After what has been a turbulent few months with classification drama and a disappointing demo SEGA and Rebellion's Alien vs Predator found its way to Australian store shelves today for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC (although Steam pre-orders still aren't unlocked until Feb 20th).

A couple of weeks ago, after all the feedback from AusGamers readers about the poor peer to peer multiplayer in the PC demo, we compiled a list of questions to send over to Rebellion with the hopes of finding out more about the game's promised dedicated server support.

Questions like:

• Is Steam registration and activation mandatory, even for owners of boxed retail copies of the game?
  
• Will there be a standalone dedicated server distribution, or will a full retail copy of the game be required to run one?
  
• Will ranked play only be available over the peer to peer matchmaking method

Unfortunately due to some email woes, we were unable to have these answered before the game shipped. Now that the game is available, and we have a PC retail copy for review, we decided that the first order of business should be to jump in and find out our own answers to these questions. Read on to find out our results.

Stay tuned for our full review of the PC version in the coming days.

Is ausgamers tossing up a single player review? Tis the only reason to buy it anymore i think

Actually with regards to steam it did say they were going to be locked until the 20th however I did check my list and it changed from "Not released" to "Not installed" so installing now, I am thinking that maybe they broke their release and have made it available now.

Q1: Why did the PC demo only include peer to peer multiplayer if the retail version will support dedicated servers?

A: Because the dedicated server software wasn't finished yet! A post by Rebellion over on the Steam Forums explained: "We hope to have a beta release with reduced functionality out in the next few days and further updates to improve functionality and fix bugs over the next few weeks."

Q2: Then why the f*** was the game released?

not buying this game. talk about fail launch.

id rather torrent it in spite of letting me down so much.

It sux that it comes to this, but it's true, that's how you feel about these releases... the reason they don't give a f*** is piracy, these actions just encourage it.

I never had it on pre-order, but did cancel my Bad Company 2 pre-order after trying the beta, pre-ordered Just Cause 2 instead :D

Well the fact that you cant go prone doesnt help'. I dont really care that much about it , its more the principal that my soldier i'm playing has a bad back and cant go prone otherwise he might pull a disc...

No prone, no lean, no strafe while sprinting. Console port, pass.

No prone is fantastic.
I'm sorry, but nothing s**** me more than dolphin diving.
And if you add huge delays to entering/exiting prone, then people set up base camp and don't move.

Lean could be implemented, but by all means, as long as you can't lean and shoot at the same time as this just creates more camping problems, or at severe accuracy penalties.
If you've fired anything more than a .22 cap gun from the shoulder, and not benched or prone, then you'd know how hard it is to steady the recoil of a large caliber rifle as the bullet exits the barrel so as not to wind up pigeon shooting, let alone while leaning around a corner.

In the end, if they added weapon stability to be the same crouched as it would be prone, then the only thing you are missing out on is a bit of reduced visibility and reduced movement.
All that says to me is you lack the ability to move around the map and use cover and timing to do so.

Prone is gone from BC2 because it was needed, running around jump+prone+iron sights is terrible and lacks skills.

Prone is gone from BC2 because it was needed, running around jump+prone+iron sights is terrible and lacks skills.

what? why? I remember it was s*** in previous BF games because the developers were total nubcakes and made the game mechanics sucked so people were just dolphin diving everywhere. That problem should be utterly trivial to solve with some better game design and a penalty on going prone, like there is in real life

here we* are

Hey trauma have you seen this trailer for JC2? Talk about epic s***. Having a garry's mod style tool to hook people up to random objects seems like bloody great fun

ahaha where is fpot he should be here for this with his precious goty ramblings

JC2 looks awesome, might have to preorder this too.

No, prone is stupid and done poorly even in MW/MW2.
You can still dolphin dive in it or in the middle of a firefight just hit prone and the time it takes to actually drop to the ground and be able to shoot again, is still less than the average players reaction times...

I never really had a problem with Prone. It was more a problem with the Hitboxes on people not updating until 1/2 a second after the prone animation had finished. I never understood why they could make it fine if a guy was sprinting accross the map, but as soon as he takes a knee to lay down the Hitbox stops moving for 2-3 seconds.
So you think you're following his head, but really your hitting his feet, No 'Ping' for you :(

As others have said, acc penalties while the proner is in the animation too.

It should be utterly trivial to fix but here with are on the verge of BC2 release and the game has no prone.

Yeh I don't mind at all BC2 not having prone - from what I can tell they were always pretty clear about the game not having it, and I don't think they should hack it in now just for whiny gamers.

It just used to bug the s*** out of me how poorly it was implemented. Seemed to always work absolutely perfectly in Enemy Territory - there were strong penalties for prone at the expense of awesome firepower w/ the MG42 (man, the memories)

[quote]Yeh I don't mind at all BC2 not having prone - from what I can tell they were always pretty clear about the game not having it, and I don't think they should hack it in now just for whiny gamers.[/quote]

Agree but it surprises me how much people arte complaining about not having prone when they complained about how much prone was abused in BF2.

< and >

It's ther other side of the fence (the ones that did abuse prone) that are complaining about not having it.

Agree but it surprises me how much people arte complaining about not having prone when they complained about how much prone was abused in BF2.

See below image for explanation:

http://trog.qgl.org/up/gamers-about-colours.jpg

Back on topic if anyone is interested the dedicated server support is up but its only for non ranker matchs and it is very L4D style in which you have a server browser for a lobby. Either way there is hardly anyone playing it on pc and you would be lucky to get a full 8 player game and hell would freeze over before you got a full 18 player game.

I had a mate who picked it up on 360 he said there was heaps of people playing and personally I think the melee combat would work much better on a controller so maybe x360 is the way to go with this one (not sure how well its doing on ps3).

Its ok though as with most console generations the consoles play a huge part for a few years and then as the technology improves and the difference becomes bigger and bigger between the kinds of things the new tech can do and the limitations of the old tech PC will start to come back and rise from the ashes again.

Personally for me that day can't come too soon.

controls for humans and preds are fine but for aliens they are just horrible, its fine in single player when dealing with stupid as s*** ai but for multiplayer its horrible its so disorienting like i can deal with running on the roof and the walls and stuff but they made it so your so close to the ground that any slight bumb shifts your whole camera and pretty much all of the walls on every map are bumpy as s*** so your camera quite often in fast paced combat just becomes a constant blur.

The heavy attack becomes pointless because most times if someone sees an alien coming the first thing they do is block and as soon as they see you doing a heavy attack they just quick attack and you take damage.

Also with the certain surfaces that aliens auto transition on like a tree branch, this means that if a pred is on a tree branch which for him is a flat surface for you is a rounded one means you cant really attack him because of the angle and also means you cant grab for a stealth kill. On top of that both classes have ranged weapons for the marine they have the shotgun which if it hits you at point blank range its 1 hit kill and off course for alien you need to be a point blank and for preds all their weapons are 1 hit kill so if an alien is attacking a pred using light atttacks because I covered earlier why heavys are useless the pred has ample time to just turn around and 1 hit kill the alien with their weapon.

So this isnt so bad when there are lots of players in a game and you have a team mate alien who you can work with but seeming that almost never happens on PC and its almost always small games usually around 3-6 and you get stuck playing the only alien while the others run around playing marine and pred.

Now I still top the server quite often even apart from my gripes with the alien but its one of those things of fine I may still be going really well for kills but its all the other 30 or so opportunities for kills that I would of got if it hadn't been for the s***** controls.

/rant