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.
I tried a Half-Life 2 mod today, Zombie Panic: Source which actually turned out to be entertaining, at least in short spurts (of blood).
The idea behind ZPS is the classic zombie outbreak scenario, nothing new there. Unlike many of the zombie mods out there, however, this one is multi-player. Here’s how it works:
When the match starts, you can choose to be human or zombie. If no one chooses zombie, the server will randomly select one player to be the first zombie: the carrier. Humans are armed with random melee weapons such as a club, shovel, even a Logitech keyboard! Humans also have flashlights to get a better view of things, since the game is quite dark. Pistols, rifles and shotguns are available if you can find them, though ammunition is sparse and must be found as well. Explosives also, though I haven’t seen them today. Zombies can only melee with their clawed hands, but they hit very hard. Zombies also have regenerating health which helps keep them “alive” longer. Where humans have their flashlights, the undead have “zombie vision” which is a sort of infrared vision. The more active a human is, the more body heat he gives off and the easier he is to track.
If you noticed above I referred to the first zombie as the “carrier” that’s because once a human is killed, he respawns as a zombie! Despite the humans having ranged weapons, some of which are quite deadly, every match I played today ended in a zombie victory. One dead human means one more zombie to join the ranks and overrun the dwindling human population!
ZPS is fun in its own right if you’re into the small skirmish PvP scene, and the automatic team change from human to zombie is an interesting change of pace.
Personally, I was hoping for a cooperative PvE experience; Dead Rising meets Resident Evil as a Source engine-powered FPS. I envision somewhat larger maps, with multiple goals to achieve in order to win. Zombies continually spawn and march toward the players, hungry for their virtual brains. If another player connects to the server to join the fray, the server will spawn more zombies to keep the difficulty level sustained. Conversely, when a player disconnects either some zombies will despawn or a longer period of time will pass before any further zombie spawns. Something like that… I’m making this up as I write, after all.
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