I honestly don't miss the weapon wheel. The 2 weapon system, and weapon distribution in R2 really gives each weapon a valuable feel, and you really have to consider the pros and cons of each weapon (i.e. do I really need a marksman in this narrow corridor? will this magnum be a good idea in this open canyon full of enemies?).
Resistance 2
- Thread starter ManuVlad3.0
- Start date
As long as you don't mind "harsh" FPS. I have seen some people complaining about "cheap" AI and frail shield. So you'll have to react quickly.
The game has 4 difficulties (Casual, Normal, Hard/Difficult and Super Human). The last one is unlocked only after you beat Hard. I heard the higher difficulties are not much harder than Normal. In fact, some claimed that Normal in R2 is like Difficult in R1 (probably because of the limited Shield).
Several also complained that the AI only goes after you instead of your team mates. It happens sometimes, but not always. Know that if you play on Casual, you get better Shield and the enemy AI focuses less on you. You can switch between difficulty half way. So choose freely and don't let the Casual difficulty fool you.
I am going to play MP next and LBP. Will definitely come back to Hard again once I become better in competitive.
The AI does not ignore your teammates, they do if you start killing them. I've stood back and watched fights between the two AI groups. In fact one part I could not participate in due to lack of ammo, so I just took cover and watched.
I just left Orrick, the SP is up there with HL2 IMO, not many shooters reach that level.
I also love the visceral feeling of shooting the enemy. There bodies react well to bullers and the head shots and gibbing makes it feel like you are really hitting something and not just draining a hidden HP number then watching them fall when they reach zero.
I just left Orrick, the SP is up there with HL2 IMO, not many shooters reach that level.
I also love the visceral feeling of shooting the enemy. There bodies react well to bullers and the head shots and gibbing makes it feel like you are really hitting something and not just draining a hidden HP number then watching them fall when they reach zero.
In general, you are correct. However, there are 2-3 fights in subsequent levels where they do go after you only. Once you have spilled blood, your teammates watched and fired at their leisure.
But that's not the entire R2 gaming experience of course. Only in those limited stages. Insomniac could have justified the action by making some enemy characters remember Hale due to past encounters (but they didn't).I took it as a challenge and tried to live up to Hale's reputation. But with a weak Shield, I can see why some people b*tched about the move.
Throughout the game, my teammates did get ambushed, attacked, swarmed, and/or slaughtered. They were also helpful in taking out tough enemies (as tough as multiple Titans ! ^_^).
My favorite has to be the Auger. The Belllock is nice (The secondary fire seems very powerful). I want to try Splicer more too.
EDIT:
When taken in isolation, I agree with you. But R2 has a weak Shield. It needs to be compensated by a better offense. Otherwise, it is a difficult game like right now (and will limit its audience).
EDIT 2:
Damn it, the more I talk about it, the more I want to go back and re-fight some of the levels I could have fared better. I am a much better player near the end.
Yes, health. My bad. I forgot Hale is a half-alien that can regen. >_<
Btw, GAF has turned more positive after more people completed the SP campaign. Will see how long this lasts. Like I said, the negative points are not strong enough to kill the game, but being an Insomniac fan, I hope for a "perfect" game (Getting the last 0.5 - 1.5 points out of 10.0).
They are starting to get into MP now. Aeon712 had 17 people on the party last night until 2:30am. I will soon become one of them.
Btw, GAF has turned more positive after more people completed the SP campaign. Will see how long this lasts. Like I said, the negative points are not strong enough to kill the game, but being an Insomniac fan, I hope for a "perfect" game (Getting the last 0.5 - 1.5 points out of 10.0).
They are starting to get into MP now. Aeon712 had 17 people on the party last night until 2:30am. I will soon become one of them.
Okay, gotcha. In that respect, I do agree, health in R2 on Normal and Difficult settings depletes rather quickly (especially during boss battles). Still, I feel myself playing much more thoughtfully in R2 as opposed to R1, where I was a walking tank, and most of my weapons could take out a brigade of Chimeran forces without a hitch on Superhuman.
I feel the differences are great, but I like them.
