Ed Herdman
07-24-2010, 04:42 PM
Well, on loading the first thing I saw was the .net 2005 (I think it was) executable running. Not the most auspicious sign. But in-game, it was better. First thought was "wow, this looks a lot like TF2, they're even using the vector-based HUD drawing." Second thought was "wow, this looks a lot better than TF2, even with the similar type of scenery. Hot damn that's a good looking tree root." First thing I played was the Practice, for a while, then Co-op and all sorts of people joined my server. That was interesting.
The very first thing I noticed about multiplayer (in coop) was that nobody seemed to see my chat messages. Only at the end of the round did I see some of theirs, too. This wasn't an issue for other game modes, strangely, and I did have one creepy person join my coop game and chat me up rather extensively.
Gameplay-wise, not too many oughtright complaints, though that one mine level plays poorly. Both times I've played it, enemies have camped the gatling right above the interior spawn. I know having a bunch of newbies around doesn't help - to which end I felt it preferable to give the spawn stick to deputies and maybe snipers, 'cuz I can't remember how many times I watched gunslingers run out in the field of fire of gatling guns, leading their team to slaughter (I first noticed that happening on the field map when I was sitting on the gun). Then again, some blasters and gunslingers were very good about leading with the stick. I know that is mostly player error, but it's something to think over. In any case, I never had any luck breaking out of the interior of the mine: enemies stayed with the spawn stick below, and some jerk hogged the gatling above.
In terms of player mechanics: Too much standing around looking goofy sometimes. The Deputy seems to have to wait a long while between tags, while that same time always seems to give the Blaster dynamite at hand if you cook it off a few seconds. I noticed people using the Admiral (Navy revolver) and the Deputy with his lever rifle ran into an issue I did, where on reloading they loaded one shot, fired, loaded again...and it seemed this was happening without the fire button being pressed, unlike say the Half-Life or Left 4 Dead shotguns, which have had this implemented more or less correctly for ages.
Too many buttons to hold. Fer crissakes, the Gunslinger has to hold two keys down all the time! For me, that means holding a side mouse button; it's somewhat awkward! Running should be default with walking secondary (though I wonder why there's a walk button - is there a super secret stealth walk I don't know about? There's just two speeds I believe, and that's all there needs to be; it's odd that there are two keys for this given the relative paucity of available command mappings). I wonder if Traits couldn't be toggled - this would make sense for the Gunslinger in particular, if not for the Blaster. If you gotta make the key have different effects per class, by all means it'd be worth it.
View movement speeds (I could say crosshair speed) for different classes and weapons isn't universally applicable; I noticed that as a sniper that Quake-like mouse sensitivity settings, which work well for the Gunslinger and Blaster, made precise aim very difficult. I don't know what a good solution to this would be, especially as this is dependent on target distance, and on many maps the Sniper's effective engagement distance is much longer or shoter than others. Example: The island map (with the circled wagons) and the field make better use of low sensitivity settings. Many other maps do less well with that setting. The only solution I can come up with is having players invest in an expensive mouse with sensitivity adjustment (thankfully, I'm prepared, but bad news for everybody else).
I don't know how to put my finger on it but a lot of the gameplay doesn't really seem "smooth," though it's certainly playable!
Issue: Bots got stretchy limbs when they neared certain objects. I noticed a Deputy's arms stretching out twice as long as they should have and flying around when that bot was right by my co-player. They also run straight for dead teammates - apparently trying to revive.
Next, tried to find servers and play them.
Issue: I know the server system is overloaded due to the free weekend, however, the server browser's functionality is execrable. The top row highlights but seems non-functional, whereas sorting tabs to click on don't seem to exist. That definitely should be in there.
Also, the game crashed literally four-five times on me when trying to join a server. I gave up and ran one again.
Shootout: Yeah, this is fun, and I used the "Create game" option to run a server. It's a lot more fun than trying to play objective-carry games with a team who doesn't like to protect carriers (and I feel, in general, that carry games suck; who wants not to be able to shoot?)
Issue: Again, the game lacks some basic functionality. First I changed the "server" window key from F8 to tilde, as God intended it to be. The dang thing still doesn't look right though. And on that note, the humongous chat window wastes a bunch of space; even though it's transparent there doesn't seem to be a need to have it open that large all the time. Pretty sure the Source engine has resizable chat windows standard for GUI possibilities.
The big problem was there was really no functionality to the command window that I could see, just messages about invalid commands that demonstrated it was meant to be for controlling the game - but stuff didn't seem to work. Routine Source engine commands didn't work. Nowhere could I see peoples' pings listed so I had no way of knowing who needed to get the boot for lagging everybody. I luckily didn't have to kick or ban anybody, but that probably would not have gone well. At one point (joyrides with dynamite!) the game threatened to kick me. Fair enough, but gee, how would that affect the 10+ players in the game?
What really ticked me off is that the game did not let me go back to the menu to disconnect (and shut the game down) a few seconds after a map was finished. I extended the game uptime a map for this reason, but once again the map loaded afterward and the game locked me out of the menu for those precious seconds. Again, the command window was useless (quit and disconnect are standard, why don't they work?), so everybody who didn't disconnect (maybe one person if I was lucky) wasted their time loading the next map.
