Support NeoGAF

[Vlad]

<rant>

I uninstalled Battlefield 1942 a while ago, due to the fact that it was pretty much impossible to find a good game online, prompting more frustration than enjoyment from the title. The new release of Galactic Conquest (awesome mod, despite a few issues here and there) prompted a reinstall, so I figured that I should give the unmodded game a shot again. I figured that the game's been out for quite some time now, and it's been a while since I played, things had to have gotten better by now, right?

My thinking for this came from the time I attempted to play Tribes. A few years after the game came out, a friend from work loaned me his CD after raving about the game for a while. I did the tutorial, felt pretty confident in the general mechanics of the game, and joined a server. I wasn't expecting to dominate or anything, but at least help out where I could. I join a server, merrily trot over to a nearby weapons supply thing to pick out the guns I'd like to use. I'm there not more than five seconds before I'm sent flying away from the console by a teammate's rocket. I try again to browse the weapons, and am again sent flying away after about ten seconds by somebody else, accompanied by a stream of foul language through chat. After I learned about grouping weapons and the fact that only a single person can access a console at a time, and my dawdling was pretty much getting in the way, I apologized and disconnected to figure out how that worked. I hopped back in another server, and soon realized that I was way out of my league. No matter what I tried, my character would always lumber around, being completely outgunned and outpaced by the other players who were somehow zipping all over the place. Every single server I played on was like this. People in random games online were working pretty well together and capturing the flag with more teamwork than I'd seen in the typical TFC match at that point. I was impressed, but also realized that that sort of skill would take quite a bit of time to learn, and I wasn't overflowing with free time at that point, so I pretty much gave up on the game right there.

Battlefield 1942 has been out for around the same amount of time, I believe, yet every time I play on a server, it's just as filled with idiots as the first time I played. I'm not just talking about the usual plane campers and teamkillers, either. It's the people who just don't understand the objectives, or look at their maps, or drive away in a six person vehicle by themselves, leaving five other teammates behind. You'd think that after all this time that you'd be able to find a good game somewhere. Heck, I was hoping that Battlefield Vietnam would draw all the casual players away, leaving only the people who were really interested in BF42, but alas, that doesn't seem to have happened.

I think I've maybe had 5-8 good sessions of the game... in the two years I've had it. Those times were pretty damn fun, but they're just WAY too hard to find.

 

[pestul]

I've found the Star Wars geeks in Galatic Conquest to be a decent bunch.. for the most part. It seems they sometimes actually try.. unlike the BF1942 general server crowd. Try joining a clan.

 

[Musashi Wins!]

For some reason...The more ease of use a game institutes, the faster the play (no real strategy involvement), the more tools playing. I guess the reasons are somewhat obvious actually.

 

[Vennt]

My thinking for this came from the time I attempted to play Tribes. A few years after the game came out, a friend from work loaned me his CD after raving about the game for a while. I did the tutorial, felt pretty confident in the general mechanics of the game, and joined a server. I wasn't expecting to dominate or anything, but at least help out where I could. I join a server, merrily trot over to a nearby weapons supply thing to pick out the guns I'd like to use. I'm there not more than five seconds before I'm sent flying away from the console by a teammate's rocket. I try again to browse the weapons, and am again sent flying away after about ten seconds by somebody else, accompanied by a stream of foul language through chat. After I learned about grouping weapons and the fact that only a single person can access a console at a time, and my dawdling was pretty much getting in the way, I apologized and disconnected to figure out how that worked. I hopped back in another server, and soon realized that I was way out of my league. No matter what I tried, my character would always lumber around, being completely outgunned and outpaced by the other players who were somehow zipping all over the place. Every single server I played on was like this. People in random games online were working pretty well together and capturing the flag with more teamwork than I'd seen in the typical TFC match at that point. I was impressed, but also realized that that sort of skill would take quite a bit of time to learn, and I wasn't overflowing with free time at that point, so I pretty much gave up on the game right there.

Haha, seriously, I don't think there is a single Tribes player out there that hasn't been through this scenario themselves at least once (and hopefully only once ) during their early introduction to Tribes, and any player that claims to not have done so I will point at and say "That man is a shameful liar!"

 

[Falch]

I haven't played Battlefield (or Desert Combat) for quite a while, but I recognize that problem in an instant. I've played my share of online games, but Battlefield exceeds all other online games I've played in the amount of stupid people.

