There were also some tech issues due to the “megatexture” stuff. It also suffered from the all-brown aesthetic that was being (rightly) criticized at the time.
I had no idea Quake Wars was so loved. I grabbed a demo from Gamershell and had a good time playing it for half an hour or so. Any idea if there’s anyone still running servers? Amazon has the disk version pretty cheap, so I might actually bite on it.
Just to keep this on topic, I have about 11 hours in Dirty Bomb now. I dug into the trading system a little but didn’t think it looked great. There isn’t much feed back on how much better a gold card is than a silver card. Are gold loadouts more powerful? The perks that come with the cards I already have just aren’t that exciting. Honestly, they aren’t even that noticeable when I’m playing. With at least one character I take the card that has no perks over any of the others because that card has the best gun and I’ve never missed the perks. That seems like a huge failing in a game that’s trying to sell me cards (or random boxes of cards).
Maybe I’m just a sucker for game modes that involve defending a vehicle as it moves. I just never get tired of it.
Bronze and up will just give different skins (that I don’t notice at my low settings…). As you say the weapon will be the main difference, after that the most boring effects tend to be the best ones. Faster reloads, extra clip, faster weapon switch and such. Most of the perks have moved around a lot, and most I think have been reduced. I know when they where introduced I didn’t think they would work well and would mainly upset the balance, so I’m happy that they aren’t that important.
I’d never take a crappy gun to have different perks.
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I could swear there were more characters in the alpha than in the current beta? Am I crazy?
There were (closed beta even), I think most will be coming back. They’re all listed in the Wiki.
Some finals, it was interesting to watch, as I played more the last two days.
It was a good cup! Fun to see more teams show up. Less fun to see Fnatic drop out before they’re challenged… for the second time in a row. The regulars did put on a good show though. I’d recommend the final and the series with BSNS playing, for some unorthodox play.
I got to mess around with MM the other day, using a full team of players at similar skill level. We got ~4 games against teams that we completely stomped before we had opposition from a group that even had matching tags (and levels above 10)! All in all it’s not really worth the effort atm, no one is having fun when we can effortlessly push the enemy back to their spawn. There really needs to be a forfeit option in there before it’s worthwhile.
A real shame too since pubs are really bad since it went open beta. I’m sure the people in there are having fun when I’m not there, but it’s at the point where I feel bad for ruining games with my presence. It’s such a huge gap between semi-competent players (like myself) and new players that you can pretty much just carry your whole team in most of the games you get into.
It was a thing before open beta as well, but the players that upset the balance in pubs then are seen in the Dirty Cups now (rline, Draceus, MattjA, and so on)… I hope they add high level servers soon.
That’s an excellent question, but I’m afraid I have no idea what the answer is. Frankly, I’d be surprised if anyone was still playing this game. It doesn’t have any sort of longterm grind and it never got any DLC love. Maybe there are still a couple hundred diehards meeting to play every night? I’d love to know the answer.
-Tom
I just fired it up! Like many id engine games, I’ve left the game folder on my data drive for years. They don’t need to be re-installed, just launch the executable and you’re good to go. I even remembered my ET: QW username/password (mono, natch) and there I was, mono of clan Qt3. The master server must be online, because I got the list of the whopping 17 servers that were online. They were entirely populated by bots, if populated at all. That said, I was able to hop on to one called Weekend Warriors and promptly get vaporized by a Strogg anti-personnel rocket in no time. If only I could remember which key lets me hop on a vehicle…
I love the role based/team dynamic of Quakewars. I do prefer Wolf: ET, as I thought the Quakewars vehicles made the game a bit too chaotic, but infantry maps were excellent, but QW is still great fun. I liked Brink as well, but I prefer the open maps of Wolf or Quakewars. When I fired up the new Wolfenstein single player expansion, just released, it made me so nostalgic for MP Wolfenstein. Man, I would love to get new Wolfenstein maps w/ the tried and true Enemy Territory multiplayer gameplay.
Good luck.
I see that same thing happen in csgo all the time and it has a shitload more players.
It’s just a larger problem with a smaller player base because when you have half a million people competing the upper 10% don’t dominate quite as much. When you have a fraction of that the skill gap can be crushing.
14 cases opened. 14 lead color loadouts. :/
Have you looked at the trade up system? Any 9 lead cards can be turned into a bronze card for the character of your choosing. I experimented over the last couple days and was able to turn about 12K in credits into 2 bronze cards and one silver between what dropped while playing and cases I purchased. My goal is to have at least one bronze for ever character so I can get the boost no matter who hits the free rotation and I’m already about 1/3rd of the way there.
