doobiwan said:
So has anyone been playing SF over the weekend? Someone want to do a personal review?
My personal review.
I got my greasy little mits on the game on Wednesday, downloaded the 1.12 patch and installed all the toys. I had a look at the single play stuff because the overseas ping is horrid and there was no local server until this Friday. Unfortunately it is a 32 player server and someone had had reserved names so there might have been a problem getting on. I played 3 maps on Friday. The first is on an air craft carrier - this looks like a rip off of Call of Duty battleship scenario at first glance. It isn't once you start playing. I think that BF2 has been so successful because there isn't a single all dominating position and you can get around most situations - although a bit more on this later. What was really cool for me on this map is the hangar lifts.
The next map in the sequence is an assault on a submarine base at night, with no moon. There are lots of brightly lit areas too so you will be turning night vision on and off. Of the maps I have played this seems to be the most balanced - or should I say ends in very narrow margins. You do have your grappling hooks and zips lines but I don't think they get as much use as other maps. There is a fair amount of armour but the humvees have AT weapons. You also get to ride jetskis. Ambient sounds are cool too - steam hisses from the subs. I've played this map the most so far. There were a couple of foreigners (Holland and Germany) on the server with really bad pings and I think they caused the problem with some lag. I was dumped off an overseas server the other night for having an average ping over 240 and punkbuster banned me for 0 seconds. There must be a way of setting up our local servers to discourage the high pings from consuming a scare resource. This is not xenophobia.
The next map has Russians and Rebels fighting over a chemical factory. The comments were that the map sucks from some of the players. But here you start getting 'new' weapons. The AT guy's rpg is really cool even if it only has a short range. It also seems that the helicopters take a lot longer to spawn.
There have been comments about flash grenade abuse. You'd think that it would be worse in these maps but I think I have oinly encountered one. The gas grenade is really weird. The world goes all distorted.
The next map is back to night with an assault by the SAS on an airstrip. Huge areas of dark with island of light so the night vision stays on mostly. The height of the buildings and their distance apart means that zip lines can be really cool. I only got about half a game on this as I had family duties. I noticed the ambient sounds now included crickets.
Last night I joined in on a map that seemed to be a village on a volcano or really steep mountain. Again a night mission but there are some areas of this map that stay pitch black - must be the rock. Sniping and fire fights are the order of the night. You can get some awesome zip line runs in here.
After taht it was Ghost Town. This looks like street fighting between the Russians and the SAS. I wasn't able to really get any where as my ADSL router decied that that was a good time to jam - and it was late already.
As a personal observation - I joined in a lot of the squads and the people playing seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the newness of it all. There were lots of questions - unfortunately some about what do I need to get such and such. I know some people are driven by achieving all the ribbons and medals but some one was also mentioning the points packing that happens.
I say get it - it can be frustrating in the dark but adapting to that is pretty quick. I think there is more of a curve with the new weapons. Downside - if the server has 30/32 people playing then there is going to be more frustration if you can't log on - there isn't anywhere else to go at the moment and maybe this is why we need to block high pingers.
