I couldn’t be bothered digging out that old PS thread. Great battles this morning (another thing you don’t get in BF1942: three-sided battles). I am loving this Falcon MAX the more I use it. What a great cert. It rocks against vehicles and MAXes, it’s good for base/tower assaults because it’s good against wall turrets & spitfires, and it is so-so against air vehicles (they have to be sitting still tho) and infantry (low damage, but the missiles splash and confuse people). Top it off with tons of ammo (with instant reload!), great survivability, and the fast run for getting from place to place, and this is the best three certs I’ve ever spent.
We had a huge battle on Hossin today. When I logged in, NC had a couple bases in the southeast, VS had some in the northwest, and TR had everything else. A huge wave of NC swept up across the continent, with a couple of high-level commanders helping us coordinate. Great bridge battles, some awesome tower assaults, terrific infantry charges. Lots of outdoor fighting. The TR fought for Voltan like it was the last base on earth. It was great because there was a little of everything–fighting in the forest, fighting in the hills, fighting in the courtyard, fighting in the base.
We swept up towards Acan, where we ran smack into the huge VS wave that had taken the other part of the continent. We got involved in a huge three-way, which was total chaos–Magmowers scything through the lines, tons of Libs overhead dropping all kinds of shit, at least two OS’s, tracers all over the place. The Acan bridge had so many wrecked vehicles on it that we couldn’t get any more across. At one point in front of an Acan tower, a VS and I teamed against a TR MCGer, dropped him, hesitated a half second, and then opened up on each other (I lost). Great stuff!
Alright, I’ll post this here – what framerates are people getting? There’s a “performance counter” that can be bound to a key (go under keymapping) and shows your ping, packet loss, and framerate.
My system:
Athlon XP 2400/266
GF4 Ti4200 64MB
1 gig o’ ram (yo ho ho)
In the massive big battles, my FPS falls to around ~8fps. Highest (like in Sanctuary) are ~50fps. Graphical settings are mostly high, but I took away the flora.
Now, weapons like the Jackhammer and Phoenix work pretty good with this much lag though.
Pretty low framerates for me. Last night, somebody else and I had a wild Vangard run on Hossin. As soon as I got in the gunner’s seat, the lag monster got me. I couldn’t do anything for at least a minute, but it did clear up. I love gunning in that tank: got me a Mosquito, couple of Magmowers, couple of Lightnings, several MAX’s (all with the main gun), and untold Vanu infantry before a TS Reaver got us.
Logged back in, and a freakin bloodbath was underway on Hossin at Acan. Three way combined arms fight for the fort that was brutal. BTW, I gotta commend Wombat’s bombing abilities and Grisha’s piloting. Those guy’s are good.
Hossin is the worst continent for framerate in the game, and Acan is the worst base on the worst continent from a framerate standpoint. All those trees and weather plus three factions with lots of units = my computer whimpering and trying to crawl under the bed.
I hit highs of like 110 or so in clear areas. I haven’t had a chance to look at the frame counter in the heat of battle. I am at 1152x856x32 and turned off shadows and the sky box. I think I am running 4x performance AF.
I usually play at 12 x 9 x 16 with most stuff on “high” and view at around 85% of maximum. I get rates of 60-70 in Sanctuary, 50ish in an empty area, 30ish with small groups. In huge battles my rate totally tanks, often around 4-6 FPS. This makes weapons like the JH nearly useless (another reason the terran HA weapons don’t need improving–their “spray n’ pray” firing mode deals with stuttering way better). I’ve tried to improve things, but it really seems to be endemic to the game. Today I was in a huge battle on Cyssor and got so fed up with low framerates that I kicked back to 8x6x16, medium details, and half draw distance. Net result? 7-10 FPS. Whee.
I guess I need to upgrade my processor and memory type if I really want this game to run well in big battles.
Right, played around with the Mosquito today. I hate it. Watch me wiggle my “plane” around the sky with the mouse. Tried using my joystick too. I hate that, because I don’t think that they ever bothered to play a flight sim, and the controls suck.
The Basilisk was more fun yesterday. Maybe tommorow I’ll try a buggy or something.
I can see myself getting bored in a week or so with this game – its always the same right now. All everyone wants to do is capture bases, because thats the only thing that really gets XP. So everyone goes round and round capturing bases and defending the bases in the lattice that enable them to capture more bases.
I really don’t know what the developers are doing at this point, because it seems to me that there’s just not a lot of legs in this game considering the fee at this point, and the entire game conspires to channel the playing into a few activities ad naseum.
Well, I’ve got a free month. We’ll see what happens after that, won’t we?
