That game is the biggest scam ever. I can't believe so many suckers fell for this scam. It's MW2 with crappier maps and you're still gonna have to pay more for the new maps.

The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Save your money and buy bf3, which blows cod out of the water, or skyrim.

SoCalSurfer: That game is the biggest scam ever. I can't believe so many suckers fell for this scam. It's MW2 with crappier maps and you're still gonna have to pay more for the new maps.

The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Save your money and buy bf3, which blows cod out of the water, or skyrim.

I'm a huge fan of the COD line but these maps farking blow ass. I can't believe they actually thought these maps were a good idea.

Bunnyhat: cameroncrazy1984: cmunic8r99: cameroncrazy1984: So glad I bought BF3 instead of MW3. Putting a tank shell into a building to neutralize a sniper is SO satisfying

So YOU are the dick that keeps shooting me with HEAT rounds?!

(the saddest part is i pre-ordered BF3 and have had time to play the beta twice and the RTM version once)

Hey, if people are dumb enough to snipe with laser sights, they deserve a 120mm rude awakening.


I love targeting people from my tank cause they keep flashing their laser sight at me.

I just unlocked laser designation on my tank load out and nobody is using laser guided weapons yet. I also unlocked the guided gunner missile for use against tanks. Farking deadly.

/HalfAssAssasin (XBox)

Ah FPS, the lowest common denominator of gaming. The Jersey Shore of the internet, if you will.

I am honestly not surprised, these two games pretty much have the market sew up and MW tends to get the heavy handed advertising push plus is known to be hmm... "kiddie friendly"? Not in that it's less gory but it's, percieved to be, just run, gun & nuke rather than having to work as a coherent unit to push on a given objective.

It should however been thrown in the same category as World of Warcraft. It's a statistical outlier as far as video game sales (regardless of genre) go and honestly? Doesn't deserve half the attention it has lavished on it by the press. Then again neither does Battlefield.

Sorry but I sit there/here looking at all the 'awesome' people get up to in these two games and always get left with the sentiment "Is that it?" they're pretty basic FPS's... it's not like the flight sim bit in BF3 is all that acurate... which would be something new and interesting to bring to the table I suppose.

sarah_t_s : Sorry but I sit there/here looking at all the 'awesome' people get up to in these two games and always get left with the sentiment "Is that it?"

Yeah, it's not like it's quake 2 or tribes or anything.

lordargent: sarah_t_s : Sorry but I sit there/here looking at all the 'awesome' people get up to in these two games and always get left with the sentiment "Is that it?"

Yeah, it's not like it's quake 2 or tribes or anything.

Heh. True enough. The thing that gets me is with all these various unlocks stuffed in to either of the games they've taken a basic FPS and welded a grindy Korean MMO to it in some respects.

True not everything has to be a Deus Ex in terms of depth but... if all these games have is their multiplayer (and I have been yelled at quite a lot when commenting on the single player campaigns in them) why am I paying £40 for it?

Hell, Mechwarrior is lobby/match/map based and F2P when it's released in a few months time.

God I wish intelligent PC gaming was back. FPS's have been the source of dumbing down of gaming. For gods sakes, I tried showing some of my slightly younger (five years) friends X-wing Alliance and and mechwarrior... they thought they were ridiculously complicated to play. "What... you mean you needed to remember what buttons do what? what the hell is a keymap??" and these were games I was playing when I was ten years old!

//my last hope of intelligent console gaming died with the kinect steel battallion.

On Black Ops I was one of those bastards who could go 45-1 or 30-0 most every game, just stupid scores that people would biatch at. I don't care if I'm not even half that good at BF3, that game at least has some quality to it. God dammit I miss the games of my youth. Fun times, gone forever.

I own both, I play both for different reasons. COD is twitchier. BF3 is much more paced, and I enjoy bullet mechanics.

I like the maps in COD, and it supports the gameplay of limited camping. I also like the maps in BF3, which support camping.

I dislike botters in both games. I dislike stat padders in both games.

