sdgundamx wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 20:24:
I dunno... I enjoy the game on the PS4. It scratches a certain itch for me, especially after playing a much more refined shooter like Destiny: TTK for like the past month and a half.

I don't get the complaints about it not being the next Battlefield though... I mean, the goal of any game company--particularly EA--is to make money. How could they possibly take that franchise and market it only to the niche hardcore shooter crowd?

It's pretty obvious why they chose the arcadey feel--they're hoping people who don't normally play FPS will pick this up and give it a go and be able to have fun. They didn't want new players to be constantly getting pub-stomped by some clan of 13-year olds. And it's not like this should be surprising--the devs have been publicly saying for months the kind of experience they were going for and the beta gave everyone a pretty good idea of what the final game would be like. People who bought it after all that and expected some kind of high skill ceiling FPS game are idiots IMO.

In terms of the Star Wars experience, the game delivers. I've had tons of "cinematic" moments in the game, like last night when I strode into a rebel-controlled bunker on Endor as Darth Vader, killed two rebels by deflecting their shots back at them and then mowed down four more with a single saber throw. Force-choked a guy who was late to the party, then strode out of the other side of the bunker with 5 or 6 stormtroopers at my back and waded into another group of rebels.

There are definitely some wonky bugs that detract from the experience though (spawning in the middle of enemies or spawning in the middle of nowhere, the invincibility bug that pops up occasionally, etc.). But I don't get the hate for the game. I'd give it a 7/10 (possibly 8/10 once they push out more maps and fix the bugs). It's not GOTY or anything but it is entertaining enough that I'll get my money's worth out of it (got it on sale for around $50 after tax).

The hate for the game is coming from seasoned gamers who expect more content and developer effort for their money. A side by side movie/Christmas release marketed towards children as gifts on consoles does not impress.

Slick wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 09:38:

ZeroPike1 wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 03:56:
Also slick Titanfall was not a great fps game. It was a flash-in-the-pan success at best and is now just a Shiny P.O.S. game. If you disagree, tough, cause thats my permanent view on it.

You're entitled to your view. However mine isn't impeded by how many copies it shipped. I'm not concerned with quarterly reports when it comes to how enjoyable a game is to me.

- fast-paced arena combat with hitscan weapons. check.
- best implementation of parkour in a game IMO, wallrunning, doublejumping all perfectly weighted. check.
- motherfucking mechs, somehow balanced against infantry, yet totally beast. check.
- AI is fun, and a good start. adds intensity to the game feeling like a badass, and the feeling in your chest when you come across an enemy pilot amidst the AI, to fear them. check.

Notably all of the mechanics are in the category I'd call "fun". it's not trying to be anything else. Yes it did lack the content to be a deep experience, it was shallow, that I'll admit. but what they delivered knocked it out of the park as far as i'm concerned , and spoke to every fiber of my quake-loving being. If 13 year old me knew that eventually after quake we'd have Titanfall, I'd have a raging 13-year old boner.

One of the few times I'd have to agree with you Slick. I know we're in the minority here, but as far as an MP shooter goes it doesn't get much better than Titanfall gameplay. It's a shame they fucked up the community aspects right out the gate and it never recovered.

I dunno... I enjoy the game on the PS4. It scratches a certain itch for me, especially after playing a much more refined shooter like Destiny: TTK for like the past month and a half.

I don't get the complaints about it not being the next Battlefield though... I mean, the goal of any game company--particularly EA--is to make money. How could they possibly take that franchise and market it only to the niche hardcore shooter crowd?

It's pretty obvious why they chose the arcadey feel--they're hoping people who don't normally play FPS will pick this up and give it a go and be able to have fun. They didn't want new players to be constantly getting pub-stomped by some clan of 13-year olds. And it's not like this should be surprising--the devs have been publicly saying for months the kind of experience they were going for and the beta gave everyone a pretty good idea of what the final game would be like. People who bought it after all that and expected some kind of high skill ceiling FPS game are idiots IMO.

In terms of the Star Wars experience, the game delivers. I've had tons of "cinematic" moments in the game, like last night when I strode into a rebel-controlled bunker on Endor as Darth Vader, killed two rebels by deflecting their shots back at them and then mowed down four more with a single saber throw. Force-choked a guy who was late to the party, then strode out of the other side of the bunker with 5 or 6 stormtroopers at my back and waded into another group of rebels.

