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.
Posted 05:04pm 18/2/10
id rather torrent it in spite of letting me down so much.
Posted 05:08pm 18/2/10
Posted 05:25pm 18/2/10
EDIT - Just to elaborate a bit more, the marine story is the longest coming in around 2 1/2 hours. It looks pretty, Plays bloody great and has the marine feel to it all over. Quite awesome s***. Everything else is a big let down single player wise. Alien and Predator modes turn into "sneak up behind enemy and push E" fests. Not to mention melee sucks in this game. How this game is 16.6gb IDK. Not even ME2 was that big and it lasted like 10x the length easy
last edited by DM at 17:25:18 18/Feb/10
Posted 06:18pm 18/2/10
Posted 06:55pm 18/2/10
Posted 07:47pm 18/2/10
Q2: Then why the f*** was the game released?
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.
Posted 08:26pm 18/2/10
Posted 10:24pm 18/2/10
Posted 10:41pm 18/2/10
I don't see what was wrong with it just needed some bug fixes.
Posted 12:31am 19/2/10
Posted 12:39am 19/2/10
Posted 01:02am 19/2/10
Posted 03:52am 19/2/10
although the lack of lean kinda sucks.
Posted 09:49am 19/2/10
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.
Posted 10:07am 19/2/10
Movement just feels wrong too, the level layout in parts is mirrored and makes you feel was I not just here 10 mins ago.
Story wise it seems bogus, but the graphics are pretty good and maxed is pushing my 8800 GTS.
Defiently going on the end of the list, I still need to beat Dragon Age, ME2 and Bioshock 2, lol.
Posted 10:07am 19/2/10
Posted 10:09am 19/2/10
Posted 11:09am 19/2/10
Posted 11:35am 19/2/10
Either they chose to keep it out due to community opinion or were too lazy to put the time and effort in to make sure prone couldn't be used for some lame ass scrub move that has no place in competition let alone anywhere else.
Prone is out and I'm happy, I couldn't continue to play BF2 with how bad things where and their so called fixes in later patches didn't really do anything to help.
Posted 11:36am 19/2/10
Posted 11:39am 19/2/10
Posted 11:40am 19/2/10
Posted 11:41am 19/2/10
Posted 11:44am 19/2/10
Posted 11:45am 19/2/10
Posted 12:15pm 19/2/10
Posted 12:22pm 19/2/10
OR
atleast have a server option -----> Prone on/off (pretty simple huh)
Posted 12:27pm 19/2/10
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...
Posted 12:41pm 19/2/10
Posted 01:11pm 19/2/10
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.
Posted 01:27pm 19/2/10
It seems quite obvious to me that EA/DICE have left prone out of BC2 due to the abuse in BF2, which is a fair enough call seeing that it was a major concern of the community for such a long time and they never really fixed it.
Leave it out, get used to it and stop thinking that only cs type games don't have prone.
Gameplay has a part in games just as much as realism.
Posted 02:10pm 19/2/10
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)
Posted 02:17pm 19/2/10
Posted 03:10pm 19/2/10
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.
Posted 03:10pm 19/2/10
Posted 03:12pm 19/2/10
It's ther other side of the fence (the ones that did abuse prone) that are complaining about not having it.
Posted 04:07pm 19/2/10
Posted 04:31pm 19/2/10
Posted 10:06pm 19/2/10
Posted 12:39pm 20/2/10
Posted 09:09am 21/2/10
Makes me glad that I cancelled the preorder.
Posted 01:28pm 21/2/10
Posted 03:39pm 21/2/10
Posted 04:11pm 21/2/10
Personally for me that day can't come too soon.
Posted 08:42pm 21/2/10
I would say the biggest let down in the campaign is the length - the campaign for each species is no more than 3 hours of play...and thats on hard settings, and pushing it as is.
I hear people play online on consoles - but for PC, you'll never find a game available online. It's a fun game, but extremely disappointing and will be shelved within the next week.
Posted 12:34am 22/2/10
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