, ie. no RPG mechanics under the hood artificially making your shots miss like you’d see in Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. However, the more you use a given weapon type, your character’s proficiency with it increases, though no one said what effect proficiency actually has on anything. Traditional shooter rules apply: crouching is more accurate than standing, and single shots are more accurate than bursts. Also there are no RPG attributes to increase as you level.
Controls on the 360 are similar to COD4: A to jump, B to crouch (which is a toggle, and crouch-jumping is possible), X to reload and interact with environmental objects or pick up loot, Y to change weapons. Left trigger switches to gun sights. Left bumper is the character’s special ability. Right bumper is grenades. Click the analog sticks to melee and sprint.
The 360 maintained a solid framerate even with lots of enemies on-screen.
Death animations are a mix between ragdoll physics and set animations.
You can equip ammo modifiers to your gun to add effects such as acid, etc. to your ammo.
AI is decent. More advanced bandits will take cover, etc. like you’d expect in a shooter but the lesser types will stand there and get shot. I haven’t read anything about monster AI so it’s probably exactly what you’d expect.
Skill trees are setup more like an MMO than Diablo. There are three trees to choose from and most/all of the skills are passive rather than active “oh crap!” buttons with long cooldowns. Each tree culminates with a single super power.
In addition to all the gun mods, there are grenade mods as well so you’re not just limited to the standard frag grenade. One mentioned was a “transition grenade” which would heal you with whatever damage it did to enemies. Just like the gun mods, you can have several available in your inventory and quickly swap to a different mod type any time you need to.
Quests are fairly simple and the typical MMO style formats. Kill ten rats. Kill this boss. Deliver this item to an NPC. Etc. The story is kept somewhat simplistic possibly to accomodate for the focus on cooperative play rather than specific characters like in a single-player game.
What MMO players would call an “elite” or “boss” is called a Badass in Borderlands. Since the difficulty scales in cooperative play, everyone has said with four human players the Badasses more than live up to their name.
The Medic role has a passive skill about halfway down a skill tree that will both damage enemies and heal players. One player mentioned a strategy for a particular Badass where Brick tanked the Badass and he stayed in the back and shooting Brick in the back of the head with healing ammo to keep him alive (and using Brick’s size as cover) and shooting the Badass when Brick’s health wasn’t critical.
The world is open and (mostly?) seamless but there are “doglegs” (ie. instances) that are repeatable and full of hard enemies and good loot.
I’ll stop there. Tons of additional information is available in the two forum threads I linked, especially the official Gearbox forum. If you have the time, by all means stop over there and give it a good read. But be warned, it’s at 86 pages before it was locked.
Unrelated to the NDA, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said this week that there will not be a pre-launch Borderlands demo but they might get out out post-launch. Borderlands is currently in certification mode, meaning it is feature-complete and the team is polishing things up for launch. They’ve already had more ideas during this phase that will be included in DLC. Sounds like they’re already working on two DLC expansions and they will be listening carefully to the community for ideas and to adjust their DLC plans to fit what the players are looking for.
KAOS Studios announced their new game today, Homefront, a first-person shooter for the Big Three platforms: Windows PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Everyone hoping for Frontlines 2 is saddened, myself included, but having a brand-new IP also keeps them from being a one-trick pony.
Homefront is set in near-future America where players fight a North Korean occupation of America following the collapse of the US economy. Sort of an eerie blend of our current times with some Cold War thrown in for flavor. Indeed, the story behind Homefront was penned by John Milius,who wrote the original Red Dawn movie in the 80’s as well as the in-production remake, wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and many other films, and the story for Medal of Honor: European Invasion.
I suspect the single-player campaign will be one-sided much like Frontlines: Fuel of War was. In that game, players could only play through the story from the Western Coalition perspective, ultimately fighting their way to the Red Star base in Moscow. The multi-player game obviously allowed players to choose a faction. (Red Star for the win! Capitalist pigs die!) The wording of today’s announcement leads me to believe Homefront will play out the same with a one-sided campaign then open multi-player battles.
I’ll most likely check out the game if it will be another sandbox shooter and if it continues KAOS’ little innovations.
