I’ve paid for this game, and something about it—somewhere between the uncontrollable camera jittering, the bizarre inertial mechanics, and the utterly retarded lock-on system (maybe it works for some people; certainly not for me), which is exacerbated by the fact that manually charging someone doesn’t damage them… there’s just not a lot of fun to be had—the game lacks polish and feels, well, amateurish.
I’ll probably check back in a few months, to see if patching has fixed the issues, but I suspect it won’t get handled—the lack of testing is evident, when I hit a null pointer deref in my first online session—that sort of thing speaks to a messy or poorly maintained code base, IMO, and that’s not a promising sign.
I’ve paid for this game, and something about it—somewhere between the uncontrollable camera jittering, the bizarre inertial mechanics, and the utterly retarded lock-on system (maybe it works for some people; certainly not for me), which is exacerbated by the fact that manually charging someone doesn’t damage them… there’s just not a lot of fun to be had—the game lacks polish and feels, well, amateurish.
I’ll probably check back in a few months, to see if patching has fixed the issues, but I suspect it won’t get handled—the lack of testing is evident, when I hit a null pointer deref in my first online session—that sort of thing speaks to a messy or poorly maintained code base, IMO, and that’s not a promising sign.
unfortunately I have to agree with you - oh well at least it was only 8 quid wasted :)
Me thinks you expect a bit to much for the price of 3 cups of coffee.
When free games available online are more polished, yes—I expect the exchange of money to be paired with a greater value than what I can get for nothing.
Robin - 09 April 2010 09:21 AM
Sorry to hear that you think that Omicron, hope to see you back here in a few months.
Me too; this game has a lot of potential, but it’s just… not release-ready. I’m a little disappointed it managed to go gold in this state, but hopefully something will be done about that. Oh, and it’s all caps for a reason - I wasn’t just hyper when I typed my name out.
no3y3h4nd - 09 April 2010 11:48 AM
OMICRON - 09 April 2010 08:59 AM
This feels like a beta.
I’ve paid for this game, and something about it—somewhere between the uncontrollable camera jittering, the bizarre inertial mechanics, and the utterly retarded lock-on system (maybe it works for some people; certainly not for me), which is exacerbated by the fact that manually charging someone doesn’t damage them… there’s just not a lot of fun to be had—the game lacks polish and feels, well, amateurish.
I’ll probably check back in a few months, to see if patching has fixed the issues, but I suspect it won’t get handled—the lack of testing is evident, when I hit a null pointer deref in my first online session—that sort of thing speaks to a messy or poorly maintained code base, IMO, and that’s not a promising sign.
unfortunately I have to agree with you - oh well at least it was only 8 quid wasted :)
True that; let’s just hope it’s more of an ‘investment’ than a ‘waste’.
I wouldn’t say it’s it’s a waste I mean when you balance this as a game for life soon to have custom maps and content and promise of support vs 1 months sub of borecraft (or 3 cups of coffee! :D) I think it’s epic VFM.
Now I agree to a certain extent about the lock on system, there is a discussion thread open about it and crucially the dev team here actually LISTEN to people here :D
The game has been tested, to the extent that the last one had to be called a gamma test as they had already had a beta but the fact of the matter is they are a very small team of 8 guys (and not all of them are coders) and don’t have access to the epic QA resources available (in fact I used to work in an office next door to one studios QA dept, they had hell of a lot more then 8 people and their 100% full time job was just to test the games going through the pipline).
Now lets have a perspective test, by now this game will be selling in the tens of thousands of units and if there’s 100 people on here having problems then we are only talking about 1% of the user base, I myself have had the odd bug (last one I found is that if you are alt tabbed out at map change when you come back you can’t see the ground) but for a game that cost me 6 quid (we got some 4 packs in our group) they are hardly enough for to call them game breakers, I have paid a hell of a lot more for games a hell of a lot buggier (even biowares first game required a cheat to complete a mission) and games no where near as much fun which frankly is a lot more important to me then having to rejoin a server due to absent terrain)
I must also point out that this game is dependent on two very complex liberies that, being honest, as buggy as f**k this so I can see a fair amount of these being down to how the PS code interacts with these layers and not through bad practice or coding errors.
I bought it at least partially to support an indie dev, so I don’t feel bad about purchasing it, but it feels very, very unpolished, especially the interface… the core gameplay is pretty good, but the lock-on does fail sometimes, I hate how instead of having a real HUD it just pops up text (like “Lock on Lost!” and “Your flag has been taken”), and no voice chat (and text chat that you can’t scroll in… you’ve played TF2, right? Just implement that!). I already wrote a bit about the HUD (or lack of it) here, but it seems universally useless, especially the energy indicator in the top-right, as it is way too small!
