Coop was a lot more fun. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttx959sUORY

Looks hell fucking awesome 

That was incredible. Maybe a decent game will be made with this version? 

And came back saying that the demo was real time ... but it was basically running on a super computer. You wouldn't get that on the average computer today, and you wouldn't be able to get that on XBox360 or PS3, but possibly next gen consoles. 

Maybe that will be a new game. They said it hasn't gone past a tech demo, but Gears of war was originally just a tech demo and then turned into a full game.

Yeah the system they ran it on had 3 GTX580's... ffs. However if you started a game now, it wouldn't be ready for a couple years anyway, by which time GTX580's will be cheap. And they did say it'd be fine on just 1 GTX580.


I wouldn't mind if that was their next game, at least it's better than realistic war shooters. 

son yeah its enjoyable in a sandbox kind of way (not my thing generally) but it gets pretty repetitive too IMHO. Although the plains of Africa look great, I would love for a change of environment sometime soon. 

I like the ending, I hope he got pwnd. 

nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.

I think the detailed violence in some recent games (Crysis 2 breaking necks, anyone) is really a bit over the top. Games do not get automatically better when guts drop on the floor, brains hit the wall or jaws are ripped off. It's pretty cheap actually.

Apart from that, gameplay plz?

And if there was a jab at Brink in there, I'm just going to say I'm 300% more likely to buy Brink. 

Yeah if I remember right this video was to show off the new dx11 support in UE3, and I believe they have added the dx11 effects into UDK now also, although I could be mistaken.

Sure doe's look great though, lol about the 3x GTX 580's however... Maybe in another 5-6 years we will see games that actually look like that, its not like id or crytek are making gpu-melting engines any more :P 

I'll be honest. I love the way that Doom baddies turn into mush. I dont think Quake ever managed to succesfully reproduce that. What I dont like is over-large QTE-style anims which take too long (AVP anyone?) 

Violence is satisfying, but when you get to God of War levels, you have to start feeling your hobby is just a bit fucked up :P 

It has to be the end of a range.

A Quake example: Gibbing is rarely seen and can be difficult to do since you're not supposed to be quadrocketing shamblers or rocketing grunts. So its 'rare' that you see the bits and pieces fly although theres still the standard death sequence.

With cutom maps and veteran players who save their rockets for this sort of thing this doesn't make much of a difference - gibbing has become frequent.

My point is that gibbing isn't constant. You can barely go a single fight without some monster losing its organs in GoW. Which completely takes the satisfaction out of it.

It's not the goreporn I like, but achieving something. If thats tied into splattering a monster across the wall then so be it. 

Interesting one. Has to fit the subject matter, theme, atmosphere and tone of the game IMO.

L4D2 is the goriest game I've played and it is pretty bloody gory - blood, limbs, innards and hacked up corpses fly everywhere. It's grim but great, cos it's zombies, so it feels appropriate. Worth it's 18 rating tho.

Funnily enough, playing Bioshock recently, I found Ryan's death scene in that, although much much less gory, to be far more traumatic due to the way it was presented. One of the harshest things I've seen in a game. 

nice lighting and fog and sweat, but it looks like just another game where you headshot people and fight giant robots to me.

What about the innovative cigarette-butt-enrages-enemies aggro management mechanic? It works on guys with helmets, and giant robots! 

Looked like it would be a cool game right up to the point where he showed 'teh super powers lol'

oooh dark stealthy potential Deus Ex type... oh no, just beating shit up, oh well.

But why am I complaining about a tech demo 

About 25ish hours into it at the moment, really enjoying it so far.

it's definitely more hack n slash compared to the first one, you can literally kill about 8 enemies with 1 move if you get the right positioning and timing. All classes and abilities are meaty as hell, the combat in general is awesome, much better than the original.

Story etc is good too, I was worried that having the game centered on 1 city would make it repetitive and to some extent that is true, but there is a lot of diversity in how you interact with various organisations and people in the city, that it stays fresh. I can already see im going to replay the game at least twice just to see what happens when you align with different people.

Some things do stick out however, all of the dungeon levels seem to be made of a very small amount of tile sets and get repetitive fairly quickly, from a visual standpoint.

