So, I got to play 2142 as well as Quake Wars yesterday at E3.
Impressions....
2142: All they had going was Titan mode. There's a distinct lack of optimization thus far. The game was laggy at times, this on an E3 system. You'd figure they'd put together some pretty good systems.
Titan mode? I wasn't overly fond of it, to be honest. The map they had us playing on was so-so. Mostly a vehicle/air whores map. Not even a large map at that. Dice said that right now they're pulling a Euro Forces on us and they're only medium maps. The only real CQC being on the Titan's themselves. The spawn points are mostly just the missile silos themselves (three on the map they had). Each one has a timer on it for missile launch. I believe once you capture a silo that the time starts at 2 minutes and counts down. The timer will reset if the silo is cap'ed by the other team. The other thing is that all silo clocks are shown regardless of who controls it. The goal of launching missiles is to blow up the enemy Titan's shields.
As for the new vehicles. The new APC's are okay (they remind me of the MEC APC's with the turret near the front so you're weaker defending from the back). They've got machine guns on them instead of the small cannons and they take a lot more to kill a person than the BF2 APC's. The tanks just look a bit different. Air is pretty weak. The APC's guns took them out easily enough. You're going to have to get in and get out quick.
Last for vehicles is the Mech's. They're an odd bunch. You aren't going to be very accurate while moving so you're pretty much going to have to stop to shoot. At that, you're a pretty large target. No, there's no area damage on them (lose an arm and keep going). It's just the total health. The Mech's have the driver and a turret gunner on top (covered, at least). Tanks will be able to take you out.
As for the players. On the map we were on, not being in a decent vehicle = dead soldier. The only time for any decent foot soldiering was on the Titan's themselves. Didn't get a chance to play with customization much as the characters they had for you were low rank so no toys to really switch around. The interface for it seems pretty straight-forward enough. That they didn't make you higher level to do some of this stuff like many game companies do suggests that they've still got a lot of work to do. Didn't get to test out squad leader stuff yet. Oh, parachute is now <Space> and not 9. Remember this when spawning on the Titan and jumping off It does appear to be working better than in BF2. Also, the sniper scope now has two levels of zoom. I'd grabbed a character with one, hit zoom and it zoomed in. Hit again and it zoomed in more. Just an idiotic way to do things. Why not just use the middle mouse button for zoom and the scroll wheel to scroll the zoom? It worked well in Wolfenstein. So a note for Snipers. Click twice to get out of zoom unless they change things.
One last thing, yes, the spawn time was only 5 seconds. I wouldn't put much into that, however. Remember that this is a trade show event and they want people playing as much as possible so they can flush them out and get others in. I'm guessing it won't be 5 seconds for Ranked mode upon release.
Overall impression: not bad but not enticing enough yet for me to consider spending the money. I want to see how the regular mode's going to be and what other maps there are. I'll wait for a playable demo.
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Quake Wars: QW had that same graphics feel that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had. Graphics-wise, everything but the players looked pretty good. Didn't get the best feel for the vehicles in the game but there's several of them, including some mech's. This time, it's humans vs. aliens. I didn't get as much time with it as 2142.
Characters. Right now, there's no global ranking system. It looks like the same (or similar) system used by Wolfenstein: ET. You all start equal at the beginning of each round and build up rank for only that round. Kinda lame. On the plus side, some of the weapons options are nice. You AT folks won't like that your missile launcher kit doesn't, at least that I saw, include a machine gun.
Vehicles: Saw a tank, some little buggy/transport type vehicles, an air vehicle that looked a bit better done than 2142 (ie. not going to die in a few seconds to APC machine gun fire) and some large construction vehicle. I'll get into my theory on this vehicle more later.
Players: There's a customizable basic Soldier, much like Wolfenstein. You get some kit options here to tweak things out and they at least had some options to select. There's also some kind of Engineer kit that can build various offensive & defensive weapons (like an RTS, they were saying). That seems to be where those large construction vehicles might come into play. The other thing with Engineers is that they can do stuff but it's going to take some time which means they'd better have some backup or hope that no one spots them. There's also a SpecOps kit that can do their own scans to find the enemy and those get sent to the player mini maps.
Maps: The map we were playing looked like more fun. Lot more indoors combat than 2142 was showing (though id seems to be bigger on indoor combat than Dice). The QW maps look to be a bit more varied from talking with the EA and id people, given that 2142's during an ice age while QW is just an alien invasion.
Again, I'm not fully sold on this one. I've grown spoiled by the ranking system and don't like the idea of stuff I can only get when I'm doing well that round. I prefer the global unlocks and such. There seems more potential in the rest of the game here, however. It's going to be another one I'll wait for a demo on.
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2142 vs. QW. Who wins?
It's still a toss up at this point but QW still has a slight advantage for me based on potential with these other things you can build and such. I'd saw QW easily if they did global rankings or at least eliminated the idiotic system that looks yanked from Wolfenstein: ET. For now, 2142's still got a chance but they seem to have more work to do than QW. I'm guessing that we could end up with a buggy release if they manage to keep to their planned release data (that and maybe some missing features). A date push wouldn't surprise me at all.