The server browser is a mess, since you can’t even filter TDM, you can’t scroll (Pages? What the hell?), and you can’t hide empty and full servers (which I will admit, this is the first indie game where I feel like there are too *few* servers ). The menus are also pretty lacking (they aren’t even centered in 1440x900, which… I mean, come on), along with the options (no volume control beyond mute/unmute).
Also, the entire login system is insane. No Steamworks integration beyond Achievements? Having to log in every time I start the game? Super lame. At least remember my password!
Oh god, this isn’t Infinity Ward, or Valve. These guys are independent developers and are limited by certain factors like money. Its a group of guys, not an entire company with millions of dollars to spend and thousands of work hours to devote to making a game. A part of me bought the game JUST because of that fact. Sure, there are some issues with the game but its not like they’re abandoning the gaming community (EG Alien Vs Predator). From what I see they’re working hard to fix any issues and much more importantly LISTENING to their players concerns and wants.
Hi,
Auto log on is on the todo list (I flagged this to the head guy and his response was me too), as for steam logins, how many indi games support steam accounts? (altidude sort of ties the steam account to a vapourID but you still need to log in (although it does have a memory)) I am sure they wanted to do a lot more polish but this game has been cooking for such a long time it was about time it at least saw the light of day and there is only so much such a small team can with a day at least the game PLAYS well even if the interface is not top notch (I for one like the minimalist approach although a few things could be improved like volume but again I am sure this can be worked on, at least we get to play the game now :D (as I said the game part works, I can live with a buggy menu)
How would you implement voice chat? for a start a lot of the codecs / api’s cost $$ and would you really like to play a game with 20 complete strangers mewling over voice at you constantly??? (anyone remember the hell that was the AVP demo?) I would more then likely mute everyone anyhow! (and for friends / teams etc I have already offered the use of our mumble server and there have been others offering the use of vent / teamspeak as well)
Hi,
Auto log on is on the todo list (I flagged this to the head guy and his response was me too),
Good to know.
as for steam logins, how many indi games support steam accounts? (altidude sort of ties the steam account to a vapourID but you still need to log in (although it does have a memory))
I don’t need a ton of integration other than carryover of Steam names and maybe even the ability to see on the Steam friends list what server your friend is playing on and the ability to join it from the list. The technology is there with Steamworks, and I can think of a few games that do this - Shatter uses Steam names on their leaderboards, and Shattered Horizon allows you to join a server from the friends list.
I am sure they wanted to do a lot more polish but this game has been cooking for such a long time it was about time it at least saw the light of day
If this was the case it shouldn’t have been advertised as a finished product. Should have been termed a preorder with a beta or something. I mean, the fact that the devs don’t want to put out a demo right now because of bugs shows that not enough open testing was done.
How would you implement voice chat? for a start a lot of the codecs / api’s cost $$ and would you really like to play a game with 20 complete strangers mewling over voice at you constantly??? (anyone remember the hell that was the AVP demo?) I would more then likely mute everyone anyhow! (and for friends / teams etc I have already offered the use of our mumble server and there have been others offering the use of vent / teamspeak as well)
I play TF2 with voice chat on 24-player servers and it works just fine. I doubt a few Mumble/Vent/TS servers can handle the game’s capacity or find wide use. Along with mute options I can’t see why you wouldn’t want it in. (also, I played the AVP demo and the issue there was that there was no push-to-talk key, which was insane! Lots of people breathing and coughing into their mics without realizing others could hear them, ugh.)
And about your “feature curve:” I don’t want any sweeping changes to gameplay, which, again I think works fine. I just want the basic features of a 2010 multiplayer PC game, which include a decent HUD/UI, voice chat, and Steam functionality.
I do see what you are saying (and having a friend drop in would be nice), I actually didn’t notice the join server in SH (but I was at a LAN on their free weekend) but it would be nice.
Where do you draw a line about when a game is done enough, and how much testing would make you happy? as I been stated it went out for testing at least 3 times but even with the samples they could cope with they are hardly going to get the gamut of hardware and software the greater PC community deals with.