I dislike how BF3 farked up and allowed EOD Bots to be considered 'headshot' weapons. I have just under 1m from the maximum effective distance for the Barrett as my headshot. It was legit, in-game, non-boosted. I don't need 890482843284 kiddies who've never fired a sniper rifle suddenly posting 2348m headshots (975m is the Barrett max, mine is a 974.16m)

I have a sad and shameful admission to make: I usually like Call of Duty's multiplayer.

I understand what I'm buying into isn't in any way a worthwhile experience. It's a time passer that is based on pure dopamine shots of constant levelling married with destroying the concept of winning matches so "skill" can be the all-knowing, all-seeing k/d rating. I appreciate this, and understood as future installments refined that formula the game became a yearly expansion-minded cash cow rather than the revolution COD4 was.

Hell, I even appreciate the dumbing down process Activitision have introduced under the illusion of adding complexity. All the killstreaks, gun add-ons, deathstreaks, etc, were done to make it as accessible as possible for shedloads of different styles of players to at least pretend they had found their niche of excellence in a sea of noobs. I will even openly and unashamedly admit while I think of myself as an intelligent human being in normal life, the complex games the likes of the PC revel in regularly have the effect of repelling me from even starting to play. So I'm aware I'm a reductive idiot when it comes to games, and COD is designed to appeal to the slack-jaw in me.

But if MW3 is the direction they want to push it in future, then this isn't even a series pretending to provide anything other than an empty and random killing field with levelling any more. Every map has been dumbed down and cluttered with so much detritus that long range combat (and by that I'm just on about assault rifles from a distance) or even medium-range combat is strongly discouraged. The developers even went so far as to say they were doing it to eliminate BF3-style camping i.e. hardscoping - which they consider to be unskilled play - when the reality of COD is that camping actually refers to sitting in a corner/behind one of the many desks/bushes/storage containers all day and waiting for someone to run by. I play cautious run-and-gun, which is traditionally a strong play style for the better players even though I suck at it, and I still think this is a change for the worse.

They just want a scenario where people are going "ha ha, I shot you! Oh no, you got me! I'll run back and shoot you again in 10 seconds! Woo, levelled up! I am the best! Got you again!" like it's a water gun fight. You level something, anything, about 1-3 times a game, to the point where you don't care anymore what's levelling. And the more the series is "balanced" by over-nerfing game styles that just needed tweaks (explosives players being the perfect example) the more it becomes homogenous and the more series's weakness get revealed - the game and its players are so dependent on their mini maps that every perk and killstreak that gives you an advantage on said mini-map becomes king, while ARs and the best QS sniper rifles are the only guns to consider because heaven forbid someone have to think about a different weapon for different-ranged scenarios or how areas of a map should be the province of different players.

I know this is a stupid tl;dr rant, and I know I'm not supposed to do anything but sneer at the series as a map pack (or claim it's been like this for years), but there are differences between games no matter how subtle you think they are, and this iteration has abandoned the elements that secretly made the good COD games good in multiplayer because they detract from what have become the iconic elements of COD multiplayer.

Rant off :)

I haven't really liked any of the CoD series apart from the very first one (I miss the Retrieval game mode), and the first Modern Warfare.

/meh

Mike_LowELL: Meanwhile, Doom is probably the most complex and progressive game to legitimize any genre that isn't the flight simulator. And somehow, Doom's success has yielded a generation of gamers who claim the genre-setter has primitive artificial intelligence but can't get enough of "zombie modes" where hordes of slow-moving monsters stumble towards the player. It truly is a sad state of affairs.

Doom and Wolfenstein 3d and the like certainly helped improve my sense of direction, I think.
..and I agree with everything you wrote.

As far as new FPS games go, I like to think there is hope, and I really wish they made a Tribes 2 FPS type of game for xbox. Those games make me happy.. what quake 2 mod was a version of that, Team Fortress?

echri:
//my last hope of intelligent console gaming died with the kinect steel battallion.

Consoles are more than powerful enough to do 'intelligent' gaming, hell in theory if you could get the MW4 source and hit a button marked "Compile for PPC & sign for 360" it'd run the game easily.