What you have to try is find a community based server (one that belongs to a clan for example), usually they're pretty well moderated.

Anyway, how's Galactic Conquest?

 

[Dagless M.D.]

the fact that most of the retards on the servers have no idea about the concept of tickets is the worst, they just sit spawn camping like its going to win the game

 

[Vlad]

Anyway, how's Galactic Conquest?

It's pretty darn awesome. Release 4 was the big one that came out a week or so ago, and they just put out a mini-patch to that, bringing the current version to 4.2, which fixed a few little bugs and one big balancing issue (two words: gas grenade).

I may run a little long here, simply because they've done some pretty neat stuff with the BF engine...

First off, the classes...

The scout is now a bit of a super-sniper. The sniper rifles have been toned down a bit, so that they can not kill in one shot, even with a headshot. However, this is because the scout has a camouflage item. It's basically a little deployable thing that varies in look depending on the map. It basically looks like a tiny flat tent, and is big enough to easily cover a prone player. The outside textures on the thing are made to match the most common area of the map, so if you're on Hoth, it's white, if you're on Tatooine, it's a dusty yellow, so you can blend into the sand. The inside is actually see-through, with a sort of mesh covering everything, so you don't have quite as good of a view as you normally do. The thing is pretty easy to spot up close, as it isn't a perfect match for the terrain, and has a distinct shape, but it really extends the life of a sniper when he's further away. I don't usually snipe in games, but I've found it to be pretty fun in GC, simply because you don't have to worry as much about being such a sitting duck.

The Trooper class is basically a standard assault guy, with a light machine gun, grenades, etc.

The Medic is pretty similar to the BF medic, except his gun is different (it's not automatic at all, but it's pretty accurate and powerful, it's like a powerful pistol), he can heal fast, has a lethal injection weapon instead of a knife for one hit kills, and has smoke grenades (gas grenades before the patch, which were WAY too powerful and prone to spamming).

The Anti-Tanker is pretty standard. Carries a bazooka and mines.

The engineer is really a support class more than a fighter. His only gun is a pistol, which is pretty good for light sniping, but sucks against pretty much anything else. Along with the usual wrench and detpacks (no mines, though), he carries a deployable shield. The shield is a smallish (about as wide as a tank or so) quarter-sphere that faces the direction you threw the generator. It blocks all shots and splash damage. Vehicles can drive through it, infantry can walk through it (at the cost of some damage), but it's a great way to protect people nearby from turrets/walkers/etc. On the more infantry-centric maps the engineer is replaced with a Heavy Weapons guy, who carriers a heavy machine gun.

The maps and vehicles are really where the mod shines, though. There's the basic conquest-style maps, but there's often a bit of a twist to them. Judicator, for example, takes place on a Star Destroyer after the Rebels have disabled and boarded it. The rebels start on their ship and have to make their way from the front of the Star Destroyer to the bridge. There's around seven capturable spawn points on the way, as well as a tram system for quicker (yet noisier) transportation to the other end of the ship. The bridge is located at the top of a HUGE shaft, with a bunch of elevators around the edges. The problem is that by the time the Rebels are ready to assault the bridge, it's usually the only spawn that the Imperials have left, so it tends to develop into a HUGE firefight at the top of the shaft. The only way to really break through the defense is to get most of your team on different elevators to try and knock out the defenders from multiple angles.

Another map recreates the assault on the Death Star from the original movie, with the trench and everything. The rebels start on a platform way up above the ground, and have to pilot the X-wings and Y-wings down to the surface, make their way to the trench, and do signifigant damage to the exhaust port. However, it does take more than 1 hit to knock out the exhaust port (it takes around 10-12 or so), and even though you can physically hit the port with a torpedo from above, the map is coded so that you can only do damage if you hit it from the trench. The Imperials' job on this map is pretty much defense only, and not only do they have two varieties of TIE fighters (the regular ones, and the kind that Vader flew in the movie), but also turrets all along the trench. There's a bunch of regular, a little taller than person-sized turrets around, as well as some absolutely gigantic "larger than an office building" turrets that are slow, but can knock out any enemy fighter in a single hit, easily. The thing is, none of the turrets can fire into the lower 3/4 of the trench, so you need fighters to flush out the rebels who are making a run at the port. On a server with a good amount of people, this map can really be intense. When you're making a run down the trench, you get nervous every time you hear a TIE nearby, because you know that if one gets behind you, you'll have to leave the safety of the trench to avoid them shooting you down, making you easy bait for the turrets.

