Okay I played 5 hours of FH2.1 yesterday. I spent the time in the only 2 full 64 servers:
World at War FH2.1 Pure bfewaw.com (USA)
[ASG] BattleZone FH2 v2.1 Pure! (Germany)
Initial Impressions were not too good, I plan on spending alot more time to fully investigate the mod, but so far things are not looking that great in my perspective:
First some positive points:
- I think they might have updated some textures or lighting settings cause everything really does look great, maybe I just dont remember it looking this good but it really looks great! All the weapons, the vehicles and all those great statics on the maps really gives this mod a great feel! By far the nicest looking mod on
BF2!
- Maps are gorgeous! They just have sooo many new statics, very little vbf2 statics are used and generally the layout of the bases/towns/roads is prety good, prety life-like and makes sense.
- Shader effects still quite impressive. The blur on ironsight weapons, the famous suppression effect, its all very nice.
- Pulling a parachute takes time now, which is cool. There is a para drop map, but unforunately there is only 1 para plane spawning at a time and the pilots are clueless. Also you cannot guide your parachute much, which is cool and realistic.
Now onto some of the major downfalls that was making me cringe:
- I was visiting the 2 full 64 player servers. I hopped from team to team, squad to squad, each time offering a cheerful "hey guys Im new to this mod! "Anyone have VOIP?". Most squads I recieved NO responses. A few times I asked "Is VOIP even working on this server" a couple typed in chat 'YES'. Eventually after about an hour of playing I found a couple people using VOIP, a couple of them were FH2 vets and we had some okay rounds. Ironically 2 of them were actually from the PR community and joined the server cause they saw me playing :P
So dont expect anyone to respond to you on VOIP, although maybe this is just because of the initial release, someone who plays FH2 more often might be able to correct me (hopefully its not this bad regularly).
- The camera sound!!! You might be thinking 'what?!' well there is a recon plane vehicle on alot of the maps, and this basically acts as a manned player controlled vbf2 UAV. Which is fine, except that in order to use it properly you have to constantly spam a camera, which is also fine, EXCEPT that it makes a very distinct and loud "CLICK" sound of a camera taking a photo everytime you click. I remember playing a particular round for 45 minutes where I literally heard 2 "CLICK"s every second, for 10 or more minutes at a time. Sometimes the horrid yet useful plane would get shot down and everyone would have a few moments of silence, but thanks to the incredibly short respawn times (more on that later) the plane is usually back up in the air in 30 seconds or so, so the silence is short lived and the clicking sounds are back in action... Why the developers choose to add such an irritating sound to broadcast to your ENTIRE team, I dont have a clue, it leads me to believe they dont actually PLAY their own mod cause this was in the first version as well. I guess maybe it just annoys me but to me its just utterly distracting to the point I want to only hunt that plane down (friendly or foe) just to make it shut up!
- Maps completely saturated with vehicles. I played for 5 hours and EVERY map was heavily congested with tanks and aircraft. I will play again cause I know there MUST be some infantry heavy maps, but the servers were not playing these apparently. I know WW2 is widescale/epic battles etc etc, but my god man, when I can go in a tank, drive up and die, and then spawn back and IMMEDIATELY get another tank 10(!) times in a row, there is something wrong with that... My initial opinion is the developers have done very little to 'balance' the gameplay environment to make each class a rewarding and interesting occupation. It seems you have 3 things to do of any use: FLYING, TANKING & ARTY. flying you can kill lots of tanks and the helpless infantry stupid enough to go in the open, tanking you can kill lots of helpless infantry (with no AT weapons) and artying you can just bomb the crap out of flags on the (yet again) helpless infantry.
- Spawnpoints. I didnt expect this to change, and it didnt. You still spawn directly on flags, directly behind the enemy troops trying to attack the flag. The spawn positions are in great defensive spots, which makes perfect sense EXCEPT when the attackers get close and you start spawning behind them making their efforts of careful attack, pointless. This means the order of the day is to tard rush a flag.
- Flag captures, nothing changed here either. Takes only seconds to capture a flag. Some people love it, I think its a prety big oversight, not much more to talk about it.
Some Tips:
- Drive a tank and be a squad leader. Try to drive up your tank near a flag and just sit in it and have your squad mates spawn on you. As long as an engineer or another tank doesnt get close to you, you keep spawning your squad off you for unlimited time. This is usually one of the best (and only) ways to capture a well defended flag.
- Pull the parachute early or you go splat :P
- When you see a mine sign, THEY MEAN IT! They are dotted all across the maps and it denotes mapper placed 'dome of deaths' for vehicles. Basically like call of duty1&2...
This is just my initial impressions Im gonna give it more chances and hopefully I get to see some positive things from this mod. I love the WW2 atmosphere of the mod, I just hope the gameplay has had some improvements cause nice environment is useless if the mod is no fun to play...
|TG-6th|Skud