The controller however makes a console the stereotype Mac of 'intelligent' gaming: how you do that when you can't right click? Take the Mechwarrior games as an example, trying to wedge WSAD, torso twist & aiming on to a controller and you're left with an unplayable mess. And that leaves out a hell of a lot of really quite useful controls.

But unless you are going to bundle your own pricey controller with the game, all you've got is the standard unit that comes with the machine and that REALLY limits what you can do for RTS/sim games.

Dairy King: SoCalSurfer: That game is the biggest scam ever. I can't believe so many suckers fell for this scam. It's MW2 with crappier maps and you're still gonna have to pay more for the new maps.

The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Save your money and buy bf3, which blows cod out of the water, or skyrim.

I'm a huge fan of the COD line but these maps farking blow ass. I can't believe they actually thought these maps were a good idea.

Having not played it, what is the main issue with the maps?

Domino's Fiend: hardscoping


Or playing a sniper. The only reason "softscoping" works is because the farking game is aiming for you, that shiat don't fly on a keyboard & mouse set up. Hell that shiat shouldn't fly on a god damn 21st Century console either.

If they're that adamant they don't want sniper's then they should just remove the god damn sniper rifles!

Nemo's Brother: Dairy King: SoCalSurfer: That game is the biggest scam ever. I can't believe so many suckers fell for this scam. It's MW2 with crappier maps and you're still gonna have to pay more for the new maps.

The developers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Save your money and buy bf3, which blows cod out of the water, or skyrim.

I'm a huge fan of the COD line but these maps farking blow ass. I can't believe they actually thought these maps were a good idea.

Having not played it, what is the main issue with the maps?

In summary, they changed the design philosophy to make it more about "gun on gun gameplay" (their wording) One of the major points was they wanted people to be gunned down less from behind or unawares, so they cut down the amount of different directions you could be killed from at any point on the map. This meant removing a lot of the verticality, and sticking a lot of large storage crates, trucks, cars, tables etc in any empty expanse so you're theoreticially guarding no more than three directions.

However, not only does this make for a bunch of maps that all play the same way and are much smaller than their former counterparts (how dare people have to run around for 15 seconds without killing or being killed) but it also exacerbates many of the old problems. Because of their twisty turny alcove nature, getting shot from behind is more common than ever, while the safest thing you can do is corner camp because of the way you can hide yourself very easily.

Not advocating a return to the days of Wasteland, but 16 maps shouldn't feel similar, and shouldn't all require the same play style. Plus they aren't even stand-out examples of those sort of maps.

(p.s. Gun on Gun fails when gun lethality has been boosted significantly, lag adjustment means bullets wrap around objects, and the strength of your connection is king. It's whoever hits first wins, end of discussion.)

sarah_t_s: Domino's Fiend: hardscoping


Or playing a sniper. The only reason "softscoping" works is because the farking game is aiming for you, that shiat don't fly on a keyboard & mouse set up. Hell that shiat shouldn't fly on a god damn 21st Century console either.

If they're that adamant they don't want sniper's then they should just remove the god damn sniper rifles!


They want you to be a sniper, but just not the way you want to be one:

http://www.oxm.co.uk/35794/interviewsmw3-multiplayer-sledgehammer-on- m aps-streaks-snipers-camping-and-more/

\ The whole interview sets my teeth on edge - it feels very Broforce and tells you a lot about why MW3 is like it is.
\\ Sorry about not knowing how to linky

ARMA > COD

Domino's Fiend: They just want a scenario where people are going "ha ha, I shot you! Oh no, you got me! I'll run back and shoot you again in 10 seconds! Woo, levelled up! I am the best! Got you again!" like it's a water gun fight.

I remember when, back in the day, the point of all these kinds of bonuses was to level the playing field.

A race is no fun if the same horse keeps winning by a large lead. You need to even things up a bit so the outcome is still exciting, and to that end you need to feed bonuses to the weaker side, and add activities that the non-1337 can do to still help their team... only all these games do the opposite. They dump rewards on the best killers, hurting the norms.

Setting up an ambush is a legitimate military tactic, as is sniping.
Tho I see it more as the players response to a battlefield that's been made too dangerous for them.

