good bye ns2
schkorpio
I can mspaint Join Date: 2003-05-23 Member: 16635Members
I can mspaint Join Date: 2003-05-23 Member: 16635Members
We'll after several hours of ns2 and the new gorgeous update, i gotta say - I'm no longer going to play ns2 because it simply isn't fun, I've been waiting for it become fun for a long time, but it has never gotten there.
Why?
-The absolute biggest killer (and what people, especially the ns1 vets have been saying for the last 4 years) is that the fundamentals of the game aren't right. The gameplay feels like work rather than playing a game. The basics of the game are sooo annoying, the movement is sluggish and muddy, even walking annoys me, no matter what team i'm on. (except for blinking i'll admit that is fun, but still a long way from ns1). movement, it is terribly frustrating, and especially more so since moving around is what you do for most of the round.
-Another fundamental is gunplay, and it feels completely off - normally shooting is supposed to be exciting, and it is when it is done right. The way the character holds the gun looks weird to start with, the angle feels strange, and size and location isn't great either.All of the guns feel like they don't do any damage. The rifle feels like a pea shooter, I can't tell if I'm hitting things despite the crosshair hit marker. The miniguns on the exo are so inaccurate that it's frustrating (yeah its for balance, but that's a crap reason to make a feature frustrating). The shotgun nearly feels good, nearly.
If I was to do what Hugh does and use a car analogy, then I'd say moving and shooting in NS2 feels like a car with lots of features and flexibility, but driving is mundane. But for the same cost you could get a mini cooper - and ns2 should feel like a minicooper. it can't carry your entire family, but the handling on it is superb, it is incredibly satisfying to drive, no matter what the circumstances are.
-concede and no RFK has really put a huge emphasis on winning rather than having fun. Often I ask myself, why am I playing this game again? So I can see the "Aliens WIN!" screen as soon as possible? You know when skulks rush marine spawn and finish the game in under 2 minutes? I get that underwhelming sense disappointment at the end of nearly every game. Thanks to concede you barely get to the cool toys before the other team gives up. But then should I be worried about getting to the cool toys - am I that bored with the standard gameplay that I want to get the better gear and abilities? And then I realize that I just spent 20 minutes walking around, holding "E" on various structures so that I could see "you win" logo? well that was a let down. I wouldn't mind doing that, if for at least 5 minutes afterwards I could walk around and pwn on the battlefield as a reward. but the reward never happens. and having No RFK drives this let down feeling even further, especially for aliens, chomping on buildings at the best of times is tedious, but a lot of the time the chomping is so loud that I can't hear marines coming up to me for their free kill. If only I got some res for completely an objective or making a kill, to counter balance the tediousness i had to endure.
- there is a lot of shiny and pretty stuff added quite regularly, but once you have played for a few hours you go "meh" because new stuff isn't what keeps people playing, its the mechanics behind it.
-despite having a ton of cool abilities and awesome things to do - not a single one of them is fun. they are all watered down - especially things that are researched that are meant to give you an edge in battle are watered down with "trade-offs". I figured the trade off for being say an exo is, that I've spend 75 res on it, and I can't spawn another one for ages. It doesn't need any other trade offs.
Whats the point of having so much stuff in the game if none of it is fun. vanilla skulks vs vanilla marines could be really great if it was done right, and the rest of the stuff in the game wouldn't even be missed. I would easily swap every single feature in the game if all there was skulks vs marines and if it was as good or better than ns1.
And a lot of the time it seems like the answer to this is "we made them crap, because its balanced that way" and that just makes me want to pull my hair out. (Especially when the I&S forum is filled with hundreds and thousands of awesome ideas.) But because it just doesn't make sense to have something in the game that is useless. Maybe try to balance things in a way that doesn't make them either, useless, annoying or frustrating, or just simply underpowered.
Just a few examples:
Turrets - wtf guys?
Parasite - completely nerfed, and this was one of best ways of communicating with alien team - skulks were actually used to skulk around and scout for objectives by marking buildings and marines. Now its just a little bit of bonus damage before you get into bite range.
The flamethrower has never really found a place in the game.
Exosuits - wow they sure look cool. But they're only about as 1/2 as useful as the heavy armor from NS1.
