Blogged in FPS, Computers, Games by Matt on Tuesday September 4, 2007
Let me begin this by saying, Insurgency, you’re one of my favorite FPS games I’ve played in the couple of years, but why do you fail me? You were released, and promptly patched to fix critical problems, now it’s nearing two months later and you have yet to release a new patch nor any new content. We understand you’re wanting to expand the game while fixing numerous issues, but why not fix the “small” issues, and release the fixes, while you work on new content? I know you’re not being paid a salary for your work, but can you really expect to shove an unfinished game, technically a Half-Life 2 mod, to an eager, active community and not continue semi regular support?
I’m not a game developer, nor even consider myself an expert on the subject, but what I do know is what makes a game or mod successful in my view as well as many others. Producing and releasing a mod for any game is a task unto it’s self, but once you reach that milestone there has to be continuous support for the mod. For example, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat both started as mods for Half-Life, but through their continuous updates and content additions they’ve grown to be full, retail games. Should we be expecting this kind of support from all mods that are released now?
The fact of the matter is development has to continue at a regular pace with regular updates to the game, otherwise your player base will gradually fall off, regardless of “larger” updates. You’ll gain a few back with the new “large” updates but it will NEVER make up for the amount of players lost while waiting. Releasing small patches, that fix a few bugs or address balance issues, consistently is a large factor in keeping players content. MMORPG companies have realized this since their infancy, considering it means even more when your customers pay a monthly recurring fee. You could say the bottom line is “Develop constantly, release often”.
The problem with Insurgency in this case is the small, underlying bugs that should have been addressed directly after the release of their 1.1 patch, instead as noted, they are currently aiming at a large release with 1.2 that will fix the current bugs and add new content. Gamers love new content, but they also want their game to play as well as possible, just look at Counter-Strike 1.6.
I guess the easiest way to summarize my issue with the Insurgency development cycle is; fix the bugs before you bring introduce new ones!
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Blogged in FPS, Games by Matt on Friday August 26, 2005
The Doom movie trailer has been released today. It’s avaliable at Yahoo Movies or by clicking here.
Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I can honestly say I’m not anymore estatic about seeing the movie as I was when I read about it before. The settings in the trailer remind me alot of Doom 3, as far as the architecture indoors and the look of Mars goes, however the “monsters” in this one are spawned from a genetics project gone wry, instead of being beastily demons from hell!What the hell is that? The people that Doom is marketed towards are the gamers, who have played Doom since it’s beginning, at least the older crowd in that case. Regardless the plot has been changed. To top all of that off, it looks like there’ll be First-Person footage in the movie, as long as the trailer uses actual footage. I don’t want to watch a god damn movie in the first person, if I wanted to see that, I’d play the god awful game. As for my recommendation of Doom the Movie, I’ll probably wait and download it. Yar!
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Blogged in FPS, Games by Matt on Sunday July 17, 2005
Just the other day at work, Bill, one of the computer techs at my work, and myself were talking about what First Person Shooters we like. We both came to an agreement that we both prefer the faster paced, more deathmatch like FPS games, Quake 2, Quake 3, Team Fortress, Call of Duty and so forth. When talking about the games I was remembered a great game I played for a good summer in 2003, this game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (ET).
If you don’t know what ET is, it was scheduled to be a Multiplayer Addon for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, instead they decided to release it as a free, open source game. The gameplay is VERY similar to Team Fortress. ET runs on the Quake 3 engine, so it’s nice looking but nothing cutting edge. The gameplay is top notch though, if you remember playing TF for QuakeWorld then you’ll feel at home here, however if you’re a Counter-Strike Kiddie, this will be a new experience for you. Out with the “faux-realistic” FPS gameplay of CS, and in with the Team Objective Based game with tons of DM flavor. Don’t get me wrong CS is a good game, however it doesn’t have the appeal for me. I much prefer the Fast, Deathmatch like gameplay of ET over CS anyday.
If you’ve never played Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory be sure to give it a try, and if you’re an OG QW:TF player you’ll be pleasently suprised, this I gurantee you!
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Blogged in FPS, Games by Matt on Sunday June 12, 2005
So I decided to mess around with Battlefield 2 some more, to make it run worth a crap on my system. First of all, if you have a Nvidia graphics card, make sure you use the drivers on the CD! Before I got done downloading the Battlefield 2 demo, I took the liberty to make sure my Video Card drivers were the most recent. I took a stroll over to Nvidia to download my drivers, according to them, their latest official driver is 71.89 so I got and installed them. Anyways it turns out the Battlefield 2 demo has 77.?? Nvidia Drivers. Anyways, make sure you use the drivers on the CD if you do not already have the 77.?? Nvidia Drivers.