My hopes for Homefront, and KAOS’ future games, are that they launch with dedicated servers for PC first and foremost. I still to this day feel that was the major nail in the game’s coffin from the PC side of things. But also give dedicated servers for the consoles – we love having those available on the 360! Second, I hope they’ve either gotten a grip on the Unreal Engine. Frontlines was their first time using the Unreal tech and… it showed, performance is still an issue. I’m not much of a fan of the Unreal Engine anyway but if KAOS is stuck with it from licensing it for Frontlines or just deciding to use it again now that they do have experience (I have no idea how the licensing works but I suspect it’s on a per-game basis anyway) they need to put everything they can into giving the best performance possible. Third, audio. I remember the audio engineer saying they used a stock sound library for Frontlines for budget reasons. It was your first game, so fine. But now, spend a few bucks, get out there and record your own high-quality sounds. Look at DICE… when it comes to the audio quality and immersion, it’s hard to beat a Battlefield game. But try, please.
EA’s Battlefield Franchise site has an announcement that yet another patch is coming to both Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. Aside from the obvious bug fixes, etc. the main attraction is a new map named Operation Blue Pearl which will focus on tight infantry combat featuring the PLA army as well as a beach landing scenario similar to Battlefield 1942’s Omaha Beach map.
The update will come in the 1.50 patch for Battlefield 2 and the 1.51 patch for Battlefield 2142. No release date has been set at this time.
I find it amazing that EA/DICE is still supporting these games with new content and bug fixes. Battlefield 2 is approaching 4 years old, and 2142 is nearly 3. The last update to 2142 was the 1.50 patch in May, 2008.
I’ve been trying to play 2142 but it keeps crashing to desktop when I launch it with no error messages to give me a clue what to fix. I spent time uninstalling the game this morning, updating all my drivers, then reinstalling. It just finished, in fact, so I’m crossing my fingers that it’s playable again.
Despite its’ shortcomings, Battlefield 2142 resonated with me and I’ve enjoyed every moment of it. I dream of a Frostbite engine sequel. In fact, I’ll go so far as to wish for a Battlefield Bad Company: 2142 that gives a good single-player campaign for when I’m not in the mood for multiplayer. DICE seems to listen somewhat to their player base, so fix what we complained about in the first Bad Company, namely the lack of squad options, the “noob dots,” and the restrictive maps that made it seem less of a sandbox shooter than was intended along with fixes to what we complain about in 2142 and you’ve got my cash. I’d even buy it both for PC and 360 provided the developers give each platform equal dedicated attention rather than following the current trend of leading with a console SKU then pissing off the PC players by giving them a “dumbed down” port.
Oh, and EA/DICE? Wake up and get your games on Steam already…
I considered simply titling this “PunkBuster Sucks!” but…
First off, no I have not been banned due to PunkBuster. What I am is unable to play the game I’ve purchased. Out of curiosity a few weeks ago I bought Kaos Studios new shooter, Frontlines: Fuel of War over Steam. I’ve enjoyed the handful of games I’ve been in so far, although the nerve — nay, the stupidity — of anyone releasing a shooter without dedicated server support in the 21st century was beyond disappointing. Kaos’ 1.0.2 patch rectified this but it seems the damage had been done. Even last week Frontlines’ server browser was showing zero dedicated servers for the game.
June 5, Kaos pushed out the much-anticipated 1.1.0 patch, which among other things, adds PunkBuster anti-cheat support. I wasn’t 100% positive if I can use a “normal” patch for a Steam-enabled game, so I waited until Steam auto-updated the game the following day. Great, right? Not so much…
As you can see on the lower left, I do have PunkBuster enabled. Yet, for the past three days, I’ve gotten this error and have been unable to join any PB-enabled servers, which is the majority now. The other problem would be player count. Zero players on any servers? I’d love to think it’s because everyone else’s PB is broken and they can’t play, but I’ve seen a fair share of activity on PB-enabled servers the past few days. So it’s just me.
I recall having similar problems with both BF2142 and CoD4 — PunkBuster has been nothing but a pain in my ass — so I went to my old standby fix: run the official PunkBuster update software. I ran the PB updater, let it update itself then checked for updates for my PB-enabled games. Turns out both BF2142 and CoD4 were in need of PB updates. I could have sworn that PB was supposed to check for updates when I’m playing PB-enabled games? Anyway… I try to add Frontlines to my PB games list but hit another snag:
Ok, so let me get this straight: Kaos gets the green light from Even Balance to put PunkBuster in their game. But Even Balance doesn’t bother to put out an update that the game is officially enabled?
The Battlefield Franchise site posted the glorious news that the 1.50 patch is final and available for download!