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Impressions....
2142: All they had going was Titan mode. There's a distinct lack of optimization thus far. The game was laggy at times, this on an E3 system. You'd figure they'd put together some pretty good systems.
Titan mode? I wasn't overly fond of it, to be honest. The map they had us playing on was so-so. Mostly a vehicle/air whores map. Not even a large map at that. Dice said that right now they're pulling a Euro Forces on us and they're only medium maps. The only real CQC being on the Titan's themselves. The spawn points are mostly just the missile silos themselves (three on the map they had). Each one has a timer on it for missile launch. I believe once you capture a silo that the time starts at 2 minutes and counts down. The timer will reset if the silo is cap'ed by the other team. The other thing is that all silo clocks are shown regardless of who controls it. The goal of launching missiles is to blow up the enemy Titan's shields.
As for the new vehicles. The new APC's are okay (they remind me of the MEC APC's with the turret near the front so you're weaker defending from the back). They've got machine guns on them instead of the small cannons and they take a lot more to kill a person than the BF2 APC's. The tanks just look a bit different. Air is pretty weak. The APC's guns took them out easily enough. You're going to have to get in and get out quick.
Last for vehicles is the Mech's. They're an odd bunch. You aren't going to be very accurate while moving so you're pretty much going to have to stop to shoot. At that, you're a pretty large target. No, there's no area damage on them (lose an arm and keep going). It's just the total health. The Mech's have the driver and a turret gunner on top (covered, at least). Tanks will be able to take you out.
As for the players. On the map we were on, not being in a decent vehicle = dead soldier. The only time for any decent foot soldiering was on the Titan's themselves. Didn't get a chance to play with customization much as the characters they had for you were low rank so no toys to really switch around. The interface for it seems pretty straight-forward enough. That they didn't make you higher level to do some of this stuff like many game companies do suggests that they've still got a lot of work to do. Didn't get to test out squad leader stuff yet. Oh, parachute is now <Space> and not 9. Remember this when spawning on the Titan and jumping off It does appear to be working better than in BF2. Also, the sniper scope now has two levels of zoom. I'd grabbed a character with one, hit zoom and it zoomed in. Hit again and it zoomed in more. Just an idiotic way to do things. Why not just use the middle mouse button for zoom and the scroll wheel to scroll the zoom? It worked well in Wolfenstein. So a note for Snipers. Click twice to get out of zoom unless they change things.
One last thing, yes, the spawn time was only 5 seconds. I wouldn't put much into that, however. Remember that this is a trade show event and they want people playing as much as possible so they can flush them out and get others in. I'm guessing it won't be 5 seconds for Ranked mode upon release.
Overall impression: not bad but not enticing enough yet for me to consider spending the money. I want to see how the regular mode's going to be and what other maps there are. I'll wait for a playable demo.
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Quake Wars: QW had that same graphics feel that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had. Graphics-wise, everything but the players looked pretty good. Didn't get the best feel for the vehicles in the game but there's several of them, including some mech's. This time, it's humans vs. aliens. I didn't get as much time with it as 2142.
Characters. Right now, there's no global ranking system. It looks like the same (or similar) system used by Wolfenstein: ET. You all start equal at the beginning of each round and build up rank for only that round. Kinda lame. On the plus side, some of the weapons options are nice. You AT folks won't like that your missile launcher kit doesn't, at least that I saw, include a machine gun.
Vehicles: Saw a tank, some little buggy/transport type vehicles, an air vehicle that looked a bit better done than 2142 (ie. not going to die in a few seconds to APC machine gun fire) and some large construction vehicle. I'll get into my theory on this vehicle more later.
Players: There's a customizable basic Soldier, much like Wolfenstein. You get some kit options here to tweak things out and they at least had some options to select. There's also some kind of Engineer kit that can build various offensive & defensive weapons (like an RTS, they were saying). That seems to be where those large construction vehicles might come into play. The other thing with Engineers is that they can do stuff but it's going to take some time which means they'd better have some backup or hope that no one spots them. There's also a SpecOps kit that can do their own scans to find the enemy and those get sent to the player mini maps.
Maps: The map we were playing looked like more fun. Lot more indoors combat than 2142 was showing (though id seems to be bigger on indoor combat than Dice). The QW maps look to be a bit more varied from talking with the EA and id people, given that 2142's during an ice age while QW is just an alien invasion.
Again, I'm not fully sold on this one. I've grown spoiled by the ranking system and don't like the idea of stuff I can only get when I'm doing well that round. I prefer the global unlocks and such. There seems more potential in the rest of the game here, however. It's going to be another one I'll wait for a demo on.
-------
2142 vs. QW. Who wins?
It's still a toss up at this point but QW still has a slight advantage for me based on potential with these other things you can build and such. I'd saw QW easily if they did global rankings or at least eliminated the idiotic system that looks yanked from Wolfenstein: ET. For now, 2142's still got a chance but they seem to have more work to do than QW. I'm guessing that we could end up with a buggy release if they manage to keep to their planned release data (that and maybe some missing features). A date push wouldn't surprise me at all.
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