If one guy is stabbing people by the dozen while another is quick sniping the survivors before they get a shot off, only to polish off half the map with a bonus bomb, people will retreat to the corners and ambush more to compensate. They WONT run around and join their friends on the front line because movement has become too dangerous.
A big difference I see in BF3, especially on large maps, is that the extra movement before contact makes players more bold. They don't feel as entrapped so they don't camp as often.

Balancing COD more with death streaks and by outing the kill leaders would go further to deal with campers than nerfing the weapons will.

SoCalSurfer: Save your money and buy bf3, which blows cod out of the water, or skyrim.

I'm just waiting for Skyward Sword. Most excited I've been for a Wii game in probably 3 years.

I got the javelin badge in MW2 and never looked back. 500 kills of spotting where people SHOULD be and MIGHT be. Nobody took it seriously and that was that for me.

way south: Domino's Fiend: They just want a scenario where people are going "ha ha, I shot you! Oh no, you got me! I'll run back and shoot you again in 10 seconds! Woo, levelled up! I am the best! Got you again!" like it's a water gun fight.

I remember when, back in the day, the point of all these kinds of bonuses was to level the playing field.

A race is no fun if the same horse keeps winning by a large lead. You need to even things up a bit so the outcome is still exciting, and to that end you need to feed bonuses to the weaker side, and add activities that the non-1337 can do to still help their team... only all these games do the opposite. They dump rewards on the best killers, hurting the norms.

Setting up an ambush is a legitimate military tactic, as is sniping.
Tho I see it more as the players response to a battlefield that's been made too dangerous for them.

If one guy is stabbing people by the dozen while another is quick sniping the survivors before they get a shot off, only to polish off half the map with a bonus bomb, people will retreat to the corners and ambush more to compensate. They WONT run around and join their friends on the front line because movement has become too dangerous.
A big difference I see in BF3, especially on large maps, is that the extra movement before contact makes players more bold. They don't feel as entrapped so they don't camp as often.

Balancing COD more with death streaks and by outing the kill leaders would go further to deal with campers than nerfing the weapons will.

Their concession to balancing is to give people a lot more ways to contribute despite their ability and negate killstreaks. The support killstreak class - where hardly any of it is lethal, but your killstreak doesn't reset when you die - is a fantastic idea. But it seems people are using it to spam UAVs or go for the Stealth Bomber rather than help the team with Recon Drones, SAM Turrets etc (and the true helping perks are too high on the kill tree for said bad players to reach even with no resets). Also, you don't get a true killing launcher to take out air support until level 40, and people would rather run Blind Eye and Assassin so they can avoid getting killed rather than then help their teammates by also taking the choppers out. (Totally anecdotal evidence, YMMV)

For those who want to know, the default keymap for Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (Best game in the series IMO). Yes, this handy slip of plastic came with the game, and I think had more on the other side of it (I know I still have mine around here somewhere, i need to look for it)



/master of the DFA by the time I was done with it

I'm a little disappointed in MW3, but that's why I also bought BF3...so I could mix it up. And I'm also not trading in Black Ops, because even though I'm not a big Trayarch fan, they did a pretty good job with the maps and I felt that the game was surprisingly well balanced for my play style (AR run and gun with tactical flanking).

So, I'm disappointed, but I'm gonna give MW3 a chance. I've only had a few days to get used to it, and it may turn out to be a game that I really get into. But yeah the maps are too small and the camping has gotten a lot worse. I never go anywhere without a rifle grenade attached to my AR because I'm not going to keep getting killed from the same corner by the same player 6 times. I also don't like sniping, but I will snipe when it comes to campers. If someone is up on the same area, then they get a sniper bullet to the face. That is much harder to do in this game because you can't post up anywhere without being shot in the back from some random corner before you get to where you need to be.