Issue: Achievements broken. Around two months ago one of the developers was in here promising they'd get fixed. Wellll, I've seen different names for the "reach level 9" Achivement, one of them being Ace-High but there also was another (maybe an old one just given to some websites). Other Achievements (like Noble Prize - p.s. why is Alfie's name wrong? It isn't funnier this way, and just makes the Devs look clueless) and Mad Hatter probably should have visible counters in Steam Community, but they don't, and I suspect they're broken too. In any case, Ace-High isn't triggering, while it should. I know this is an old issue, and I know everybody must be talking about it, so forgive me, but this is why people screw around with Achievements when they shouldn't, and everybody ends up feeling burned.
I more or less like how the revive mechanic works, except I don't like accidentally hitting the respawn menu (which I couldn't see how to get out of other than being respawned or revived by a teammate - that leaves you a sitting duck if you change your mind about respawning and wait for a nearby teammate to revive, and should be changed to allow closing it out), and didn't like how the menu for changing class worked. As hard as it is to get rid of that window, once you close it, you're stuck - which is not really ideal for a game like this where you sometimes need to make a class change decision based on the last second, not what happened seven seconds ago.
I also didn't like that players didn't know to watch the respawn flag! That, or they didn't notice that they could spawn back at the main spawn if the flag was in a bad spot. Cripes, the thing locks your viewpoint to it and people would see the spot covered in gunslingers, TNT, and gatling gun bullets, and they'd still just go there. Definitely player error but the game does afford some opportunities for hints to teach players - I did the practice and it's not mentioned at all. I first wondered if maybe it was a totem to enhance my personal superpowers, but didn't feel anything, but it just felt right carrying it on my back, so...
All jokes aside, I'd vote for the spawn flag having a timer so that the enemy team cannot simply hold it in place by killing anybody who spawns on it. If players are dumb enough to spawn on it, fine...but as it stands, all the enemy team needs to do is conspire to not touch it, and you suddenly got yourselves one less spawn to play with.
All that being said, I like the game. It doesn't feel like a must-have yet but I might consider getting it in the future; it depends on having the junky bits fixed and the game extended a ways with some new modes and scenery (you know you want to have train robberies with movin' trains, maybe even horse ridin', aww yeah - perfectly doable in Source though I'm not sure about giving that horse turbo boosts). I liked it a bit less when I realized (on Gold Rush) that I was having a lot more success with the Gunslinger than anything else, but in actual gameplay all the classes were useful and seemed well enough balanced.
I would really love more cooperative maps, and maybe even the ability for larger teams to take on bots in different ways, as the bots can't be all that computationally expensive. You all know that people are gonna add zombies to it anyhow. Maybe on my current aging rig it would be a bit much, but this is about the future, no?
The very first thing I noticed about multiplayer (in coop) was that nobody seemed to see my chat messages. Only at the end of the round did I see some of theirs, too. This wasn't an issue for other game modes, strangely, and I did have one creepy person join my coop game and chat me up rather extensively.
Gameplay-wise, not too many oughtright complaints, though that one mine level plays poorly. Both times I've played it, enemies have camped the gatling right above the interior spawn. I know having a bunch of newbies around doesn't help - to which end I felt it preferable to give the spawn stick to deputies and maybe snipers, 'cuz I can't remember how many times I watched gunslingers run out in the field of fire of gatling guns, leading their team to slaughter (I first noticed that happening on the field map when I was sitting on the gun). Then again, some blasters and gunslingers were very good about leading with the stick. I know that is mostly player error, but it's something to think over. In any case, I never had any luck breaking out of the interior of the mine: enemies stayed with the spawn stick below, and some jerk hogged the gatling above.
In terms of player mechanics: Too much standing around looking goofy sometimes. The Deputy seems to have to wait a long while between tags, while that same time always seems to give the Blaster dynamite at hand if you cook it off a few seconds. I noticed people using the Admiral (Navy revolver) and the Deputy with his lever rifle ran into an issue I did, where on reloading they loaded one shot, fired, loaded again...and it seemed this was happening without the fire button being pressed, unlike say the Half-Life or Left 4 Dead shotguns, which have had this implemented more or less correctly for ages.
Too many buttons to hold. Fer crissakes, the Gunslinger has to hold two keys down all the time! For me, that means holding a side mouse button; it's somewhat awkward! Running should be default with walking secondary (though I wonder why there's a walk button - is there a super secret stealth walk I don't know about? There's just two speeds I believe, and that's all there needs to be; it's odd that there are two keys for this given the relative paucity of available command mappings). I wonder if Traits couldn't be toggled - this would make sense for the Gunslinger in particular, if not for the Blaster. If you gotta make the key have different effects per class, by all means it'd be worth it.
View movement speeds (I could say crosshair speed) for different classes and weapons isn't universally applicable; I noticed that as a sniper that Quake-like mouse sensitivity settings, which work well for the Gunslinger and Blaster, made precise aim very difficult. I don't know what a good solution to this would be, especially as this is dependent on target distance, and on many maps the Sniper's effective engagement distance is much longer or shoter than others. Example: The island map (with the circled wagons) and the field make better use of low sensitivity settings. Many other maps do less well with that setting. The only solution I can come up with is having players invest in an expensive mouse with sensitivity adjustment (thankfully, I'm prepared, but bad news for everybody else).
