Monthly Archives: March 2009

More America’s Army 3 Stuff

I’ve been following America’s Army 3 pretty religiously. Indeed, I’ve already made one blog post about it over here. At this week’s GDC we’ve been getting plenty of new details about game though.

Yes kids, using lean looks as stupid as it feels.
“Yes kids, using lean looks as stupid as it feels.”

Here’s some of the new, interesting stuff I’ve learned:

  • Instead of the anonymous terrorists we killed in droves in America’s Army we’ll be fighting soldiers from an imaginary European country with similar technology to the US Army in AA3. This solves several of the realism problems we saw in the original AA – Both sides would play as American soldiers with American weapons yet would see each other as enemies using very different enemy weapons which made it difficult to reconcile the disparity between the ballistic qualities between, say, an M16 firing a 5.56 round and an AK-47 firing a 7.62 round. This also removes the balance issues introduced when those weapons were actually picked up off the field and used. It’s unclear if weapon looting will even be in AA3 though there has at least been mention of ammo pick ups. The fact that the OPFOR are military this time will also help explain why they’re behaving like American soldiers. It’s kind of odd to think about a bunch of shabby looking terrorists using modern fireteam tactics after all. 😉
  • Along with the more obvious graphical enhancements (higher poly models and environments, for instance) AA3 will feature prominent use of Illuminate Lab’s Beast advanced lighting system to produce more realistic lighting and shadows effects. Bloom from going from a dark to bright environment was noted as well.
  • Character models will also better reflect what equipment is equipped and when it has been expended – I.E. the player’s model will show exactly what grenades he has equipped and when he uses one it’s gone! Animations for little things like pulling mags from pouches during reloads will also be improved and will be fully viewable by other players rather than just from the player’s own first person view.
  • Audio is apparently being greatly, greatly improved. Not only are sound samples in general more realistic but tons of little details have been added such as sound scaling and occlusion – you’ll be able to hear the cracks and pops of distant fire, bullets whizzing by your head, etc. One article mentioned being able to tell how close you were to being hit by the sound the bullet made as it passed you and how much more intimidating this made being suppressed. This sounds like an excellent improvement to the game. Sound design strikes me an a very important though often overlooked factor in war games. As an aside it has also been mentioned the moving slower will cause you to make a lot less noise when creeping around. Past America’s Army players will know how important listening for enemy foot steps and the like is.
  • AA3 will also have integrated TeamSpeak 3 voice over IP – in fact it may be the first we see of TS3 if it manages to beat the general client/server release out of the gate. Personally I’m pretty skeptical about games with built in VOIP – in most cases people don’t use it but prefer the performance, quality, and flexibility of using a dedicated voice server. There’s various reasons for that but one of my personal biggest ones is that I don’t necessarily want to talk to random idiots on the ‘net and I have no doubt that AA3, being an FPS and a free one at that, will attract a lot of idiots.
  • One change that is sure to bum some people out while causing others to rejoice is the removal of the ability to jump. It’s a popular subject of debate amongst tactical gamers but one I personally feel is the right decision. Hopping around like an idiot is great fun in Unreal or Quake but I hate it in what are supposed to be more realistic games. Not all is lost, however, as you will still be able to climb, vault, and otherwise traverse some obstacles in the environment using a special action in this particular spots. Hopefully these locations aren’t too sparse.
  • Another minor, but definitely new change to the controls is the ability to transition smoothly from running to prone or on-knee position which apparently results in a neat and effective combat slide type maneuver.
  • We’ll also be given radial menus to make the interface a little easier to use. I’m not sure which functions will have these radial menus but communications (as in Battlefield 2) is easy to imagine as is weapon selection and modes as seen in many console shooters.