Again with the in game voice, 24 player TF2 = 12 people on your chan (assuming alltalk disabled) not 20 in deathmatch, and TF2’s voice is quite a few versions down the road, the original version shipped with CS was, frankly bloody horrible and like I said, it’s the sort of thing you can put into a game when you have the resources and the manpower to do that sort of thing, there must be close to 100 people at valve, beatnik is 8. http://www.valvesoftware.com/people.html
Our mumble server can currently support 75 so more then enough room for everyone on our PS server if they wanted to join (and we can increase the server capacity without any problems)
As I said it would be nice to get the bells ans whistles polished off but they have spent their time working on what counts, the gameplay :D
It’s all about learning how to play the game. The first match i played i had no idea what was going on, but now i’ve gotten very good You just need to take the little amount of needed to learn how to play the game correctly, and learn how to move fluidly in game (talking camera here).
I wouldn’t say it’s it’s a waste I mean when you balance this as a game for life soon to have custom maps and content and promise of support vs 1 months sub of borecraft (or 3 cups of coffee! :D) I think it’s epic VFM.
Now I agree to a certain extent about the lock on system, there is a discussion thread open about it and crucially the dev team here actually LISTEN to people here :D
The game has been tested, to the extent that the last one had to be called a gamma test as they had already had a beta but the fact of the matter is they are a very small team of 8 guys (and not all of them are coders) and don’t have access to the epic QA resources available (in fact I used to work in an office next door to one studios QA dept, they had hell of a lot more then 8 people and their 100% full time job was just to test the games going through the pipline).
Now lets have a perspective test, by now this game will be selling in the tens of thousands of units and if there’s 100 people on here having problems then we are only talking about 1% of the user base, I myself have had the odd bug (last one I found is that if you are alt tabbed out at map change when you come back you can’t see the ground) but for a game that cost me 6 quid (we got some 4 packs in our group) they are hardly enough for to call them game breakers, I have paid a hell of a lot more for games a hell of a lot buggier (even biowares first game required a cheat to complete a mission) and games no where near as much fun which frankly is a lot more important to me then having to rejoin a server due to absent terrain)
I must also point out that this game is dependent on two very complex liberies that, being honest, as buggy as f**k this so I can see a fair amount of these being down to how the PS code interacts with these layers and not through bad practice or coding errors.
Then they should not have used those libraries; a programmer’s job doesn’t just stop at finding a library that looks like it has the right features, and if those libraries are that bad, they simply weren’t suitable for production use. As someone else said, if the game had been put out on an open beta on Steam, or had been sold as a “work in progress”, then I would have been a lot less irritated at the issues I encountered.
As for the devs listening, if I had a direct line to them, I might stay on to help get the game working better, but I doubt that’s going to happen… if it does, cool—if not, oh well.
Lycosa - 10 April 2010 07:57 AM
It’s all about learning how to play the game. The first match i played i had no idea what was going on, but now i’ve gotten very good You just need to take the little amount of needed to learn how to play the game correctly, and learn how to move fluidly in game (talking camera here).
I have no (or few) problems with the camera, except that it’s too “smart” in a few ways it shouldn’t be (I believe to help with the vertigo issue, which I don’t have), and the issues with movement are related to really bizarre inertial mechanics—I’m sure I could learn to compensate for them, but I don’t really want to; my reflexes are honed from years of other FPS-ish games which feel a lot less weird, and I’m sure the mechanics in this game could be fixed so they actually make sense, more easily than making everyone who plays it have to relearn the basics of movement.
The bugs I came across were related to movements not being registered, camera jittering (uncontrolled shaking), getting stuck on vertexes, dashes going diametrically opposite the direction of the lock-on, dashes missing way too frequently (I could tell from where a player was moving I should have gone one way, but I actually went a very different direction), and crashes due to null object derefs, which frankly shouldn’t make it out of beta.
I’d also consider the lack of manual attacking options (I have often been able to predict people’s paths much more effectively than the lock-on system, even when it does “work”) to be a bug, but I’m sure it’s an intentional design decision, albeit a poor one.
Well this is the first game of this type (as far as I know) and considering it’s not a big gaming company making it I think they did a great job with it. The graphics are better than flash games, the engine is better than them, and most of all, the idea is CREATIVE. Infinity Ward and Valve make FPS games. They have been made for years but now, one brave and hopefull group of people comes alonng and makes a great game. Sure, there are many glitches and a lot of people who can’t play it but you have to remember that this game was made by a small group of people. They don’t have millions to spend on fixing every single error. Don’t worry, they will be fixed because the dev’s listen to suggestions and bug complaints. So, if you want the game to be better tell them what is wrong about it and they will see what they can do.