The gorge - sigh. despite all of the abilities you just feel so hopeless - at least until you get bilebomb. yeah babblers are useless (they are really really cool, but useless).
Cloaking - it could be totally overpowered, but thats the whole point, it is fun for the alien team if it is, the game is an arms race after all. The marines just need a more interesting anti cloaking ability.
Skulk movement - wall jumping :S completely flawed idea - you make a class of alien who's main ability is walk walking, and then you force it to run on the ground to move at a decent speed. thats like making an airplane that travels faster while its on a road. Oh it's a trade off? well you know how I feel about trade off's already
-atmosphere
What atmosphere? The game feels like quake 3 / TF2 with an marines vs aliens skin. those 2 games have ZERO atmosphere btw. They might be great tournament games but they are soulless.
-What makes games fun? (hopefully i don't sound as bad as peter molydoucheux...)
Its all about how they make you feel in the end.
For marines you want to feel like the ultimate badass. In ns1, when I was equipped with a heavy machine gun and heavy armor, and a welder. I felt like nothing could stop me (and sure a lot of stuff could stop me, but thats not the point). And when I was in a group of 4 or more heavy armor marines, stomping down a hallway it made me feel like a boss. And if some aliens happen to come across the group of heavies you'd fire that HMG and it like you were unleashing hell.You simply don't get this in an exosuit, your still a whimpy marine controlling a robot, and you have to fear a 0 res skulk and a 10 res gorge. because you are absolutely useless on your own. And when something pops out you gotta wait for the guns to wind up, but which point its hit you and run away. And even then who wants to be the poor sucker that is stares at a welder and the back of exo for rest of the game?
I don't want NS2 to be NS1, but I do want it to bring me the same emotions, the tension of building a phase gate just outside of a hive, then having an intense battle where you tried to get up seige turrets before you were overwhelmed by the aliens.
There is a lot more that I coud go on about but I probably already sound like a ranting nutter.
TL:DR
Yes i know UWE is a small team, and yes NS2 is a great achievement and its definitely something to be proud of.NS2 isn't terrible, infact its great. It does a lot of things right for PC gaming, but it just isn't fun to play once you are finished saying "oh cool, look at this feature/ability", because those features and abilities aren't actually fun to do/use.
Why?
-The absolute biggest killer (and what people, especially the ns1 vets have been saying for the last 4 years) is that the fundamentals of the game aren't right. The gameplay feels like work rather than playing a game. The basics of the game are sooo annoying, the movement is sluggish and muddy, even walking annoys me, no matter what team i'm on. (except for blinking i'll admit that is fun, but still a long way from ns1). movement, it is terribly frustrating, and especially more so since moving around is what you do for most of the round.
-Another fundamental is gunplay, and it feels completely off - normally shooting is supposed to be exciting, and it is when it is done right. The way the character holds the gun looks weird to start with, the angle feels strange, and size and location isn't great either.All of the guns feel like they don't do any damage. The rifle feels like a pea shooter, I can't tell if I'm hitting things despite the crosshair hit marker. The miniguns on the exo are so inaccurate that it's frustrating (yeah its for balance, but that's a crap reason to make a feature frustrating). The shotgun nearly feels good, nearly.
If I was to do what Hugh does and use a car analogy, then I'd say moving and shooting in NS2 feels like a car with lots of features and flexibility, but driving is mundane. But for the same cost you could get a mini cooper - and ns2 should feel like a minicooper. it can't carry your entire family, but the handling on it is superb, it is incredibly satisfying to drive, no matter what the circumstances are.
-concede and no RFK has really put a huge emphasis on winning rather than having fun. Often I ask myself, why am I playing this game again? So I can see the "Aliens WIN!" screen as soon as possible? You know when skulks rush marine spawn and finish the game in under 2 minutes? I get that underwhelming sense disappointment at the end of nearly every game. Thanks to concede you barely get to the cool toys before the other team gives up. But then should I be worried about getting to the cool toys - am I that bored with the standard gameplay that I want to get the better gear and abilities? And then I realize that I just spent 20 minutes walking around, holding "E" on various structures so that I could see "you win" logo? well that was a let down. I wouldn't mind doing that, if for at least 5 minutes afterwards I could walk around and pwn on the battlefield as a reward. but the reward never happens. and having No RFK drives this let down feeling even further, especially for aliens, chomping on buildings at the best of times is tedious, but a lot of the time the chomping is so loud that I can't hear marines coming up to me for their free kill. If only I got some res for completely an objective or making a kill, to counter balance the tediousness i had to endure.