I suspect a lot of people are now like me - frustrated with the game, and waiting for our issues to be fixed before we bother logging back in. I’ve decided to give them until the end of July - if the game isn’t in a state that satisfies me by then, subscription goes bye bye. My outfit leader, and just about all of my outfit, have come to a similar conclusion.
I expect I’ll play through through the end of the summer, but unless they’ve really put in a lot of new content that will be it. The way I go through games this is a smash hit for me. 2 or 3 months of playing a single game is a good value for me personally.
However, I don’t see the game going away any time soon. WW2OL is still going (maybe not strong, but going) and that is 1/100th the game that PS is. I fought and hacked and died at Chuku, and Dinant, you’re no Chuku.
I still don’t understand the “there’s no goal” complaint. To me, it seems a lot like BF1942 in that respect–in BF1942 you’re trying to capture flags, and here you’re trying to capture CCs, but at the end of the day, none of it makes any difference and you don’t ever progress or win. I mean, of course you “win” in the sense that one side of BF1942 makes the other one run out of tickets, or one side in PS captures the base, but overall both games, like all multiplayer shooters, are ultimately “pointless” if you’re looking for some overall goal beyond just the fun of fighting.
It strikes me as particularly odd because PS is actually better than most shooters in this respect. There is at least some level of persistence in the world, and in your character, and in who’s on your side (both your outfit, and the high-CR leaders, and just other folks in general–there are definitely some names I have gotten to remember as “Oh, he’s that really good base-clearing guy” or whatever). I can imagine making it more a territory-capture type game–make defense a lot easier (and more rewarding), so that empires can easily hold territory and slowly march towards their enemies’ sanctuaries. But I don’t know that that would be a better game, at all.
I agree about the issue with bugs, balance, etc., and I totally, totally agree about the low population numbers (at least on Johari). I’m really tempted to start an alternate character on Emerald (probably TR, because I like their look and weapons better than the NC) just so I can regularly find battles. On Johari, it seems like it’s getting really difficult to find balanced battles; the only way you do is on a continent that is jam-packed with folks from both sides. That’s fun (although in the latest patch, extremely choppy for me), but I miss the old days where there were often 20-on-20 or 40-on-40 battles as well as the 100-on-100 stuff.
I’d vote for TR emerald too, if you want to keep the outfit alive. Or, should we try and join a large established outfit there? I’m just talking here, I’m not quite ready to abandon Robbo the Sund driver quite yet.
If we did switch to emerald, I have a suggestion: lets each have at least one char with a flyer cert, and we’ll start an outfit called Dawn Patrol. I’m itching to start a char named Sopwith.
I still don’t understand the “there’s no goal” complaint. To me, it seems a lot like BF1942 in that respect–in BF1942 you’re trying to capture flags, and here you’re trying to capture CCs, but at the end of the day, none of it makes any difference and you don’t ever progress or win. I mean, of course you “win” in the sense that one side of BF1942 makes the other one run out of tickets, or one side in PS captures the base, but overall both games, like all multiplayer shooters, are ultimately “pointless” if you’re looking for some overall goal beyond just the fun of fighting.
Thing is, to attract the kind of subscriber numbers SOE would like to have, you may need more than “fun fighting”. That’s my guess at least. It’s looking like PS, despite its good gameplay, is having trouble attracting a good-sized subscriber base.
I think SWG is definitely hurting PS, especially as people are learning how to play SWG and finding it addictive (don’t ask me how - I hate the combat too much to ever play). I know this will get flamed, but I think including some dungeons with mobs and rare implants for treasure would rock in PS. Give us some random ancient Vanu cities, or the occasional wandering uber flying saucer that all 3 sides must combine to kill that explodes like a pinyata and drops some sort of loot. Balance-shmalance, you gotta have some of the unknown.
But there are BF1942 servers that emulate this; they have tickets set to huge numbers like 20,000 a side. Each side can take flags in, say Operation Battleaxe, but nobody ever “wins”. I’m not arguing that PS doesn’t make a better game under those circumstances, with its large maps and huge fights, etc. My argument is that there are few BF1942 servers that use those settings, and I think that’s because a lot of people like having a defined objective with a ending screen that shows how well players did over a single defined event, and what you call pointless is not to them.
I’m just saying, anecdotally, that playing both the PS beta and in BF1942 servers with abnormally high tickets, I heard people say “what’s the point?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that during a normal BF1942 game.
I think this would have helped. In fact, they probably should have made the character-building more important and made PvE a viable part of the game. You’d still have the normal PvP and then the random PvP as you stumble upon a rival force hunting mobs.
Endless Ages is a shooter built around a PvE game. It works quite well for the most part.