  • Kill messages have gone bye-bye. Now if you throw a grenade into a room someone might be in you won’t know if your guess was right or not until you verify it. There’s also a system for that too – you can verify a kill by going up to a body and pressing an action key which sounds similar to reporting suspects in SWAT 4. Hopefully this will cut back on the silly grenade spamming shit as well as giving the game a slower, more cautious pace, at least in theory.
  • The new in-game map will show all of the friendlies playing to reflect improvements in communication technology. This is a change over the current system in AA in which there is a complicated system of who can see who based on line of sight and chain of command related communications. I assume you’ll still be able to report enemy sightings and the like on your map as well.
  • The ballistic system has been greatly improved. Besides the obvious like more realistic, accurate shots, we’ll also be seeing realistic penetration with features such as impact dampening (the bullet slows down after passing through material and may do less damage if it still manages to hit) trajectory changes, ricochets, and the like. This should make firefights much more dangerous and dynamic.
  • Grenades have also been overhauled. Not only can the shrapnel mess you up but the concussive force of a nearby blast and do nasty things to you as well. They’ve even added a realistic “overpressure” system which causes grenades to do more damage in enclosed spaces with open doors, windows, and the like helping to mitigate the effect. Sounds neat.
  • Another thing we’ve learned about in the past and apparently people have seen at GDC is the ability to do melee attacks – specifically, rifle butt strikes and the like. It’s not clear how effective these will be nor have any other information about them been release to my knowledge but it is definitely notable as AA2 had no melee whatsoever.
  • The player damage model has been overhauled. The player will be split into 16 different sections with damage to different areas resulting in different effects. Chest and arm shots, for instance, will slow your reloading and dull your accuracy while shots to the legs and feet will slow your movement speed. Head shots are, of course, instant death.
  • Players can also become incapacitated – a state in which the player is down but not entirely out. There is a funky screen effect and they can look around but not shoot until they are revived by medic or finished off by the other team. This sounds similar to Left 4 Dead or Call of Duty 4‘s Last Stand perk without the ability to shoot back. It sounds like a cool addition. My mind is immediately filled with visions of being shot down and laying in the middle of a street, helplessly watching a massive firefight unfold all around me. This could also be a good, less questionable platform for “ghosting”.
  • Speaking of being incapacitated it seems as if you’ll be punished if you choose to simply finish off a downed opponents. Such kills are not the army way, after all, and will negatively effect your score. Instead you’re supposed to secure downed enemies which, again, sounds a little SWAT 4 (definitely not a complaint!)
  • As far as healing your squad mates goes it seems that all players will have basic Combat Life Saving training which they can use to revive incapacitated comrades once a match. The actual act of healing seems to have been changed greatly to be more complicated than the typical “run up to a downed opponent, press use key” system that the original AA had. Instead you’ll need to check the injury, use the correct method to heal that injury out of several, then heal them a second time after they’re back on their feet.
  • We also know we’re getting the Combat Medic MOS in AA3’s first expansion. It’s unclear how the Combat Medic’s abilities will differ from normal soldiers though I’d imagine the once per round thing will be gone or at least less limited.
  • In addition to the Combat Medic MOS other MOSes will be available in future expansions as well. I’ve heard the term “unlock” used to describe acquiring these secondary MOSes but it’s unclear exactly what that means. Will they be unlocked after a brief training session and test such as in the original AA or will they tie into the new character advancement system? I also wonder if you can assign your character all available secondary MOSes or if you can only specialize in one at a time. The fact that we can apparently have more than one character per account and specialize them different makes me think you’ll have a limited upgrade path which could be painful considering the slow rollout of additional MOSes likely over AA3’s lifespan. Rumored but all but confirmed future MOSes include the Combat Engineer and the Raven UAV pilot.