Another neat thing about the rebel fighters on that map (and others) is that a second player can enter and essentially "be" the R2 unit on-board, to repair the fighter in mid-flight.

There's a good amount of maps in the mod, but I'm only going to talk about two more reql quick, Task Force and Tanaab. Task Force is a 100% space battle between two fleets. Each fleet has two carriers (with plenty of fighters/bombers/interceptors), and two smaller capital ships. Each one of these is fully controllable (they control like the submarines in regular BF), and each has multiple gun positions of varying strengths. The smaller capital ships even have escape pods which are great for escaping, or even boarding other ships (the pods are more or less indescrutable to colliding with stuff). Again, on a full server, this map gets pretty chaotic, in a good way. There's no shortage of stuff to fly, and I've had games where multiple capital ships from each side have gotten into huge firefights in the middle of the map, with blaster fire and explosions happening everywhere.

That's another great thing about the mod. Unlike BF, DC, etc, where most of the shots fired are invisible, practically everything here has a shot you can see, so when there's a firefight going on somewhere, be it between vehicles or infantry, it looks like a firefight, since there's junk flying everywhere.

The other really neat map, Tanaab, is like a cross between an infantry and space battle map. Each team has an unmovable carrier-type ship, as well as two more of the smaller capital ships, which can be moved. In the middle of the map, there's an Imperial research station with four targets on it to be destroyed. There's a satellite dish on the top which is best destroyed by the various fighters and capital ships, an "experimental TIE fighter" which is located in a hangar that runs the entire length of the station, with exits on both sides. This can be destroyed by fighters flying through and bombing it, or by landing a transport in there and blowing it up with engineers or something. There's also two more experimental fighters in a lab near a large landing platform. These are both inside, though, and require infantry to go in and knock them out.

There's also a bunch of other maps, with pretty different play styles and vehicles, but I've done enough typing for now. It really is a good mod, and it's different from all the other ones out there in theme and gameplay. If anybody's interested, I can post some pictures of it to give you guys a general idea of the sheer scale of some of this stuff.

 

[Falch]

Thx vlad, for those impressions, it sounds great. I especially like how snipers have some sort of camouflage, and the engineer has a deployable shield. Maps sound great too. I'll check it out soon.

Btw, how crowded are GC servers? Is it hard to find 64 player servers?

 

[Dr.Guru of Peru]

Find a server you like, and play on that. Personally, I enjoy playing CTF. Alot of the people that have been playing the game for a while and arent idiots play the mode. Many great clan servers for CTF as well.

I would recommend playing on the 1x8E Elite.com server, but ever since they moved servers, its been pretty empty. The DAWG pound server is pretty cool too(but the slightest cuss will get you kicked-even "shit").

 

[MrAngryFace]

Dling galactic conquest now.

 

[Vlad]

Thx vlad, for those impressions, it sounds great. I especially like how snipers have some sort of camouflage, and the engineer has a deployable shield. Maps sound great too. I'll check it out soon.

Btw, how crowded are GC servers? Is it hard to find 64 player servers?

Well, I've never looked for a server with that many people, as my graphics card can only really handle about 32 or so before things start to get really choppy. That said, there's really not a whole lot of people playing the mod. There's more playing during peak hours, of course, but it's hardly up to Desert Combat's level of popularity or anything.

 

[garrickk]

I think the general server crowd in Battlefield Vietnam are quite skilled. Sure, you get noobs, but there are a lot of skilled players. Maybe all the skilled BF players went to BFV.

My biggest grip are people who take helo's with air-to-air missles, and are awesome pilots who kill tons of people on the ground, but they don't take a co-pilot who can fire anti-air missles and keep the other team's air power at bay. Stupid.

 

[MrAngryFace]

I suck at vietnam. Thats all there is to it. The horrifying open jungle cant see shit holy god.

 

[teepo]

it just takes practice!!

 

[Fowler]

Slightly off-topic... but does anyone have the link to those BF1942 Recruitment posters?

 

[Vlad]

Slightly off-topic... but does anyone have the link to those BF1942 Recruitment posters?

Here's some