There are definitely some wonky bugs that detract from the experience though (spawning in the middle of enemies or spawning in the middle of nowhere, the invincibility bug that pops up occasionally, etc.). But I don't get the hate for the game. I'd give it a 7/10 (possibly 8/10 once they push out more maps and fix the bugs). It's not GOTY or anything but it is entertaining enough that I'll get my money's worth out of it (got it on sale for around $50 after tax).

Creston wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 08:46:

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:38:

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 21:42:
it's almost 2016 and online FPS devs are still struggling with # of players? Every 3d game wihether it be pve or pvp should have no problem supporting hundreds of npc and pcs with very minimal lag. the tech has been there for years now so use it!

What "tech has been there for years" to eliminate lag? Gaming is a global affair. Publishers can't really choose their audience and they can't economically offer servers for every single geographical region.
So you end up with broadband people physically close to the game servers who ping in at <20ms and then you have some maggot from Bumfuck, OH on LTE pinging in at 250+ms.

Due to the complexity of modern game engines, the advancements in 3D tech have actually had a detrimental effect as you can see by the lower player numbers than a decade ago because there is much more data that needs to be processed, checked and updated in "real-time"... well, or as close as you can get to that with the 200ms maggot.

This is not an issue of CPU/GPU processing power at all but an issue of not being able to predict latency. You need to get data from A to B and back to A while also calculating what C, D, E, F, G... and so on are doing at the same time.
This is a physical limitation of online. There is no tech to work around those limitations except hooking up every single gamer home with fibre but even then there'd still be limits to what you can do.

If only there was some way where players could see their latency to a server, and then pick which server they want to play on based on that latency.

We could call it... I dunno, like a server picker!

True, true... but it doesn't change the fact that for the maggot in Bumfuck, OH the best server for him could still be a 250ms lag affair.
There is no way to prevent that people with vastly different latency will join servers (unless you have real dedicated servers where the server admins can auto-kick people > 100ms for example).
But this wouldn't work for official servers or matchmaking. It would turn into a support nightmare for the publisher if they hardcapped connection latency limits.

@InBlack: I was talking about the complexity of modern 3D engines and actually specifically said that it is NOT an issue of graphical fidelity per se! The issue is huge maps (compared to the days of yore) with large distances where the clients and the server need to be on the same page at all times with regard to visibility, obstacles, physics, ballistics and modern complex damage models and so on...
Modern games need to keep track of a lot more variables than older games and keeping everything synchronized for everybody from the 20ms guy to the 250ms maggot is a huge challenge.
This is a real tangible technical hurdle. If it would not be we'd have plenty of MMOFPS games.

I'm enjoying the game. Rapidly advancing through racks. Probably I'll stop when I hit 50, but then I'll be tired of it. Did the same with BF3. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan but the sci-fi setting is different enough that I like it.

Here's something curious. Publishers, or any company for that matter, love to tout about sales numbers, especially in the critical first days of sales, however EA has been deadly silent about the numbers of sales this game has generated.

I think not even the Star Wars theme was enough to save this utterly mediocre game from selling decently, and that's a good thing. Strip away the Star Wars theme and you have one of the shallowest FPS experiences of the past year and the way player numbers are dropping I think this game will die faster than Titanfall and Evolve.

Titan fall was utter shite. It had to have crap AI bots to fill the empty void. And mech's that are so fragile a fucking egg would break em.

you want the best load up cod4 and feel how crisp the controls are compared to all the COD's afterwards, we have gone backwards.

BF just continues the dumbing down of gaming to shallow rubbish for consoles.

Creston wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 08:46:
If only there was some way where players could see their latency to a server, and then pick which server they want to play on based on that latency.

We could call it... I dunno, like a server picker! :P

This deserves another quote!

ZeroPike1 wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 03:56:
Also slick Titanfall was not a great fps game. It was a flash-in-the-pan success at best and is now just a Shiny P.O.S. game. If you disagree, tough, cause thats my permanent view on it.

You're entitled to your view. However mine isn't impeded by how many copies it shipped. I'm not concerned with quarterly reports when it comes to how enjoyable a game is to me.

- fast-paced arena combat with hitscan weapons. check.
- best implementation of parkour in a game IMO, wallrunning, doublejumping all perfectly weighted. check.
- motherfucking mechs, somehow balanced against infantry, yet totally beast. check.
- AI is fun, and a good start. adds intensity to the game feeling like a badass, and the feeling in your chest when you come across an enemy pilot amidst the AI, to fear them. check.

