Left 4 Dead Interview and Trailer

[DevgruSeal H.E]

Placeholder models

[Bokuho]

Zips wrote..

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Hutz wrote..

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I've tried all types of different games and I only play at weird times which (should) eliminate most of the kiddies. And yet still, sod-all people use voice chat and the ones that do are typically just whiners. I was playing PDZ two nights ago (well, mornings actually, 'twas 3am) for forty minutes in a full game and out of everyone there, the only time anyone said anything was one little kid who bitched when someone headshot him across the map (which is a piece of piss, and it's not like you can cheat on a 360 game anyway...).



Until I see (well, hear) proof of this dreamworld community who all talk to each other on their mics pleasantly and actually use the feature to enhance their gaming experience, I'll stick by my previous statement: voice com isn't used, it's not actually needed anyway, and the only people that do use it are foreign whiners.

You'll be thankful when this game comes out and you hear nowt but silence in your headphones.



On-topic: yeah, the models are kind of recycled. But meh, considering what they're trying to do, it's getting the game balance correct that should be their main priority, not making some nice new pretty models for a preview video.

[entRo]

-:Nighthawk:- wrote..

...and then someone realized that the MMORPG community is absolutely huge, and most of their time spent in combat is against computer-controlled mobs. Kind of like this, except that you actually get to aim in this setup.

To be fair, the MMO genre is fairly new, and evolving slowly. The only MMO I enjoyed was SWG, and only for the PvP gameplay. Killing NPCs just has no reward or payoff, except by giving you shit that will make it easier to kill more NPCs.. repeat ad nauseum.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Don't get me wrong entRo, I definitely agree that combat against human adversaries is much more enjoyable in many cases. I was a huge fan of the Tribes series (before Sierra went and raped the game to death and pissed on its violated corpse) and I still occasionally bust out Tribes 2 for kicks. I don't find many servers to play on, however, because as in CS, I refuse to play with or against bots. The experience simply isn't the same.



That said, I also spend a fair amount of time in the MMORPG genre and I love single-player FPS games. I can't tell you when and where others accept bots, but I finally figured out where the difference is for me. When I'm fighting hordes of enemies who are all weaker than myself, or ganging up on a boss creature which is totally unlike myself, I don't feel any particular need for the enemy in question to be a human being.



However, if I'm playing against another character that has roughly the same abilities, where it's skill and not statistics that will define which of us lives... in that situation I want a human on the other end.



With that in mind, I can see something like the Left 4 Dead concept working when my survivor teammates are human. Everyone of similar deadly ability is a human player, and the AI controls the cannon-fodder. It also allows the lone wolf players to tend towards the zombie side, and the team-oriented players to go survivor, increasing the appeal to a wider audience. What it will feel like when my teammates drop out and the AI takes over, however... on that point I'm not sure.



I liked Alyx in HL2:Ep1 better by far than the squadmates that HL2 offered and far better than the Barnys of HL, simply because she was actually useful and a bit more robust as far as taking some hits and fighting on. Perhaps the AI will do a decent job of playing alongside you. The part that makes me afraid, however, is the absolutely retarded teammates the single-player CZ experience provided you with (regular CZ, not deleted scenes). I love CZ multiplayer, but the bot experience was awful. Hopefully Ritual will learn from that and create something compelling and transparent to squadmates, rather than bragging about the CZ AI as if it was something to be proud of and making all the same mistakes.

[entRo]

Tribes: Vengeance was probably the most offensive game I have ever played.