As for GAF, I really think it's the same case with any game of this caliber. When a game receives a great amount of "hype" and anticipation, it will fall victim to the backlash.
I will more than likely play with GAF folks, but there is no way I'm giving up my clan, not in a million years! I was lucky to get this clan name, and I will forever keep it
I feel the differences are great, but I like them.
As for GAF, I really think it's the same case with any game of this caliber. When a game receives a great amount of "hype" and anticipation, it will fall victim to the backlash.
I will more than likely play with GAF folks, but there is no way I'm giving up my clan, not in a million years! I was lucky to get this clan name, and I will forever keep it
I'm hoping to crush some Insomniacs today at the Community day, show off my "skills"...hopefully they don't destroy me!
I played 16P competitive with the GAF clan yesterday. I must say it's very polished now. It's the first time my K/D ratio went positive (22 - 14).
It felt like the old R1 competitive again, except that the subtle gunplay mechanics are different.
I don't mind the differences now that everything is spit-shined, but I hope they fix the gun firing effect somehow. Firing a weapon in R2 MP feels somewhat "light, muted and detached". Fortunately, they fixed grenade throwing (It was gimped and somewhat broken in the beta).
I used to miss the weapon spawns, but if the battle is large, it's rather easy to pick up assorted weapons from dead players. This only works if there are plenty of players though (unlike the beta).
I think gunsight zooming is counter intuitive in a run-and-gun game. I don't see R2 competitive player moving in slowly, everyone was running around. May be that's why I was able to get more kills since I used the gun sight more this time. I find it awkward. If my K/D ratio continues to go up, I might file this under my FPS "skills".
Overall, I had some surprising fun. It's great to see clan mates running off together in the game. Fix the "detached" firing and I may play competitive more often. Right now, I am busy levelling up my co-op characters. ^_^
It felt like the old R1 competitive again, except that the subtle gunplay mechanics are different.
I don't mind the differences now that everything is spit-shined, but I hope they fix the gun firing effect somehow. Firing a weapon in R2 MP feels somewhat "light, muted and detached". Fortunately, they fixed grenade throwing (It was gimped and somewhat broken in the beta).
I used to miss the weapon spawns, but if the battle is large, it's rather easy to pick up assorted weapons from dead players. This only works if there are plenty of players though (unlike the beta).
I think gunsight zooming is counter intuitive in a run-and-gun game. I don't see R2 competitive player moving in slowly, everyone was running around. May be that's why I was able to get more kills since I used the gun sight more this time. I find it awkward. If my K/D ratio continues to go up, I might file this under my FPS "skills".
Overall, I had some surprising fun. It's great to see clan mates running off together in the game. Fix the "detached" firing and I may play competitive more often. Right now, I am busy levelling up my co-op characters. ^_^
tha_con, you might be surprised to see Kittonwy's impression of R2. He completed SP yesterday: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=13546805&postcount=2724
I agree that text chat should be in. It's more fun than voice chat for making (bad) jokes.
Kittonwy said:Here'z my two centz:
Graphics:
Some levels like Louisiana the lighting works, in Orick it works anytime you're seeing the light through the foliage, the houses outside when in shadow you get this bluish-grey shade that looks good, in the other levels not so much, especially SF and to some extent Chicago. In the Iceland indoor levels the lighting was pretty flat. It does not help that while Hale's flashlight can cast shadows, that a lot of shadowing was missing from the sun or overhead lights. Maybe it's the limitation of the engine due to having to push 60 players. My advice is always when you are forced to have objects lacking shadows, either make the light come from above and just shadow the characters and bake the rest or make it dark enough that yes you can notice some shadowing of the characters but it's not lit enough so the player won't assume objects in the level need to be shadowed. The gun is what the player sees all the time, so it's kind of strange going through a dark patch and the gun remains lit exactly the same way sometimes.
The character shadowing of the sentinels work very well. The environmental shadowing... what environmental shadowing?
Motorstorm 2 has pretty much shown how HUGE an impact HDR lighting and proper shadowing can have on the visuals of the game. In R2 there was never any epic mid-day sun-bleached scenes, things are still a tad soft bloomy sometimes. Technical art just feels rushed for the most part, there are some great stuff there and not so great stuff there. Textures are hit and miss sometimes, either the tech art team didn't have enough time or Insomniac Games needed a better tech art team.