I don't know how to put my finger on it but a lot of the gameplay doesn't really seem "smooth," though it's certainly playable!
Issue: Bots got stretchy limbs when they neared certain objects. I noticed a Deputy's arms stretching out twice as long as they should have and flying around when that bot was right by my co-player. They also run straight for dead teammates - apparently trying to revive.
Next, tried to find servers and play them.
Issue: I know the server system is overloaded due to the free weekend, however, the server browser's functionality is execrable. The top row highlights but seems non-functional, whereas sorting tabs to click on don't seem to exist. That definitely should be in there.
Also, the game crashed literally four-five times on me when trying to join a server. I gave up and ran one again.
Shootout: Yeah, this is fun, and I used the "Create game" option to run a server. It's a lot more fun than trying to play objective-carry games with a team who doesn't like to protect carriers (and I feel, in general, that carry games suck; who wants not to be able to shoot?)
Issue: Again, the game lacks some basic functionality. First I changed the "server" window key from F8 to tilde, as God intended it to be. The dang thing still doesn't look right though. And on that note, the humongous chat window wastes a bunch of space; even though it's transparent there doesn't seem to be a need to have it open that large all the time. Pretty sure the Source engine has resizable chat windows standard for GUI possibilities.
The big problem was there was really no functionality to the command window that I could see, just messages about invalid commands that demonstrated it was meant to be for controlling the game - but stuff didn't seem to work. Routine Source engine commands didn't work. Nowhere could I see peoples' pings listed so I had no way of knowing who needed to get the boot for lagging everybody. I luckily didn't have to kick or ban anybody, but that probably would not have gone well. At one point (joyrides with dynamite!) the game threatened to kick me. Fair enough, but gee, how would that affect the 10+ players in the game?
What really ticked me off is that the game did not let me go back to the menu to disconnect (and shut the game down) a few seconds after a map was finished. I extended the game uptime a map for this reason, but once again the map loaded afterward and the game locked me out of the menu for those precious seconds. Again, the command window was useless (quit and disconnect are standard, why don't they work?), so everybody who didn't disconnect (maybe one person if I was lucky) wasted their time loading the next map.
Issue: Achievements broken. Around two months ago one of the developers was in here promising they'd get fixed. Wellll, I've seen different names for the "reach level 9" Achivement, one of them being Ace-High but there also was another (maybe an old one just given to some websites). Other Achievements (like Noble Prize - p.s. why is Alfie's name wrong? It isn't funnier this way, and just makes the Devs look clueless) and Mad Hatter probably should have visible counters in Steam Community, but they don't, and I suspect they're broken too. In any case, Ace-High isn't triggering, while it should. I know this is an old issue, and I know everybody must be talking about it, so forgive me, but this is why people screw around with Achievements when they shouldn't, and everybody ends up feeling burned.
I more or less like how the revive mechanic works, except I don't like accidentally hitting the respawn menu (which I couldn't see how to get out of other than being respawned or revived by a teammate - that leaves you a sitting duck if you change your mind about respawning and wait for a nearby teammate to revive, and should be changed to allow closing it out), and didn't like how the menu for changing class worked. As hard as it is to get rid of that window, once you close it, you're stuck - which is not really ideal for a game like this where you sometimes need to make a class change decision based on the last second, not what happened seven seconds ago.
I also didn't like that players didn't know to watch the respawn flag! That, or they didn't notice that they could spawn back at the main spawn if the flag was in a bad spot. Cripes, the thing locks your viewpoint to it and people would see the spot covered in gunslingers, TNT, and gatling gun bullets, and they'd still just go there. Definitely player error but the game does afford some opportunities for hints to teach players - I did the practice and it's not mentioned at all. I first wondered if maybe it was a totem to enhance my personal superpowers, but didn't feel anything, but it just felt right carrying it on my back, so...
All jokes aside, I'd vote for the spawn flag having a timer so that the enemy team cannot simply hold it in place by killing anybody who spawns on it. If players are dumb enough to spawn on it, fine...but as it stands, all the enemy team needs to do is conspire to not touch it, and you suddenly got yourselves one less spawn to play with.
All that being said, I like the game. It doesn't feel like a must-have yet but I might consider getting it in the future; it depends on having the junky bits fixed and the game extended a ways with some new modes and scenery (you know you want to have train robberies with movin' trains, maybe even horse ridin', aww yeah - perfectly doable in Source though I'm not sure about giving that horse turbo boosts). I liked it a bit less when I realized (on Gold Rush) that I was having a lot more success with the Gunslinger than anything else, but in actual gameplay all the classes were useful and seemed well enough balanced.
I would really love more cooperative maps, and maybe even the ability for larger teams to take on bots in different ways, as the bots can't be all that computationally expensive. You all know that people are gonna add zombies to it anyhow. Maybe on my current aging rig it would be a bit much, but this is about the future, no?