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It’s been a little over a month since Fallen Earth launched, and we think it’s safe to say that quite a bit has changed since then — but what, exactly? For those who may have found themselves unhappy with the game’s state at launch, this article is for you. For those of you who may have tried the game during a beta stage or stress test event, and come across some technical issues that made the game completely unplayable, this article is for you, too.
We want to continue our tradition of revisiting games after launch, and this time it’s Fallen Earth’s turn. So we’re going to spend the first half of the article discussing the facts, and what the community has to say about the last month’s changes to the game, and the second half will be spent giving my own impressions of what I’ve experienced in the first month. Follow along, won’t you?
Continue reading Checking up on Fallen Earth: One month later
Filed under: Sci-fi, Fallen Earth, Opinion
Checking up on Fallen Earth: One month later originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on October 29th, 2009 at 2:30pm by Shawn Schuster
Filed Under: fallen-earth, fallen-earth-llc, featured, icarus, impressions, one-month, post-launch
I managed to snag a copy of the Xbox 360 Left 4 Dead 2 demo late last night and I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing it since. Let’s get the important bits out of the way: the game is really fun, more fun than the original which was a fantastic game, and there are no gamebreaking flaws that I’ve seen so far.
The demo consists of two chapters from The Parish, apparently the last campaign in the game chronologically, and can be played single player or cooperative campaign, but no Versus, Survival or Scavenge. Here are my impressions after playing the demo roughly 4 times through. I play primarily on Expert, though I did join a game of Advanced and ran through on Easy to try some melee weapons.
- New Infected – The new Special Infected are all available in the demo, and they definitely change the game up. The most drastic change is the Spitter, which can totally mess you up when you’re trying to run to a safe spot from the horde, as she can block your path for a good 5 seconds. Not only that, but upon killing the Spitter, she leaves a pool of acid that can block your path as well. The Charger works well for what it is and is actually really cool: I’ve had two scenarios where it reminds me of the bus scene from the first Final Destination movie, where one survivor is there, and the next, he’s gone, crushed against a wall by the Charger. The Jockey is a little silly looking and sounding, and it hasn’t really affected my gameplay much.
Changes to Old Infected - Mostly cosmetic, the Smoker looks a little more cancerous (fitting!) the Hunter looks a little bloodier, the Tank is bald, and the Boomer comes in a female variety as well. We might feature her for Ta-Tas Tuesday sometime soon. The Witch, as you may know, now wanders around in daylight; it’s very easy to mistake her for a regular infected. Her crying is louder and more adult-like wailing now. The Uncommon Common Infected in The Parish is the SWAT Zombie, who is armored from the front and a real pain in the ass to take down, but it definitely does what it’s intended to do: add variety to the experience. (You gotta shoot him in the back!)
- Rolling Crescendo Events - There’s only one in the demo, and it’s the hardest, most frustrating, and occasionally most fun part of the campaign. This is the well-publicized crescendo event where you leave a vehicle and set off an alarm that you have to run and climb up to to shut off. This works really well usually; it’s very panicked, running from zombies climbing over the fence after you, but I’ve had two cases where this has been incredibly frustrating. Once, there was a Witch who was just hanging out in the thinnest corridor that you have to pass through, so it was impossible to pass by without disturbing her. We all shot at her and she still killed me, knocked back my teammates and got us all killed. I genuinely don’t see what we could have done to avoid that. There was also a time when I was leading the run and I killed a Spitter in the same spot as the Witch above; I managed to get by but my teammates took a ton of damage running over the acid, and had they waited, I would have been alone and we probably would have gotten swarmed. Both these times we were left with a feeling of “what can we do?” This might be good for a zombie movie atmosphere, but it’s frustrating as a gamer.
- New Items – In addition to the melee weapons, below, the game also allows you to use a few new items. The ones I found in the demo were the Adrenaline Shot, which takes up your pills slot; this item is useful for the Rolling Crescendo Event as it lets you move and reload faster and also, I believe, continue moving at full speed if you get hit by a common infected. The big downside is it doesn’t restore health. That makes it, in my opinion, far worse than the pills. Still, it’s better than nothing. I also got to use the Boomer Vial: this is a new grenade that attracts zombies to whatever it hits. My friend used it on a Tank which I had just lit on fire; all it did then was run all the zombies into the flames, but I think if you coordinate it, it could be a great way to kill the Tank. The Boomer Vial also lets you get all the zombies off a downed teammate so you can pick him up and run for it, and may be one of the most effective ways to deal with the Rolling Crescendo. The last new item that I found is the defibrillator, which works surprisingly well: it restores someone to life with 50 actual health, rather than bleeding-out health. The only problem, obviously, is that you can’t use it on yourself. I never found any incendiary ammo.