Another problem? The killstreaks are way too obnoxious. In some maps you just get flooded with killstreaks and you have more people dying from killstreak boosts than you do from actual gunshots. If it were up to me, they would have severely limited what killstreaks you get. Yeah, flying a C-130 is fun, but since you yourself are almost never going to do it, the C-130 just becomes a huge obstacle to actually having fun in the map. But that's just me.

dollbreaks: Tribes 2 FPS type of game for xbox

Unfortunately, not for the Xbox, but they are making a new free to play Tribes game for the PC.

/*wishes he had a better internet connection*

IrishFarmer: So, I'm disappointed, but I'm gonna give MW3 a chance. I've only had a few days to get used to it, and it may turn out to be a game that I really get into. But yeah the maps are too small and the camping has gotten a lot worse. I never go anywhere without a rifle grenade attached to my AR because I'm not going to keep getting killed from the same corner by the same player 6 times. I also don't like sniping, but I will snipe when it comes to campers. If someone is up on the same area, then they get a sniper bullet to the face. That is much harder to do in this game because you can't post up anywhere without being shot in the back from some random corner before you get to where you need to be.

I had the same feelings, but then a friend suggested I try Kill Confirmed instead of regular Team Deathmatch. It's only a minor change, but it completely changes the dynamic of the game. It's TDM but with a goal, collect more dog tags than the enemy while preventing them from capturing yours. Think Headhunters except you don't lose 50 kills if you suddenly die.

It makes the maps more about push and pull from one side to the other and makes better use of choke points. In MW3 TDM I found every map was utter chaos. Everyone ran around all points of the map and kills or deaths seemed random. In KC this is less the case. Groups stay together and there are more concerted efforts to siege or defend a part of the map.

It literally changed my attitude of "meh" to having some of the most fun in an FPS I've ever had.

Minor CSB, but the first time I played it a guy I didn't know was using a riot shield on my team and kept running up in front of me. When I realized both players get the points if someone else grabs the dogtags from your kill, I understood what he was trying to do. He would charge an area, draw fire with the riot shield and I would mop up the enemies paying attention to him. He would collect the dog tags and we would move on. No voice communication or anything, we just got in sync through a few actions.

Bought MW3 on the 10th (two days after launch) and there were already peeps that were prestiged, even lvl 2 prestige. That's some serious game play. Or an addiction, however you slice it. For people like myself who work 40+ hours, prestige is useless. At least it forces the basement-dwellers to reset their weaponry I guess.

That being said, it's the most balanced CoD yet. I'm okay with the leveling and perks. Support packages are a breathe of fresh air as well. I'm a 'multiple corner camper'. Hit, move, and repeat. I also play with the stealth perks. Anyone who's 'dot hunting' is in for a rude awakening. And if you come back to get my corner camping arse, I'll get you from the opposite side of the room. In short, you're playing tactical/hardcore against me, whether you want to or not. Clear that room, SWAT style, or else.

That's what makes this game great. There's no streaky play, no memorizing certain procedures to defeat 70+% of your opponents. It's situational, and there are counter measures available. It's a lot like 'WWE No Mercy' in it's 'rock, paper, scissors' like balancing. I say well done.

My fav part of the X-wing series was the difficulty of managing your half crippled fighter while cork-screwing through incoming fire from an ISD with a pack of Tie-A's right behind me. I just gotta get close enough to take out that shield gen.

Oh, get over it you big babies.

Link (new window)


Don't like it? Don't buy it. Support new ip and indie games but god damn, all this QQ over this farking game. The worst comments are the ones that go "OMG" It's the same game as last year! I want my refund." Didn't you read the previews or watch the trailers. Hell didn't you play the last three games? WTF did you expect? a mmorpg? idiots.

/Yo, I know this hating MW3 is the trending thing but I just want you to know that I've been hating on console fps with crouch for a minute to seal up my bullet wounds since Halo 1.

sarah_t_s: Or playing a sniper. The only reason "softscoping" works is because the farking game is aiming for you, that shiat don't fly on a keyboard & mouse set up. Hell that shiat shouldn't fly on a god damn 21st Century console either.

That's why I gave up on Black Ops. Every time I tried to line up a scoped shot someone would run across my line of vision and it would pull me off target. That, plus how someone could run right at me while I'm pumping 7.62 at them and get a knife kill.