In R2 some levels look pretty, some not so much. Sometimes it's better not to have an object that looks ugly and stick out. Things still look a bit too clean, for cities that have been attacked, buildings need to look broken and burnt. Moar fire plz. Bigger explosions plz.
The water physics was just janky sometimes, great transparency but the reflection just wasn't there most of the time, it's getting there but it needs work.
Audio:
The music pretty much does its job, it's great mood music, I guess it's just not something one can put on a soundtrack, it's probably just not great soundtrack music like the HALO3 soundtrack or the UNCHARTED!!!111!!!soundtrack, it's hard to find an individual piece that I would want to listen to over and over.
Very good gore sounds when things blow up or when you score a headshot in SP.
Gameplay:
In general the SP gunplay against regular enemies is a lot of fun, they're not the smartest enemies around but they do use cover effectively, they just don't go around and flank very much on difficult, but they do rush, a lot of the time I basically just picked them off from a distance, it would be great if I had to stick and move from one cover spot to another and the enemies would keep me moving to a safer place. The bosses are pretty simple, the leviathan and goliath fights were kind of a joke, and the titans aren't really very intimidating, I would rather if they just don't use the cannon and just chase after the player trying to pound the crap out of the player with a one hit kill, smashing cars and boxes to the side. The boss fights could use more clever patterns and weakspots. The chameleon is really not a necessary enemy, it's mostly annoying, might as well cloak the regular chimeras in the later levels if you want to surprise the player. All in all it was a very fun campaign, very well paced, could use more levels where the player can try to stay low and run from cover to cover to flank the chimeras, towards the end of the game there's some of that but the game needed more. Enemy AI needs to respond to the player obviously but needs to be distracted enough by friendly AI to provide the player the opportunity to flank more. Friendly AI is actually pretty good, it's probably better that the friendly AI would distract the enemies rather than just kill them.
MP can be fun playing with friends, especially the first couple of nights when one time Aeon went something like 1-9 and I told him he was playing like Spartan and he could go hang himself but then he was such epic fail that the rope would probably break and he would just fall on his ass. Text chat is greatly missed. It's just so much more fun typing "ur mom >:|" than actually SAYING UR MOM.
Co-op is always fun, a great time sink for sure, quite a bit of cheap enemy spawns but I doubt people will care, the three classes work extremely well, once again it could use better enemy AI. Still a tad too many disconnections. The playable characters don't look too cool though.
Mechanics-wise, one-on-one is still a bit of a crap-shoot, if you're on top of someone with a carbine you'll probably win, with a marksman probably not because individual shots don't do as much damage and there is too much reloading to really keep plugging the damage. Bullseye is useless for tagging at this point due to the lack of accuracy. Ironsight accuracy and precision still needs to be higher because it still feels a bit like I'm fighting with my reticle. Still some balancing that needs to be done. Either make flanking more of a win or make it so that skill can allow a player to recover from an attack, right now it's still a bit too much in-between.
Story:
Hale's character is better, the other sentinels needed more fleshing out but weren't, especially Capeli, more chatter and banter would have been good, dressing them up to reflect their different personalities would have been good, Warner and Hawthorne just didn't have much personality.
The overall package is pretty great, I can see myself putting in a lot of time in it, just not the awesome-looking game that would blow people's minds, it needed some truly epic and memorable scenarios.
9/10
RAWR2.
I agree that text chat should be in. It's more fun than voice chat for making (bad) jokes.
I talked to some IG folks about Text Chat, and it basically boiled down to useable screen space. There is just too much going on pre-game for them to add in a text chat. The screen would become cluttered and full.
I agree, and disagree, on some points Kittonwy made. I think a lot of his complaints are minor and not important, he thinks they are more important than I do. Just a difference of opinion (that, and I'm super biased).
I agree, and disagree, on some points Kittonwy made. I think a lot of his complaints are minor and not important, he thinks they are more important than I do. Just a difference of opinion (that, and I'm super biased).