  • Regarding the character advancement system it has been completely and utterly overhauled to what sounds to me like a cross between Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 4’s systems. You’ll have the ability to earn achievements, badges and ribbons (which may or may not be all one in the same) and unlock new weapon upgrades and skills. An example of new skills mentioned on the official AA forums by a dev was different, faster styles of magazine swapping when reloading.
  • We’ll also be able to track our statistics (such as kill/death ratio) throughout our character’s career right in game instead of having to rely on third party sites like AA Tracker. They’ll also be some more nifty statistics available to us such as our effectiveness with certain types of weapons and breakdowns of what locations we hit and get hit the most which could potentially help individuals improve their play.
  • Actual character advancement seems to have changed from the old “honor” system of the original America’s Army. Now you’ll be advancing different categories, one per each of the Army’s seven core values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. You’ll reportedly advance these different categories in different ways. I read how not leaving an incapacitated man could can net you Loyalty points, for example.
  • Along with the ability to customize your character goes beyond character advancement. You’ll be able to customize your weapon with attachments like you can with the M4 SOPMOD added to the original America’s Army with the addition of Special Forces as standard though it sounds like the ability to use certain attachments is linked to the unlock system. You’ll also be able to decide if you want to carry a light, medium, or heavy load out which relates to how much ammunition and how many grenades you can carry though an encumbrance system has also been added – the heavier you go the slower you move and the less you can sprint. It’s unknown whether or not this might also effect body armor such as in SWAT 4 but I’ve got my hopes up.
  • An odd new feature is the pre-mission planning screen. This will give players a top down view of the map for 15-30 seconds or so to plan out tactics in advance, marking out paths to take and choosing where to spawn based on pre-determined points. The spawning thing sounds like an enhancement to the way the original AA placed different fire teams in different locations in most maps. I wonder if everyone will be able to participate in this or only squad and fire team leaders? While I really like the sound of this feature I’m also pretty skeptical about it’s use. Player’s on public servers are likely to ignore or not even use this feature, only working together the minimum amount possible while still being on the same team, and clans will likely have more advanced strategies than this screen will allow for since it reportedly is only intended to represent the first bit of the mission since everything tends to go out the window once the shooting starts anyway.
  • The game will apparently only ship with 5 maps which seems minuscule compared to the amount currently available in America’s Army. It should be noted that those were slowly added to over the years though which is likely to happen with AA3. Personally I prefer to have less maps in order to get a better feel for and give more attention to all of them as in America’s Army now there are several maps that are almost never played and starting fresh, trying to “learn” each map would be a daunting task in an already fairly intimidating game. These maps will apparently scale depending on the number of players on a server in a similar was as what we’ve seen in Battlefield 2. They’ll also be at least 3 types of games / mission objectives for each map which is another big departure from previous AA design where each map only had one static objective and game mechanic. The maps we know about so far are an urbanized remake of Bridge, a very faithful looking remake of Pipeline, a small European city called Impact, and a wide open farm reminiscent of JRTC FARP Raid from the first game called Ranch. They’d also mentioned one called Alley in the past that looked a lot like Impact but who knows if that is number 5 or not at this point. More of these AA2 remakes are likely in future updates in my opinion – here’s hoping for a remake of “CSAR”!
  • The game will be released via what I would assume would be a new version of the current Deploy Client as well as Valve’s Steam service. Both of these options, I hope, will allow for automatic patching which may be the biggest justification for this change in distribution methods. The more patches the merrier! Steam also has the advantage of all its additional features such as in-game friends list, IMs, and chats. I also think that putting AA3 on Steam may result in many people who wouldn’t normally considering playing it giving it a try.