- there is a lot of shiny and pretty stuff added quite regularly, but once you have played for a few hours you go "meh" because new stuff isn't what keeps people playing, its the mechanics behind it.
-despite having a ton of cool abilities and awesome things to do - not a single one of them is fun. they are all watered down - especially things that are researched that are meant to give you an edge in battle are watered down with "trade-offs". I figured the trade off for being say an exo is, that I've spend 75 res on it, and I can't spawn another one for ages. It doesn't need any other trade offs.
Whats the point of having so much stuff in the game if none of it is fun. vanilla skulks vs vanilla marines could be really great if it was done right, and the rest of the stuff in the game wouldn't even be missed. I would easily swap every single feature in the game if all there was skulks vs marines and if it was as good or better than ns1.
And a lot of the time it seems like the answer to this is "we made them crap, because its balanced that way" and that just makes me want to pull my hair out. (Especially when the I&S forum is filled with hundreds and thousands of awesome ideas.) But because it just doesn't make sense to have something in the game that is useless. Maybe try to balance things in a way that doesn't make them either, useless, annoying or frustrating, or just simply underpowered.
Just a few examples:
Turrets - wtf guys?
Parasite - completely nerfed, and this was one of best ways of communicating with alien team - skulks were actually used to skulk around and scout for objectives by marking buildings and marines. Now its just a little bit of bonus damage before you get into bite range.
The flamethrower has never really found a place in the game.
Exosuits - wow they sure look cool. But they're only about as 1/2 as useful as the heavy armor from NS1.
The gorge - sigh. despite all of the abilities you just feel so hopeless - at least until you get bilebomb. yeah babblers are useless (they are really really cool, but useless).
Cloaking - it could be totally overpowered, but thats the whole point, it is fun for the alien team if it is, the game is an arms race after all. The marines just need a more interesting anti cloaking ability.
Skulk movement - wall jumping :S completely flawed idea - you make a class of alien who's main ability is walk walking, and then you force it to run on the ground to move at a decent speed. thats like making an airplane that travels faster while its on a road. Oh it's a trade off? well you know how I feel about trade off's already
-atmosphere
What atmosphere? The game feels like quake 3 / TF2 with an marines vs aliens skin. those 2 games have ZERO atmosphere btw. They might be great tournament games but they are soulless.
-What makes games fun? (hopefully i don't sound as bad as peter molydoucheux...)
Its all about how they make you feel in the end.
For marines you want to feel like the ultimate badass. In ns1, when I was equipped with a heavy machine gun and heavy armor, and a welder. I felt like nothing could stop me (and sure a lot of stuff could stop me, but thats not the point). And when I was in a group of 4 or more heavy armor marines, stomping down a hallway it made me feel like a boss. And if some aliens happen to come across the group of heavies you'd fire that HMG and it like you were unleashing hell.You simply don't get this in an exosuit, your still a whimpy marine controlling a robot, and you have to fear a 0 res skulk and a 10 res gorge. because you are absolutely useless on your own. And when something pops out you gotta wait for the guns to wind up, but which point its hit you and run away. And even then who wants to be the poor sucker that is stares at a welder and the back of exo for rest of the game?
I don't want NS2 to be NS1, but I do want it to bring me the same emotions, the tension of building a phase gate just outside of a hive, then having an intense battle where you tried to get up seige turrets before you were overwhelmed by the aliens.
There is a lot more that I coud go on about but I probably already sound like a ranting nutter.
TL:DR
Yes i know UWE is a small team, and yes NS2 is a great achievement and its definitely something to be proud of.NS2 isn't terrible, infact its great. It does a lot of things right for PC gaming, but it just isn't fun to play once you are finished saying "oh cool, look at this feature/ability", because those features and abilities aren't actually fun to do/use.
Comments
it's like buzz and woody have totally let down andy.
i'm very sad now.