I’ve been participating in the public 1.50 beta for a few weeks now and have really been enjoying the changes, the new maps, and the wide screen support. The new maps have been repeatedly tweaked in accordance with testers’ feedback, and they play like a charm now! Always great to have more maps and more support in these games, and I’m still amazed it ever happened, considering it’s an EA-published title.
What I do not approve of is DICE repeatedly demonstrating they keep their heads firmly implanted in their rectal cavities. Command line switches? C’mon… it’s one thing as a quick shortcut to login with command line switches in the game shortcut, it makes an already lengthy process of loading the game and logging in a little quicker. But some of this stuff — namely the new wide screen support — is an option that hello!?!? should be in the friggin’ OPTIONS! This is a game not SSHing to a Linux server to do administrative work. The only reason I ever found the wide screen support to begin with was doing a web search for it. Even the readme.txt doesn’t tell how to do it, only that “We have seen a massive demand for widescreen resolutions in Battlefield 2142. This feature is still in a Beta state for your use and is not yet fully supported.” Oh, and don’t even get me started on the Battlefield series still having the fugliest fonts in gaming… or that my avatar can drive a hover-tank, climb a tower to snipe my foes, or fly aerial vehicles but goddamn if he doesn’t stub his toes trying to run over railroad tracks a couple pixels high…
Just to clarify, to enable wide screen resolutions, add the following switch to your BF2142 icon: +widescreen 1 then in the video options only wide screen resolutions will be in the drop-menu to select.
The two highlights I’m most looking forward to are the two new maps, both of which are futuristic versions of 1942 maps (I always loved Wake Island in 1942!) and widescreen support — both 16:9 and 16:10!
Really looking forward to 1.50 (hell, I may even do the beta?) and especially looking forward to native 16:10 so I won’t need Widescreen Fixer any longer. (Quite frankly, I’m not 100% sure it’s even doing anything…)
I mentioned in my previous post how excited I was that my lore-master Arwellyn had reached level 40 in Lord of the Rings Online. It is exciting, but at the same time, nerve-wracking.
I felt much the same back in World of Warcraft. I took forever to get a character to 60 because I’d never reached level cap before in any MMO and in my infinite noobness was afraid of the unknown. Would I feel the game was “over” once the xp bar disappeared? Would I feel I’d “beaten” the game? I was aware of dungeons and so forth, and certainly had gone through Deadmines, Scarlet Monestary, and others during the leveling process but I was completely unsure of what exactly there was to do with no xp bar, or why anyone would do it. I did everything I could think of to slow down the leveling, gaining as little xp as I possibly could, but finally the day came when I experienced the dreaded, yet wonderful, Final Ding. It didn’t take long for the lightbulb to go off in my head and realize how wrong I’d been: rather than coming to any “end” reaching 60 opened so many possibilities it was staggering!
With LOTRO, I’m not walking around with blinders on. I know what there is to do at 50, and I want to do it. The catch is, I’m a bit of a completionist, and in the next few months prior to the release of Mines of Moria, we can look forward to Book 13 (this month) and Book 14 which brings the Shadows of Angmar epic story line to a close in preparation for an all-new epic story arc with Mines of Moria. On the one hand, I want to experience the final two Books during the leveling process and feel like I’m earning my way through them rather than already being 50. On the other hand, if I delay leveling until Book 14 has been pushed, will I even have time to do the current raids, etc. that I’ve been looking forward to before the expansion ships?
Regardless, I had Arwellyn nearly parked this week, only doing some solo quests in Evendim and helping a few kin-mates with some quests. Otherwise I’ve been leveling my new hunter, Sethryndil, who is already level 22! The hunter is an amazingly fun class to play, downright addictively fun. I’ve only managed to get into a group twice though, and I’m finding learning aggro management more difficult than with the lore-master since, other than healing, the lore-master isn’t exactly going to top the dps charts. The hunter, on the other hand… It almost took me back to those WoW days with my hunter, back in the pre-raiding days where I had no use for dps or aggro addons, I had to learn and manage my aggro on my own. Once I got into raiding, so many addons were in use that everything was being told to me anyway, I could pretty much turn off the brain cells, veg out and spam a couple DoT’s or special attacks. LOTRO’s lack of addon scripting support is a nice change of pace in that regard, although given how RP-friendly the game is, I really miss the old RPHelper addon that I was in charge of before I retired from WoW and turned development over to a user who’d been contributing to the project. I’d love to write a LOTRO version if Turbine adds scripting support someday.