Notably all of the mechanics are in the category I'd call "fun". it's not trying to be anything else. Yes it did lack the content to be a deep experience, it was shallow, that I'll admit. but what they delivered knocked it out of the park as far as i'm concerned , and spoke to every fiber of my quake-loving being. If 13 year old me knew that eventually after quake we'd have Titanfall, I'd have a raging 13-year old boner.

Creston wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 08:46:

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:38:

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 21:42:
it's almost 2016 and online FPS devs are still struggling with # of players? Every 3d game wihether it be pve or pvp should have no problem supporting hundreds of npc and pcs with very minimal lag. the tech has been there for years now so use it!

What "tech has been there for years" to eliminate lag? Gaming is a global affair. Publishers can't really choose their audience and they can't economically offer servers for every single geographical region.
So you end up with broadband people physically close to the game servers who ping in at <20ms and then you have some maggot from Bumfuck, OH on LTE pinging in at 250+ms.

Due to the complexity of modern game engines, the advancements in 3D tech have actually had a detrimental effect as you can see by the lower player numbers than a decade ago because there is much more data that needs to be processed, checked and updated in "real-time"... well, or as close as you can get to that with the 200ms maggot.

This is not an issue of CPU/GPU processing power at all but an issue of not being able to predict latency. You need to get data from A to B and back to A while also calculating what C, D, E, F, G... and so on are doing at the same time.
This is a physical limitation of online. There is no tech to work around those limitations except hooking up every single gamer home with fibre but even then there'd still be limits to what you can do.

If only there was some way where players could see their latency to a server, and then pick which server they want to play on based on that latency.

We could call it... I dunno, like a server picker!

Hahhah, bravo!

"Wait! Stop! Stop!"

"What?"

"Why are we fighting when we could be using robots? And our armor is so terrible it just takes 2 shots whizzing by us four feet away to kill us!"

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:38:

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 21:42:
it's almost 2016 and online FPS devs are still struggling with # of players? Every 3d game wihether it be pve or pvp should have no problem supporting hundreds of npc and pcs with very minimal lag. the tech has been there for years now so use it!

What "tech has been there for years" to eliminate lag? Gaming is a global affair. Publishers can't really choose their audience and they can't economically offer servers for every single geographical region.
So you end up with broadband people physically close to the game servers who ping in at <20ms and then you have some maggot from Bumfuck, OH on LTE pinging in at 250+ms.

Due to the complexity of modern game engines, the advancements in 3D tech have actually had a detrimental effect as you can see by the lower player numbers than a decade ago because there is much more data that needs to be processed, checked and updated in "real-time"... well, or as close as you can get to that with the 200ms maggot.

This is not an issue of CPU/GPU processing power at all but an issue of not being able to predict latency. You need to get data from A to B and back to A while also calculating what C, D, E, F, G... and so on are doing at the same time.
This is a physical limitation of online. There is no tech to work around those limitations except hooking up every single gamer home with fibre but even then there'd still be limits to what you can do.

If only there was some way where players could see their latency to a server, and then pick which server they want to play on based on that latency.

We could call it... I dunno, like a server picker!

No need to fight or cry about it, at the time of this post Battlefront has 55K total players playing on all three platforms, it wont last past xmas even if they have a spike during the movie release. It peeks on PC at 25K players, its play time was shorter than Titanfall, put a fork in it, it's done.

http://swbstats.com/

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:38:

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 21:42:
it's almost 2016 and online FPS devs are still struggling with # of players? Every 3d game wihether it be pve or pvp should have no problem supporting hundreds of npc and pcs with very minimal lag. the tech has been there for years now so use it!

What "tech has been there for years" to eliminate lag? Gaming is a global affair. Publishers can't really choose their audience and they can't economically offer servers for every single geographical region.
So you end up with broadband people physically close to the game servers who ping in at <20ms and then you have some maggot from Bumfuck, OH on LTE pinging in at 250+ms.

Due to the complexity of modern game engines, the advancements in 3D tech have actually had a detrimental effect as you can see by the lower player numbers than a decade ago because there is much more data that needs to be processed, checked and updated in "real-time"... well, or as close as you can get to that with the 200ms maggot.

This is not an issue of CPU/GPU processing power at all but an issue of not being able to predict latency. You need to get data from A to B and back to A while also calculating what C, D, E, F, G... and so on are doing at the same time.
This is a physical limitation of online. There is no tech to work around those limitations except hooking up every single gamer home with fibre but even then there'd still be limits to what you can do.