Yeah this seems worse than any online game I know by such a huge margin. Decided to give the new update a try, so I hopped in around 15 games of NS2 yesterday. All of them except 2 were conceded within a few minutes, or auto-won by over half the other team leaving the server.
Same old good gameplay bs with facelifts = bad, dumbed down game from it's predecessor = good. Gotcha
In my opinion, NS2 is the definitive team based FPS right now, as it is pretty much the only one which hasn't (except for combat) devolved into a mindless deathmatch. Give it time to be further polished, and have all those hitbox bugs, and movement quirks ironed out a bit and we will see just how awesome this game can truly be.
i must admit, i'm not a fan of the really 'heavy' skulk - not just whatever changed in the patch but it's like the whole epic wall-jumping turned into an inconsistent quirk. you hammer space bar and have a greatest movement speed boost when running UP a ramp/stairs...
other than that... i don't see what you're complaining about. i'm not saying stuff like babblers is perfect, but it's still fun a.k.a. challenging if you can find a good server. personally i've found the 20-man non-official servers to be best as the officials usually have more rookies.
I also don't understand why you would complain about Exo accuracy right after they add Railguns.
You could've said all of this without, "Ok, bye, I quit forever", and it would've been taken in a much more positive manner.
Now all your constructive criticism is veiled by the hanging cloud of your dramatic announcement.
I feel that in NS 1 the alien team required supreme team work and in game ability to pull off wins, it's the opposite in NS 2 and it was just much more satisfying playing from behind as the weird move on walls alien things.
The consequence of stream lining the game as they have is that while it should have made it easier to pick up for new players (it didn't) it leaves a lot less 'strategy' or depth for people who have already mastered the basics, simple things like tech points have completely stifled interesting game play from NS 1.
Sckorpio- "-What makes games fun? (hopefully i don't sound as bad as peter molydoucheux...)
Its all about how they make you feel in the end."
Kattikis- "I've read threads about this and peoples opinion about this matter, mine is simple; It's not fun anymore.
I play to have fun, not mainly winning even if that is always a confident boost. But at this time I will not play NS2 for a while, because of the simple reason that it's not fun and I feel like I am waisting my time with the game at the moment."
AND THE CAR ANALOGY.
I love NS 2, else I wouldn't have played it for over 600 hours in the past year or so, but in the end I don't think it can quite live up to the standard set by its predecessor.
SMNC's forum actually has a forum rule that forbids "I quit" threads since "nothing good ever comes from them".
the gun play, it is too light and I'll add melee/butt should be a convention of all the weapons with some push-back for airborne skulks or a stun for lerks ( though I do love l4d). The point I agree on is marine vs skulk engagements can be a bit underwhelming at times.
I'd also say as wonderful as the maps are they do lack some narrative and horror elements that I think would really ground the world -corpses, bullet holes or anything to really suggest something went down in a place people lived/worked.
But they are literally the only grumbles I can make. NS2 is (in my mind) a truly great game, that offers the best experience for varied, tactical team based gameplay. Sure about 25% of games fail due to poor balancing of teams, troll coms or just good ol' fashioned rookies. But when the elements come together (for me) there's nothing that comes close.
Take a break, and come back in a few weeks/months. You may just remember why you loved the game in the first place.
Oh and it also has a pretty good community compared to most other team based games! Just saying...
That's because SMNC is a terrible game and Uber is a terrible developer, and they don't need to know whenever one of their ~50 or so dedicated players quits, since it's a devastating blow to their money-grubbing pay-to-win schema.
But that's neither here nor there~
Concede needs to be taken out of this game for starters. I dont think ive actually had my reward of killing the final hive once since its been added. This game is far from being great I mean I have fun but its becoming work to play the game half the time.
Some people like to see actual innovation in the gaming industry, I guess you're just not one of those people.
Yes, NS2 is dumbed down from NS1 so that it can appeal to more people. You'll have to admit that NS2 is more popular than NS1 was in terms of number of people who have actually played it. The general population is mildly retarded and have problems playing NS2...do you really think they could play NS1?
This is just a self-justification, people complain because it's cathartic. If they really cared about improving the game they would provide level-headed feedback in a constructive tone. Sensationalist "I'm quitting forever" headlines just undermine the possibility of anyone taking them seriously except those who already agree.