I know, in fact I already have a pair of iron cards using the trade system.
Still, I’m saving up most of my credits to unlock a few mercs, so I can’t buy cases.
Tried this last night. I was using the free unlocked Fragger code from the PC gaming E3 show, and the free rotation mercs.
The gunplay is great. Shooting and movement both feel really good. Guns snap into ADS cleanly, and the differences between weapons are notable. Deadliness is somewhere between Battlefiled 3/4 and Brink. Enemies aren’t bullet sponges, but they don’t go down in one hit either unless you get a headshot.
I’ve always like the different objectives Splash Damage puts into their matches, so that bit of carryover from Brink/Enemy Territory is welcome. The one criticism I have is that the tasks sometimes don’t tell a consistent story. For example, why am I repairing and escorting a tank to this mid-point of the map, just to take some bombs out of the back of it and hand-carry them to the place we need to blow up? Why wouldn’t we just grab the bombs from the beginning and bum rush the objective? It’s not like we’re hustling two miles to get there. Still, it’s good to have the varied jobs in the round.
The pricing is not great. I have no issue with buying mercs to keep them, but the fact that you then have to grind to earn in-game money to buy lotto tickets to randomly win better loadouts sucks. I’d much rather have the model in which you buy the character, then grind XP for that character to directly unlock stuff. Opening cases to watch the slot machine spin past the loadouts you’d like to have is supremely frustrating. It does not make me want to spend any money.
Just started playing and I totally agree with this, Merc pricing in particular.
Containment War update coming on Oct 28th.
http://forums.dirtybomb.nexon.net/discussion/19117/containment-war-giveaway-event
- New map: Dome
- New mode: Execution
- New merc: Stoker
- Anyone that logs in on the update’s launch week gets the medic, Phoenix, unlocked for free. If you already own Phoenix, you get two Elite Cases and an Obsidian card for Phoenix instead.
eh not sure if its worth reinstalling it… :p
I did recently and had a fun time in the “Level 5 and Under Servers” where most players didn’t have the premium characters/loadouts. I didn’t find the other servers where players were fully kitted out with premium players/loadouts very fun for long. There was certainly a skill gap I needed to overcome, but it was depressing playing with my starter characters with minimal abilities facing off against players that can fire heal pulses or revive themselves like Phoenix mentioned above. Power creep is a very real concern in this game as each new batch of characters seem better than the previous ones.
Also the payload type mode where you need to escort a vehicle plays out the same way every time and is really spammy. Your team finally repairs the vehicle, it crawls ahead about 5 feet, then everyone on the opposing team release airstrikes on it breaking it down again. Rinse and repeat. Airstrike spam the entire match.
I want to like this game, and keep trying it every few months, but I am bouncing off a lot of aspects of the design with emphasis on the premium aspects.
-Todd
Despite my earlier reservations about this title (they are still present and valid) and other people’s concerns mentioned upthread, there is something about this game that keeps bringing me back to play more. There is a very fun game buried under all of the F2P nonsense with a steep skill climb that is intriguing. The servers need better skill balancing heuristics to make matches more fair, but the core gameplay loop and team-focused gameplay is very enjoyable. I feel like Splash Damage has polished and iterated on their design from Brink and the design-DNA from their earlier efforts. The biggest issues are the random loadouts for characters/classes based on their card lottery system and the MOBA-like locking of classes/characters behind rotating free periods or paywalls. I don’t think the various grades or character loadouts (lead, steel bronze, silver, gold…) matter much as I have primarily used the pre-lead default sniper card/loadout despite having unlocked a premium silver one with more attributes. The default gun was just better.
I am a shooter player that typically prefers very tactical high-lethality games like Verdun, Insurgency, and RO2/Rising Storm, and Dirty Bomb is certainly NOT in that design ethos, but the team-focused objective-oriented gameplay is noteworthy in a market of shooters where everyone is a one-man Rambo army.
Worth a look if anything about the title or Splash Damage’s lineage appeals to you. Yes, the F2P junk is annoying but the core game is well designed. I do wish this was just a conventional purchase model, but it is free to try.
-Todd
I like it, the only downside is that it seems like it takes forever to get enough cash to buy one of the characters you want to have. Luckily they normally rotate a few of them so you’ll at least have one class always available to you that you’ll like.
Seems like it takes forever to go from rank 5 to 6 though.
Gunplay/movement/style is really nice in the game.