In FPS news, the Battlefield team has announced that a 1.50 patch will be going into beta soon for Battlefield 2142! Looking forward to that; it’s almost unbelievable that any game published by EA is getting an inkling of support nearly a year after launch!
Curiosity finally got the better of me and I purchased Frontlines: Fuel of War on Steam. I had to turn off a few of the eye candy options to get a playable frame rate, and I still need to do some tweaking to smooth out the experience but it seems pretty cool so far, though I only have a few minutes with it. I’ve completed the first single player mission and played one match online. My initial gut reaction was that it’s way better than the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo 2.0 from Steam but I’m unsure yet — despite 64 player support — if it will have the large maps with multiple battlefronts, varied objectives, and the overall feeling of being in a large-scale war that the Battlefield series has always excelled at. That’s what I’m looking for in this type of FPS these days. The small-scale skirmishes ala COD4, Insurgency, Counter-Strike, whatever is so 20th century for me. I bought Frontlines the same day dedicated server support was patched in, but there weren’t any dedicated servers up at the time. I’m looking forward to checking out more Frontlines when I get home next week; hopefully some dedicated servers will be operational by then. Also looking forward to getting some 2142 action since I totally slacked off getting my frag on the past few weeks. Mainly because I’ve been so into LOTRO and having fun with my kinship…
I’m not even sure I’ll be able to formulate this into a cohesive thought with an actual point, but here goes anyway…
I keep the Battlefield 2142 demo installed just in case a friend decides to try the game out with me. My good friend Jostein did just that a few days ago. He’s an Insurgency addict, recently promoted to admin on the popular server he plays on, so coming to 2142 was a bit of a culture shock, just as going to Insurgency is for me. We each complain about the UI in each game, and being able to tell who’s friendly and who’s not in each game. One valid complaint he did have, however, is one I’d never really noticed since I play the real version of 2142: in the demo, there’s almost zero communication and coordination and any sense of “community” is nearly non-existent or at the least filled with the selfish, swearing, bunny-hopping kids we all know and “love.”
I’m not in a 2142 clan, and I can’t say I’m particularly “good” at the game, but while playing the full version I consistently get invited to squads, even when I’m already in one; sometimes I’m invited to clan-only squads. 90% or more of the time in my experiences, the squad leaders are giving orders, the squad is complying to advance the squad’s score for upgrades and the commanders are at least trying to do their job as well. Coordination and communication rule the day there. In the demo, by contrast, it seems to be rare for squads to even form, rarer still for the squad leader to bother doing his job.
FPS demos are (nearly?) always played on separate demo servers so demo players can never interact with “real” players, but allow players to continue playing endlessly. Well, until there are no more demo servers. In the MMO world, the trial period is limited-time but is not (overly) crippled other than the typical spam-prevention method of prohibiting trial players from sending tells or mail.
I can’t help but wonder if an MMO that had its “noob experience” separate from the “real world” like LOTRO does would go over well with an endless trial period; the catch being you can never leave the “noob world,” can never communicate or otherwise interact with players in the rest of that game world. And, if so, would that also create an extremely fractured community like we’re seeing over in 2142, both in terms of the trial vs. full players and of the mentality and attitudes of former trial-only players finally coming over into the full world?
Players have been curious just what the hell EA/DICE is up to with Battlefield Heroes, which will lead off EA’s new “Play 4 Free” line of games for the PC, all of which will be free to download and play and will rely on micro-transactions for profitability.
Almost immediately after the announcement weeks ago, a controversy erupted over rumors the game would have only a third-person view, which would be new for the Battlefield series, thinking perhaps that would be somehow easier for the targeted casual gamer than a first-person view. The latest rumor is the game will feature both first- and third-person camera views, depending on the player’s current action or situation.
Today, Planet Battlefield put up the first video trailer for the game, embedded below. According to the article, this video was originally put up on YouTube and was quickly taken down, but not before someone saved and reposted it. That makes me think the video was not intended for public consumption, but nevertheless it’s out there now. No videos are yet available on the Battlefield Heroes website. I can’t help but wonder if the DICE guys have been visiting Zero Punctuation… their narrator talks way fast! In any event, the game actually looks fun and entertaining, and with a sense of silly humor rather than the serious “we’re at war!” tone the Battlefield series is known for. The cartoony art style will draw obvious comparisons to Team Fortress 2, however.
) and fared quite well.
Oakstout’s laughter over that one was infectious! That was an exciting few minutes attempting to fight out of a hopeless situation and nearly pulling it off.
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