This is not a real reason right ? Showing the text chat in a pop-up window should not be difficult or cluttering. It's more likely a resource issue than a screen space issue.
Poor excuse, Rfom did have it after all. The lobby is big step backwards IMO. They had one of the best game lobbies around, but they traded it in for something similar to the barely working CoD4 lobby.
If Insomniac is reading this, after experiencing all the game modes, the only changes needed are these (besides tuning weapons):
* Make it easier (like R1 "Normal").
R2 pacing is great, but is unnecessarily more difficult due to various design decisions. A cheap way is to change "Casual" to "Normal" (so on and so forth).
Alternatively, if Insomniac can give us a longer health bar, many people will feel more liberated to try different strategies. In addition, for old timers, I believe most of the R1 gameplay changes (missing 4-stage health bar, removed weapon wheel, more obvious CoD4-like infinitely spawned enemies) would matter less. Even the invisible Chameleon encounters may become more intense and interesting *if* it needed to (shift and) take a second strike to take us down.
* As for missing text chat, will Playstation Home integration help ? (because it has text chat built-in and supports open game launching).
Voice comm should not be the only communication mechanism. Even if everyone has headset, not everyone wants to talk. Text chat is a more casual and arguably more funny medium to tell jokes -- especially for a large turn out. The persistency of messages also allows us to know the clan members more. Talking is too fast and confusing sometimes.
Yes, it is impressive. The game is dynamic and choked full of different enemies. You'll need to look for the flaws when in-game. The more obvious points are the in-transit levels (i.e., walking between 2 battle fields).
To be frank, I am almost as satisfied with R2 as I was with R1 now. The above changes will make me feel that R2 is the greater successor of R1 (The difficulty will prevent me from trying "too different" strategies during replay).
* Make it easier (like R1 "Normal").
R2 pacing is great, but is unnecessarily more difficult due to various design decisions. A cheap way is to change "Casual" to "Normal" (so on and so forth).
Alternatively, if Insomniac can give us a longer health bar, many people will feel more liberated to try different strategies. In addition, for old timers, I believe most of the R1 gameplay changes (missing 4-stage health bar, removed weapon wheel, more obvious CoD4-like infinitely spawned enemies) would matter less. Even the invisible Chameleon encounters may become more intense and interesting *if* it needed to (shift and) take a second strike to take us down.
* As for missing text chat, will Playstation Home integration help ? (because it has text chat built-in and supports open game launching).
Voice comm should not be the only communication mechanism. Even if everyone has headset, not everyone wants to talk. Text chat is a more casual and arguably more funny medium to tell jokes -- especially for a large turn out. The persistency of messages also allows us to know the clan members more. Talking is too fast and confusing sometimes.
Yes, it is impressive. The game is dynamic and choked full of different enemies. You'll need to look for the flaws when in-game. The more obvious points are the in-transit levels (i.e., walking between 2 battle fields).
To be frank, I am almost as satisfied with R2 as I was with R1 now. The above changes will make me feel that R2 is the greater successor of R1 (The difficulty will prevent me from trying "too different" strategies during replay).
I'm mostly through campaign now and I'd say it's a very different game than R1 to be honest. It's much more frantic and death is unavoidable many times (IMHO). I think the graphics are a good upgrade for sure, but I'd say the SP game comes across as though they were trying to add some touches of GoW1 to RFoM. Not a bad thing mind you, but a different game.
My biggest gripe - and this one is a HUGE gripe - is that baddies ONLY pursue me! They'll run right past all my teammates and go after me. This is absurd since we're all supposed to be Sentinels! The only time a Chameleon has ever attacked anyone else is in the preset first encounter for pity sake!
Overall I'd give it a 8.5/10 if not for the horrible enemy AI. Inclusive of that I give the SP 7/10.
My biggest gripe - and this one is a HUGE gripe - is that baddies ONLY pursue me! They'll run right past all my teammates and go after me. This is absurd since we're all supposed to be Sentinels! The only time a Chameleon has ever attacked anyone else is in the preset first encounter for pity sake!
Overall I'd give it a 8.5/10 if not for the horrible enemy AI. Inclusive of that I give the SP 7/10.