I cannot wait for this. I’d been working on and more or less finished a new website for my clan (but it won’t go in until the clan officially goes live again) and counting the days until this is released. All of these new tidbits have me salivating.

In all likelihood this first release will have more than a few rough spots – it took the original version of AA quite a while to end up as solid as it is these days. I can only hope they’ve learned from the past. In any case thanks probably mostly to our tax dollars AA’s developers put even the best traditional FPS developer’s post release support to shame with patches and new content so things will improve over time providing the government doesn’t kill the program.

Zombie Overlord

I somehow hadn’t mentioned this yet but the next game I decided to tackle in my Xbox 360 backlog was Overlord. Overlord came out near the launch of the 360 and had caught my eye early. The whole “evil” angle that sort of parodies other fantasy worlds seemed pretty humorous and, of course, the whole concept of ordering minions around seemed pretty awesome.

The minions are indeed cool. As a Games Workshop fan they remind me a lot of Snotlings or Nurglings. I love “sweeping” my giant horde of minions over to an enemy to have them envelop it entirely, hitting it from every direction, hanging on to its back, etc. It’s actually kind of brutal now that I think about it. You also can’t overlook the whole pillaging angle of it – when you sweep your minions over of an area with containers they all smash and grab items, bringing anything you’d want back to you, while equipping any armor and weapons they can use while gleefully shouting “for me!” Very cool.

One thing I didn’t expect was some of the more RPGish aspects – the ability to customize your character a tiny bit, along with your tower. There are some other interesting things you can do in your tower as well. I feel like if all of these things were fleshed out a lot more in the recently announced Overlord II it could make the game appeal more to other audiences.

Decidedly less awesome than I look.
“Decidedly less awesome than I look.”

The setting is pretty enjoyable with it’s whole fantasy world flipped on its head kind of thing though the story itself isn’t anything too amazing thus far. You play the generic fantasy bad guy (who looks an awful like Sauron) trying to rebuild his evil empire all while subjugating the locals and smashing all of those pesky “heroes” that roam the land. An odd thing about it is up to the point I’ve played I haven’t really been put into many situations where I’m doing inherently evil deeds – most of the quests in the storyline are actually somewhat good, or at least neutral, and the heroes and other enemies you kill are usually portrayed as being corrupt or not having been so good in the first place. I’m especially amused by the portrayel of the evil Halflings in the first area – what’s not to love about the idea of roaming packs of Hobbits going around raiding villages, taking slaves, and generally being anti-social shits when they’re not busy at their massive feasts and smoking their pipeweed?

I suppose the main idea is that you can be sort of a benevolent dictator – ruling the land with a population that for the most part actually appreciates you on some level. If you’re so inclined you can however purposely be a bit of a dick, doing overtly evil things on the side, eventually resulting in a more vicious, fear based reign. For instance, early on in the game I found some stolen food that some villagers asked me to return to them. I could have returned it to them but instead I decided to keep it all for myself. Of course another thing the local peasants don’t seem to like is when you casually slaughter them. *whistles* Another time while hanging out with some Elfy types I decided to burn down their “sacred grove” just for the hell of it. *shrug*

I almost never play the “evil” side in games that give you such choices but this time I figured “what the hell!” This is a game built around playing a bad guy so I might as well go all out instead of trying to be a goody two shoes like I usually am.

More on Overlord when I finally beat it.

Get back outside!
“Get back outside!”

I’ve played a lot more Left 4 Dead since we first picked it up a couple of weeks ago. Playing it co-op with friends totally reminds me of how much I love playing games cooperatively period. I love all of the cool, unique stories we always end up with after a L4D session. Making memories and such.

The second time I played it I was joined by only NetworkShadow and we ended up making it all of the way to the end of the first act. Of course I was viciously knocked off of the side of the building by the last tank which was a pretty crappy way to die. At least when no one is there to notice and point and laugh. Then I got to watch NetworkShadow frantically try to survive the rest of the onslaught by himself which was actually pretty damn entertaining. I thought he was going to make it, honestly. For the record, I was bitterly rooting against him… 😉

Standing victoriously over a tank.
“Standing victoriously over a tank.”

The next time we played all four of us got together. We got to the end of the second act and, hilariously, when the ship finally showed up to rescue us I immediately ran my ass off towards the dock, missing almost the entire last zombie push but accidentally leaving all my teammates to be slaughtered. Hobotix ended up making it to the boat, barely, but Radium and NetworkShadow ended up biting the dust… Oops!

Another time with all four of us we made it to the end of act 3 but NetworkShadow died before we made it onto the plane. It was quite an epic battle with all of us almost dieing multiple times. So fun!

Up close and personal.
“Up close and personal.”

I’ve said it before (on the podcast, in particular) but Left 4 Dead is one of those games that dieing and/or doing bad in is actually fun. Maybe simply because it’s a shared experience but perhaps also because the game sort of pits you as the loan survivors struggling against the odds to make it out of alive so it’s not entirely unexpected when you don’t. Either way I’m not complaining…

Overlord screenshot lifted from somewhere else since I can’t easily take HD console screenshots.