BF3 has it's faults, but it's a much more satisfying experience.

Zousand: Oh, get over it you big babies.

Link (new window)


Don't like it? Don't buy it. Support new ip and indie games but god damn, all this QQ over this farking game. The worst comments are the ones that go "OMG" It's the same game as last year! I want my refund." Didn't you read the previews or watch the trailers. Hell didn't you play the last three games? WTF did you expect? a mmorpg? idiots.

/Yo, I know this hating MW3 is the trending thing but I just want you to know that I've been hating on console fps with crouch for a minute to seal up my bullet wounds since Halo 1.

I hate to use the word, but it's the gaming hipster phenomenon. Rather than enjoy the games they do like, it's more fun to complain about the popular ones.

Zousand: /Yo, I know this hating MW3 is the trending thing but I just want you to know that I've been hating on console fps with crouch for a minute to seal up my bullet wounds since Halo 1.

Yeah, it was way more realistic when you could only heal bullet wounds by running over a plate of food!

Zousand: /Yo, I know this hating MW3 is the trending thing but I just want you to know that I've been hating on console fps with crouch for a minute to seal up my bullet wounds since Halo 1.

That's a conscious design decision to allow for a more consistent game experience. It's hard to plan the difficulty of a battle when you don't know if the player is coming in with 100% health or 1%. It's not right for all games, but it has it's place.

S haters on Fark? Say it isn't so! ;)

You guys are more predictable than... pretty much anything.

Haha... That should have said "FPS haters" but I guess "FP" is filtered?

Burr: For those who want to know, the default keymap for Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (Best game in the series IMO). Yes, this handy slip of plastic came with the game, and I think had more on the other side of it (I know I still have mine around here somewhere, i need to look for it)

[www.localditch.com image 640x436]

/master of the DFA by the time I was done with it

Yes, if the game came with:

A keymap inset
A giant poster showing the relations of your tech or skill tree
An instruction manual the size of a young adult novel

Then you knew it was going to be a good game.

MightyPez: I hate to use the word, but it's the gaming hipster phenomenon. Rather than enjoy the games they do like, it's more fun to complain about the popular ones.


Less that, and more the definition of "good" games is far more complicated than games journalism would have us believe. We don't need to go into the whole Arkham City gets 6 out of 5 scenario again, but we are consistently told what are the only games worth buying by intense marketing campaigns and slavish reviews that consider 8 a poor score.

For instance, let's take the FPS war. All we have is "Which is better, MW3 or BF3"? from every site and every fanboy of the two series. EA and Activision must be loving it because it completely reduces the debate to their two games, makes their two games the only two worth considering and sets one up as good against the other bad. Which is ridiculous.

It's not about picking the obscure indie games and saying that's better instead, because too many of those are one-gimmick nothings, it's about actually being able to have a debate about whether a game is good or bad in spite of the public buying it because they've been told to, all their friends buy it or out of habit.

I'd argue right now that MW3 proves that COD4 might not have been all that, because this is years of testing game mechanics across several years of evolution, and the optimal strategies people are discovering are not really that satisfying for all concerned.

(Mike Lowell might have more on this, but I'll back out quickly if I'm wrong because I'd only be able to counter his walls of reasoned opinion with BUT I THINK DIFFRNT SO THAR!!1!)

Doc Daneeka: [www.halolz.com image 500x378]

Correct Title: Labyrinthine FPS Design vs. Linear FPS Design.

JohnnyC: S haters on Fark? Say it isn't so! ;)

You guys are more predictable than... pretty much anything.

I used to find it amusing. It is kind of getting old at this point. We had a lovely Skyrim thread yesterday until toward the end when some douchebag went from criticizing the game to thread shiatting in the space of 5 posts. It is a shame watching perfectly civil threads devolve into a troll competition. Of course, if trolling were not actively encouraged across the entirety of this place, maybe it would not be so rampant...

I dislike your choice of entertainment and will argue with you on the internet about it.

I will also argue with you about how the games I played in my youth are better in design then the new ones.

/no one is more judgemental then geeks and nerds for no good reason
//NO. ONE.