Thats complete BS... they cant care less abt maggots with bad pings its all abt fucking consoles .. even quake 1 mods had 128 ppl, 20+ yrs ago ffs and btw I was playing with up to 650 ms ping and I still had fun...damn kids who think they cant play if higher than 30 ms

Anyhow boycott EA already who is trying to make you pay the games like a movie, per hour

What I will say is that Battlefield games where there is 64-players on even large maps is pure crazy. Something is always happening somewhere on the map. Its a good feeling.

But I also agree with how having tons of players like Planetside makes the game feel very... I dunno hollow is a word?

Also slick Titanfall was not a great fps game. It was a flash-in-the-pan success at best and is now just a Shiny P.O.S. game. If you disagree, tough, cause thats my permanent view on it.

Kxmode wrote on Dec 1, 2015, 02:08:

NotOneOfUs wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 20:11:
Forty players, eh? Keep it up, and we might reach 1998!

That's significant when you factor in the level of fidelity in Star Wars Battlefront. People are playing in 4K native resolution over Broadband. That's gotta be murder on the SWBF servers.

Not sure if you are joking or what. net latency should have no, absolutely no connection to the rendering engine. If it does, you are programming it wrong. CJ is wrong, graphical fidelity has nothing to do with the low player counts of recent years, the reason is and always will be MONEY! It costs a shitload of money to do this right, and why do it right when you can do it cheap.

Too bad the actual gameplay in this game is garbage.

nin wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:48:
So titanfall, then evolve, and now this. Wonder how many more flops before someone gets a clue? These games have no longevity, and you see everything in the first half hour.

titanfall is a great fps game,

evolve is a piece of smoldering dinoshit

battlefront is pretty tight.

don't lump in good games with awful ones. also, show some numbers if you want to compare battlefront to 2 games with maybe a dozen PC players left each.

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 22:38:

Steele Johnson wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 21:42:
it's almost 2016 and online FPS devs are still struggling with # of players? Every 3d game wihether it be pve or pvp should have no problem supporting hundreds of npc and pcs with very minimal lag. the tech has been there for years now so use it!

What "tech has been there for years" to eliminate lag? Gaming is a global affair. Publishers can't really choose their audience and they can't economically offer servers for every single geographical region.
So you end up with broadband people physically close to the game servers who ping in at <20ms and then you have some maggot from Bumfuck, OH on LTE pinging in at 250+ms.

Due to the complexity of modern game engines, the advancements in 3D tech have actually had a detrimental effect as you can see by the lower player numbers than a decade ago because there is much more data that needs to be processed, checked and updated in "real-time"... well, or as close as you can get to that with the 200ms maggot.

This is not an issue of CPU/GPU processing power at all but an issue of not being able to predict latency. You need to get data from A to B and back to A while also calculating what C, D, E, F, G... and so on are doing at the same time.
This is a physical limitation of online. There is no tech to work around those limitations except hooking up every single gamer home with fibre but even then there'd still be limits to what you can do.

smart post. most people just get mad and move on.

The thing is this isn't a problem that's even possible to solved anytime soon, other than data compression i guess. The speed of light isn't changing anytime soon, so neither is the speed of data transfer. We can engineer and optimize it, but 40 people pinging 1 server from all across the continent AND expecting to feel like it's all real-time is insane.

It's basically magic, they use smoke and mirrors to disguise the lag that can't really be eliminated. Hence DICE's pretty great anti-lag compensator. Which is actually really really good at what it does, minus the side effect of being killed after you ran behind cover... it still feels alot better than 64 player open map hit regs do on any other game.

Anyone ever play "Frontline: Fuel of War"? It was made by the guys who did the desert combat mod for BF1942. Anyways, they used the unreal engine, and didn't have any anti-lag compensation going on. So you'd fire your gun, you'd hear the pop, see the animation and the muzzle flash, but the bullet wouldn't leave your gun for about 0.3 seconds. It was humbling to be reminded of what's actually going on with a big multiplayer realtime server nowadays.

NotOneOfUs wrote on Nov 30, 2015, 20:11:
Forty players, eh? Keep it up, and we might reach 1998!

That's significant when you factor in the level of fidelity in Star Wars Battlefront. People are playing in 4K native resolution over Broadband. That's gotta be murder on the SWBF servers.