- Melee Weapons – One of the much-hyped features of the game, I didn’t particularly care for the idea before and I don’t now. Rather than acting as a pickup item like gas cans as they did in the videos, they replace your pistol. I don’t find them very useful; I’d much rather have my pistol. Melee weapons swing a little too slow to really protect you and they’re primarily good just for holding a choke point, like a doorway. Melee weapons still have a knockback left trigger attack that has fatigue, but don’t get fatigued from their right trigger attack, which also does friendly fire. I anticipate a lot of idiots teamkilling by swinging all over the place– as they did in the demo last night– for several months after the game comes out, until they finally, finally learn. . .or stop playing. Melee weapons are primarily good for saving ammo, which leads into my next point:
- Ammo Scarcity – In Left 4 Dead, I usually used the shotgun as my first weapon, picking up an assault rifle later. (In case you didn’t know, dual pistols are only slightly weaker than the starting SMG and are very common, so it’s almost pointless to use the SMG in the first game.) You could carry a lot of ammo and ammo piles were plentiful. Valve went a very different route with Left 4 Dead 2. I can’t recall a single ammo pile that’s not in a safe room, and you can only carry about half as much ammo as before for the shotgun. The various assault rifles allow you to carry 360 shots, which is the same amount in Left 4 Dead, I believe. You’ll find a decent amount of weapons scattered around, but they’re often downgrades or the same level, depending on what the Director feels like giving you. You’ll often come across an SMG when you have a Tactical Shotgun with no ammo. This makes the game more difficult.
- Increased Difficulty – I managed to complete the demo with 3 AI partners on Expert, but without making myself sound arrogant, I’m pretty good at the game. I only died once with the AI partners. Even in that runthrough, though, I felt that the game was substantially harder than, say, the first two levels of No Mercy in Left 4 Dead. The Spitter and the Charger make it really tough to set up; the Charger especially can take quite a bit of damage and he really charges at you like a f*cking freight train, super fast. They often throw 3 Special Infected at you at once, much more often than in the original. The best strategy for Tanks on Expert in the original game was to light them on fire and run; they seem to have a lot more health (or time-to-burn, technically) in this one. The Hunters also do a lot more damage than they did in Left 4 Dead. Health packs are more frequently available throughout the level even on Expert, which was incredibly rare in the first game, but it works out as the game is simply more difficult overall. It feels like Left 4 Dead 2 takes even more cooperation than it’s predecessor, which is a good thing!
- Minutiae - There were a few animation glitches I noticed; I believe they’re largely because of lag, but often times the zombies would look like they’re gliding, or my healing animation wouldn’t go play out, though I’d still get healed. The new weapons are pretty cool and they function differently: one of the assault rifles uses a 3 shot burst, while two others are full auto. The Director 2.0 didn’t come into play much in the levels in the demo, and it was easy to take the exact same path every time.
Overall, the Left 4 Dead 2 demo is great. It’s more fun than the Crash Course DLC for Left 4 Dead, and it’s a cool way to get ready for the new game.
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Posted on October 28th, 2009 at 5:17pm by John
Filed Under: Misc, Xbox 360, demo, featured, impressions, left-4-dead-2, pc
43,829 minutes. That’s roughly how long Aion’s been out in the West. Depending on your tolerance for grinding, it may or may not have felt like that amount of time passed. There’s no doubt it’s been a busy month full of ups and downs, so we’d like to take an extensive look back at the last 30-days and give our impressions on the game.
Smooth criminal
Aion experienced one of the most technically smooth launches in MMO history, which was the result of hard work, innovative design, tough decision-making, and of course nearly a year between the Eastern and Western releases. Anti-cheat software, GameGuard, was stripped from the client in the 11th hour. This no doubt eliminated most of the open-beta issues that would have sent a lot of potential players packing shortly after release. Players just aren’t as forgiving as they used to be.
Continue reading A look back at Aion’s first month and impressions
Filed under: Fantasy, Aion, Opinion, Massively Hands-on
A look back at Aion’s first month and impressions originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on October 26th, 2009 at 1:00pm by Brooke Pilley
Filed Under: aion, botters, first-month, gameguard, grinding, impressions, nc-west, ncsoft, spammers, xp-grind