Drum Damage

I was planning on having the Untitled Games Podcast crew over to my place to record and to potentially play some Rock Band a few weekends back. I struggle to justify exactly why but I hadn’t really played Rock Band in quite sometime so I pulled out my drums to practice a bit so I didn’t embarrass myself too badly in front of everybody.

Odd depression?
“Odd depression?”

That’s when I noticed there was an odd depression in my yellow drum head and also a much less pronounced one on the blue drum. The yellow one also felt strange when I pressed in the center, almost like a button. It was as if somehow the rubber layer over the drum head had thinned out so now I was pressing directly on the censor. My friend mentioned to me that they had noticed some time before that it looked weird too. Odd. Still, I set them up and played six or so songs and they worked just fine. Hmph, weird!

The next night we recorded a two man down episode 3 and, afterwards, engaged in some Rock Band shenanigans. I was thrilled to discover that my yellow pad was now completely and utterly fucked – it’d only register 1 in 10 or so notes! Doh. Luckily we were using Rock Band 2’s “no fail mode” so it didn’t totally ruin the night.

The next day one of my compatriots called to tell me they had ventured to Circuit City during it’s going out of business sale and seen several sets of Xbox 360 Rock Band 2 wireless drums for 40% off. I had kind of been looking for a good excuse to upgrade to the Rock Band 2 drums – the removal of the cable wasn’t a big deal but I thought the add-on cymbals looks neat and the quieter, more bouncy pads sounded like a good upgrade.

Cracks on the underside of the head after dismantling.
“Cracks on the underside of the head after dismantling.”

After disassembling my old drums I discovered that the problem was that my two center pads were massively, massively cracked. I figured I could possibly fix it myself but nothing short of some sort of epoxy (which I didn’t have) would keep it from rebreaking the next time I smacked it a little bit too hard and I’m still not even sure the broken head was the only problem. I decided to simply opt for the new drums and headed off to Circuit City.

Yup, it's broke...
“Yup, it’s broke…”

When I arrived they only had 3 boxes of the wireless drums left and all of them seemed to have been curiously taped shut as if they were returns. I decided to take the gamble and grab one of them anyway. When I got home and unboxed it I was pleased to see that everything was in order – it didn’t appear that anything was missing or had otherwise been tampered with after all. Once I got the drums setup, however, they absolutely refused to connect to my 360. I absolutely can’t stand buying something and having it dead on arrival and thanks to the terms of Circuit City’s liquidation I couldn’t return the drums, not even for an exchange. Doh!

After browsing various forums and trying every suggestion under the sun it appeared that my only option was to RMA the drums.

I went through EA’s RMA process which I found to be way more painful than it should have been. The website didn’t work right in anything besides Internet Explorer (…and who the hell uses that? 😉 ) and even then it was poorly worded and not very easy to use. I actually found myself calling EA (and of course their number wasn’t easy to find) to make sure they had my correct RMA information because the process and it’s corresponding confirmation e-mail were so damn unclear.

Once all that was done with I had to get them a copy of my receipt with a date of purchase to prove that the unit was still under manufacturer’s warranty. On the bright side, once I was able to do that I received a UPS tracking number in about 20 minutes.

New drums: Success! (5 stars, 99%, 344 note streak on expert.)
“New drums: Success! (5 stars, 99%, 344 note streak on expert.)”

A few days later and UPS showed up with my new drums. Other than trying to figure out how to put my old ones back in the damn box I had zero trouble with the new replacement drums. They connected right away as my previous ones should have and they performed well during another Untitled Games Podcast rocking out session, this time after the recording of TUGP episode 5.

All in all, while I was extremely disappointed about the original “dead on arrival” drums the RMA process was easy enough, very quick, and I’m satisfied. Now I just need to scrounge up some money for those cymbals and, of course, even more songs to play! 😀