Reading a few internet forums you would think that this was the worst game ever though, I don't really understand that, I'm having a real blast here and its definitely on an even footing with the original in terms of quality. I would say the demo doesn't help much as it showed a fairly bland portion of the game (ie, the beginning). It doe's take a while to get going and get you immersed into the world, but by the end of the first year I was hooked :)

From a performance standpoint, im running in dx11 on high settings with 4x antiailasing on a gtx460 and its a smooth 60fps for 90% of the time, dropping to perhaps 40 or so in the really hectic battles, perfectly fine in my book, though I have heard people having trouble in dx11 mode with freezes and poor frame rates.

So basicly, internet is over-reacting imo, this is a great game and I'm looking forward to replaying it many times probably! 

Never! 

I was unable to play the first F.E.A.R. expansion pack because my version of F.E.A.R. refuses to update, and the pack won't run unless it's an updated version. So it's a throwaway. However the second expansion pack for F.E.A.R., strangely titled Perseus Mandate, runs standalone so I could play it. That's not necessarily a good thing though. Clearly, I got the booby prize because Perseus Mandate received below average reviews, deservedly so.

There's very little story and what is there doesn't make much sense and gives you no reason to care at all about what's happening. This is action, pure and simple. And in this respect the action is just as good as the original game with some tough new enemies. But it is a fair bit more difficult, especially the last level. Not impossible by any means, but while I rarely used the bullettime feature in F.E.A.R., this time you need it for basically every single firefight. If not every single enemy even. So you do have to play much more meticulously and carefully. I did constantly have maximum health packs in my arsenal for almost all of the game, even at the end, so it's not frustratingly hard.

Where Perseus Mandate falls down, and I mean falls hard, is in it's presentation. Now the level design in F.E.A.R. was bland, boxy and very uninspiring. But Perseus Mandate takes this to a new level; this sort of design should never have gone past the 90's. Here we have box rooms littered with debris, box corridors littered with debris, large bland areas that look like they're only at the layout/concept stage. I don't understand how level designers this slack can be hired to work on a retail game. Even I, single handedly, could have made all the levels throughout this entire game at a much higher standard than what was released. What were these designers doing between F.E.A.R. being released in 2005 and this ugly box game in 2007. So, unfortunately, the game won't live up to 2007 standards at all. And the engine is looking dated with average models and lighting.

The game is still fun all the way through, but that's because Monolith already built a great set of enemies and gameplay structure. TimeGate haven't done much but fill their bland levels with this fun gameplay. Not really worth it unless you don't care what games look like, and sadly looking at the top review sites that make no mention of how bad these levels look, that's probably a large percentage of players. 

I was never able to patch F.E.A.R. with the installer either but you can open the installer with 7-zip and extract the files and patch it that way. It's a little confusing as there are duplicate files but I think I just used the larger of the duplicates and it worked fine and allowed EP to install. 

I don't understand how level designers this slack can be hired to work on a retail game


*waves*

Glad you thought it was fun at least :)

I will not argue that Perseus Mandate looks pretty bland in terms of the levels' art. I still think it has some of the funnest combat of any game I've made levels for.

While I don't want to make excuses for a bad looking game, there are reasons why it looks bad beyond just lack of talent or effort. The majority of good Quake SP maps probably have a longer development cycle than this entire game. :) 

Yeah totally Blitz... there's a number of reasons why the levels could have looked bland, it's definitely not always the level designers fault if they're simply not given the necessary amount of time to spend on the game. In fact 5-6 level designers surely wouldn't all be lacking. Or have an art director that doesn't value quality and detailed build and thinks all you need to do is fill it with prefabs. I mean, look at the amount of top review site that never make any mention of level design... they don't seem to differentiate between level design and the 'graphics'.

There was some decent looking stuff in Perseus... it definitely wasn't as mazey as the original game. But what I preferred were the underground bits, the part with the old underground subway (was it a subway? can't remember now), actually any section that wasn't warehouse or buildings like FEAR. The spooky bits were decent.

What other games have you worked on Blitz? 

> I mean, look at the amount of top review site that never make any mention of level design... they don't seem to differentiate between level design and the 'graphics'.

This. 

at most companies the level designer doesn't do environment art anyway -- that's a separate job. Not sure how monolith did it but something to consider when saying the "level design looked bland." 

An art director does not manage level designers. 

I couldn't remember what they call the lead level designer. maybe just lead level designer?