Once you fire up the game, you’ll now want to navigate to the Options -> Video section. Once there you’ll be able to tweak your game for performance. If you’re running a low-end machine, (1.8GHZ or less, 64mb Card, 512mb Ram or less) I would recommend setting your settings all to low, and make sure shadows are turned off, Draw Distance to 50%, and you’re video resolution is at 800×600.
If you’re running a mid-range machine (1.8GHZ to 2.4GHZ , 128mb Card, Gig of Ram) I’d recommend leaving everything on Medium, however turn your geometry and texture settings to high. Once again, make sure shadows are turned off, the shadows really seem to kill machines with 128MB cards. The good thing about turning every thing to medium, except Texture and Geometry, and Shadows off is you can have the game with MOST of the Eye Candy and still get decent performance, make sure you’re resolution is at 1024×768 and 50-60% Draw Distance.
High-end machines (2.4GHZ and UP, 256MB Latest Generation Video Card, Gig or More of Ram) get to take advantage of all the eyecandy Battlefield 2 has to offer. Turn everything to high, crank your AA up a bit, and set your resolution to 1280×960 and frag away. You’ll get to see Battlefield 2 the way it’s suppose to be played, HOWEVER, all computers will differ on performance so mess around and give it a try.
I tried all the above settings out on two different boxes I have and these are what seemed to work the best. I didn’t do any Scientific Benchmarking or anything, however these settings gave me the best performance based on hardware. If you have any recommendations feel free to leave a comment for everyone to see.
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Blogged in FPS, Reviews, Games by Matt on Friday June 10, 2005
Well well well, where to start with this one. As many of you probably know, the demo for Battlefield 2 was released today. Battlefield 2 is the (over)hyped sequel to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam. This time around Battlefield 2 was worked on by the team of Trauma Studios the same group who released Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942.
By just reading this opening remark, you can probably already tell my opinions on Battlefield 2, however keep in mind this is my critique from my first impressions, which in this case happen to be from playing the demo.
The Battlefield 2 demo weighs in at a hefty 546MB, if you’re lucky enough to get connected to a download, you will recieve a single map which can be played in single player for ten minutes or played in multiplayer. Once installed and loaded you’ll be presented with a rather sleek user interface, where you can go ahead and select your play mode. Once you’re ready to dive in to the action, you may as well go grab some food or smoke a cigarette, because you’re going to be waiting for your “shaders to optimize” on the first load up. Keep in mind I am on a AMD 64 3500+, Gig of DDR in Dual Channel, Two 120GB Seagate SATA drives in Raid 0, and a pair of eVGA 6800GT’s in SLI, and this first load took well over three minutes. I thought this load would be acceptable, since it was claiming it was optimizing shaders for my graphics selection. However after loading another game without the shader optimization it still took well over two minutes, BAD!
Finally the load finishes, and I’m presented with a menu where I have to enter the game, then select my class kit and spawn point. I spawn in the game, and the first thing I’m presented with are HUGE FUCKING BLACK BLOCKS COMING FROM SHADOWS OF PLAYER AND VEHICLE MODELS. Now I could have sworn the game was optimizing shaders for my selection, but apparently it didn’t. I throw my anger aside with the shadow ordeal, and decide to give the game a spin. I start running to my objective, and I’m tapping my F8 key looking for my good old familiar radio menu only to find out it has CHANGED! You hit Q to bring up a HORRIDLY designed radio menu system. You navigate it with your mouse, wtf? I’d rather beck at my keys, then have to move my mouse to an exact spot for a selection. Horrid move EA, than again it is EA, so what should we expect?
I get up to where the action is happening, and start fighting and think to myself, wow this feels just like Desert Combat. That isn’t inheritly a bad thing, seeing how Desert Combat is a great mod for Battlefield 1942, but in this case it is bad. The fighting is like Desert Combat, however when you do start fighting you will notice the same bugs that regular old Battlefield 1942 was plagued with for oh so long. You can hit people with grenades, and they’re just magically lifted off the ground, or tank cannons just launch people. You’d figure after five years, EA would have figured out how to fix this, than again they don’t care, they have a cash cow, why invest more to fix when they can invest none and profit.
The weapon and vehicle sounds in Battlefield 2 are great, however the radio messages are just downright annoying. The graphics are also nice, even if they are laggy as shit. With some work, Battlefield 2 could be MUCH better, however deadlines and pre-determined release dates mess all of that up. Before I make a more formal review, I will wait untill the full game is released, until then I will not touch this demo again.
Get the demo here and judge for yourself!
UPDATE
Take a gander at this article I wrote after I messed around with the game tweaking my Graphics Options for best Gameplay.
http://www.ruinedmylife.com/2005/06/12/tweaking-battlefield-2-graphics-options/
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