Okay, so pretty much every single preview of CoD2 I read made specific mention of how the AI is much expanded, and this is because the battlefields are a little bigger and more open, and not so tightly scripted.
If that’s even remotely true, none of it comes across in this demo. You’re on just as tight of a rail as in CoD. The battle scenes are completely scripted, in a very regimented way. It’s the same old thing: squad sits there and takes pot-shots at the germans, neither side budging or taking the other out at all, until you run off by yourself (or with squadmates uselessly following 10 steps behind and refusing to enter doors), flank the guy in the stationary machine gun, and take him out. Then your squadmates come flooding forward another 30 steps, so you can do it again.
Hey, why don’t my squadmates just check a grenade over there? How come I always have to be the first guy through the door? Why doesn’t the one or two guys who have “got my back” keep it a little closer and off to the side a bit so they can actually shoot at a German if he pops up? How about I lay down some cover fire while they go flank the gunner every now and then?
The visceral aspect has been ratcheted up a notch, and it’s really good. Nice presentation, interface, technology. Good battlefield shouting - reminds me of those great moments in Halo where you fight with a group of Marines and they’re all yelling out where the Covenant are and stuff. The smoke is a big step up, especially smoke grenades.
But jesus, talk about playing the same game over again. And it’s really disappointing because every single preview promised that, this time, it’s a lot more open and dynamic.
Jason, I wrote some of those previews and I don’t recall promising it’s “a lot” more open and dynamic. More like a refinement on the formula :)
But there are more routes through towns now (even if it is limited to the head-on or sneaky attacks), and the friendly AI is more aggressive. You’re still the leader, after all, this wouldn’t be much of a game if you just followed your own personal death squad around, so you have to capture areas which trigger whatever “shut off the kraut spawner” flag is there, but your teammates are more effective at drawing fire now.
BTW, this is odd. I was running the 77.72 drivers when I installed the demo and finished it without trouble, but when I installed the 78.03s for DoD:S, Call of Duty 2 went to shit. It’ll freeze after a few minutes now, even with my video card underclocked and the game running at lower settings than before. Going back to the 77.72s didn’t help.
I really enjoyed it. It was a great movie experience. The gameplay was pretty simple, though. I seemed to find myself running from one turret spot to another and playing duck shoot at a fairground, with Germans popping up their heads at random for me to take them down, but it was an enjoyable romp through the mayhem of street warfare. It was also incredibly easy. I failed twice: right at the beginning by shooting at my comrades. Then I went through the entire demo mission on “normal”, taking what seemed like a hundred bullets, without dying once. It worked, though: I was left wanting more so I will probably be buying it.
Also it’s nice to have people get the voice acting for British soldiers correct for a change. I think they did a pretty good job in the first one, but it’s even better now: they sounded just like I’d expect them to, even using curses properly. Compare the “get the wankers!” of the British squaddies in the CoD2 demo, to the excrutiatingly nauseous sound of stereotypical British officers in Battlefield 1942 saying “Right O!”, “Bally Hell!” and “Chocks Away!”. I couldn’t play as the British in that game (or the Americans for that matter) because the voice acting made me cringe so much.
I liked the fact that there were no doors in CoD. Usually in a FPS you have to figure out which doors are real and which are painted on, whereas in CoD you just found a open passage and moved on. Zero time spent pressing against walls in vain.
It’s a new custom engine. Not based on licensed tech at all. (well, I’m sure they have the licensed Miles sound library and probably Havok physics, but you know what I mean)
Hesitant to even download a demo for another WWII game, I played this last night. The guns felt really good and the iron sights are done very well. The game looks great, too. I thought it was pretty decent compared to the last WWII games I played and the sound and visuals provided an excellent atmosphere. I’m just not quite sure if I thought it was fun because of how pretty it was and how fantastic the sound was, though.
I did the same thing 30 seconds into my first play through the demo. I couldn’t resist.
The impression I came away with is that the game would be great fun played in 20 minute bursts, and nothing more. If I sat down and played for an hour or two I’d probably get bored really easily, but a short burst of frantic action would be really pleasing.
I also remember the previews making not of less scripting and greater freedom in the levels, so it seems as though that was a bit of misinformation or they chose a poor level to use for the demo.
I think there may be a misconception about what IW is doing with CoD2. They’re adding some non-linear gameplay to the game, but they’re not making the entire game like that. A quote from IW’s Grant Collier (bolding is mine):
I think the designers really wanted to push the boundaries of what had been done in first-person shooters before. They felt they had been doing WWII games for a while, and were like “hey, we really want to take it to the next level.” Doing this non-linear type of gameplay in Call of Duty 2, while still keeping the traditional type of gameplay that everyone loves, was something that the designers were positive for.
There was actually some feedback – “hey, aren’t you guys worried, you had the perfect formula - why ruin it?” Infinity Ward is big on innovation, so there’s still a lot of what everyone loved and then it’s just opening it up. There’s car ride missions, there’s defend missions, linear cinematic missions, and now into the mix are the non-linear missions.
So, I don’t think CoD2 is supposed to be this huge non-linear experience. The devs have come right out and said they’re not trying to do Far Cry. It’ll look better than CoD, it’ll play out in some new theaters, and some missions will be less linear, but I don’t think they’re going to deviate too far from the CoD formula that was hugely successful for them.
And for a lot of people, that’ll be great. If you’re looking for the openness of Far Cry, or relentless carnage of Painkiller, or the door-to-door close quarters combat of SWAT 4, this probably won’t be the game for you. But for people who like this cinematic rollercoaster style of shooter, IW has proven twice that they do it as well as anyone on the planet.
Finally got around to trying this last night, and it was like playing exactly the same game again. It was undoubtedly prettier, although seemingly not by a measure of massively, but the firefights where two squads literally square off at each other, unleashing hell until one is left standing (whilst the enemy concentrates fire on you) are all present and correct, as were the convoluted routes through the map.
CoD was my game of the year when it came out, and I even swallowed the expansion pack and loved it like an attractive sibling, but I’m really not sure there’s any particular improvement in the way this fundamentally works. At least, not enough to sink another £30 on the same game again.
