He'll be able to see both Axis and Allied players moving from place
to place, see who is massing at which flag, see if any of his players
are pinned down and need help, etc, and be able to take action on it.
He can come screaming in behind some Axis troops and shoot them in the
back before they can finish off his team-mate. He can land on a
rooftop, rifle the Axis below, then slide down and capture a flag. He
can land in a tower and take out an Axis player who is owning the
battlefield sniping from a high position. He can quickly reverse a flag
that was just captured. You get the idea. Your tactics can now change
both as an individual and as a team, as you now have this increased
freedom to not only land where you want, but to get there quickly
(while being careful not to get shot).
Because of the power of this feature, it might need some
balancing once a large number of people are playing it in the real
world. Several suggestions have already been given to the Dev Team
regarding this as well.
I personally really enjoy the Airdrop, both descending as
Allies, and shooting back at them as Axis. And from all the hooting and
hollering I heard both at the MP summit and EALA, I think a lot of
people are also going to have fun with this feature as well. As I also
said in the SP preview, this feature just can't be done proper justice
with words; once players try it for themselves, they'll see just how
many applications and how powerful it is. And as a little teaser…when I
think about how the Airdrop will interact with some of the new content
planned post-release, then things get very interesting indeed.
First, let's get some of the
basics out of the way. When walking, the familiar "head-bob" motion of
past MOH's returns instead of your character just "floating" across the
landscape. It's there, but it's not too extreme. At the MP summit, we
noticed significant motion blur onscreen when you made a quick mouse
movement across a wide field, but this had either been removed or toned
down significantly by the time I saw the game again at EALA. This is a
good thing, as most of us felt it was too much/too distracting. When
sprinting, your weapon lowers/is held across your body, your crosshairs
disappear, and the screen zooms in a bit narrowing the field of view
(FOV). The screen will bounce more than the normal head-bob as your
character jogs across the landscape, complete with louder breathing.
Sprinting was still unlimited when I saw the game last. Although some
may like this, some good arguments were also made against it as well
from the MP summit, and that feedback given to the Dev Team. Again in
SP, a sprinting melee hit would be an instant-kill, but I wasn't able
to try this out in MP. After being killed, the screen goes black and
white, the camera hovers and then rotates above your character's body,
then moves toward the location of your killer in a sort of death-view.
This isn't from the first-person perspective of your killer, however,
so it won't necessarily directly give away his position. In-game
taunts, commands, goal messages, etc, return as in previous versions of
MOH, along with their corresponding audio. At this point, there is no
VOIP built into the game. Those interested in recording their playing
adventures can still use FRAPS to do so, however there isn't a
demo/gameplay recorder built into the software. The popularity of such
a feature was mentioned to the Dev Team, and they took note of it; it
may or may not make it into a future patch or update. There is
currently no spectator mode enabled in Airborne. This was again
mentioned to, and noted by the Dev Team as something useful for in-game
recording for those who enjoy that sort of thing. It stands to reason
that if the classic OBJ game-type was ever implemented in Airborne,
then spectator mode would be a necessary feature along with it for
those who are killed early in the match, and then need a place from
which to watch the rest of the battle.
Gameplay
During the MP summit at Ft. Bragg, there were unfortunately a couple of
issues that cast a shadow on Airborne's gameplay. One of them was a
mouse-lag delay in movement/aiming, the other was generally low
frames-per-second (fps). I have seen the fixes personally, and can
report that these have now both been resolved. In my hands-on test at
EALA recently, mouse movement was crisp and accurate, as it should be.
I had no issues at all in quickly acquiring the target I wanted. The
frame-rate issue was largely improved, and I'll go into a bit more
detail on that in the Performance section.
With these 2 issues out of the way, and no excuses, the question can now be asked - is the game fun? You bet it is.
The game moves along briskly, but not overly fast. Similar to
Allied Assault, I'd say, and a bit faster than Spearhead. If the sprint
is toned down, or made adjustable server-side, then I think that could
affect the game speed quite a bit.
The Airdrop, as said before, is a BIG factor adding to the enjoyment of this game as well. This
video
was taken during the MP summit back at Ft. Bragg. The 2nd half of the
vid shows gameplay in action, and the majority of folks you see talking
on camera were from the PC crew, particularly those at the very
beginning of that segment, and at the very end. Even with the hindering
issues present, the players adapted and were still enjoying the game,
largely due to the Airdrop features.
At EALA a few weeks later, it was even more so. Matt Pruitt
from PlanetMedalofHonor was also there to check out the updated
version, and we heard the yelling and trash talking before we even got
into the room, and once we were in-game, it was on. I was surprised to
spot Patrick Gilmore on the other side of the table with a huge smile
on his face as he was concentrating on his fragging. You can try to
fake having a good time, but it's easy to spot. These folks weren't
faking anything.
After being a good reporter and checking out the issues that needed
verification (while being mercilessly killed left and right, I might
add), I grabbed a trusty Kar98 rifle and went into battle for real.
There were no issues at all in acquiring and quickly dispatching my
targets on the ground and in buildings. I wanted to see for myself how
hard it was shooting down the Allies dropping in, so that was my next
test. I quickly spotted one that appeared a medium distance away and
was drifting more or less in a straight angled line to the ground. Even
with a simple drift downward, the target is still in motion and not a
given to hit. Also remember that there is a height/distance protection
factor in play. It took me 4 hits from the Kar to kill her, the last
one just before she would've disappeared behind a large tree. In
another attempt later on, I was able to kill one in 3 shots, getting
very lucky with a headshot to finish them off. Even so, I had to hurry
to do so. This player didn't seem to be making much of an attempt to
take evasive action either, thus leading to his (or her) doom. Neither
of these targets was very far away, thus not having as much protection;
and I had to hurry or I would've not been able to take them out. I was
pretty satisfied with these results, based on the distance, time I had,
their "soft" descent, and number of hits. Once people become more
proficient at this, the tables may turn, however the Allies will also
become better at taking a more varied path to the ground as well.
Server-side options could also help smooth out any balance issues. Red
"X" icons still appear to indicate a successful hit on an enemy. These
don't bother me personally, although they could perhaps be a bit
smaller. I believe this was another item put on the list to eventually
be made a toggle, either server or client side.
We played on a server that had all upgrades enabled, so I then
pressed Alt-Fire (middle mouse button) to put on my grenade launcher
attachment. My crosshair now changed to a familiar gradient/tree-like
icon in order to judge distance/elevation and pressing fire now lobbed
a nade at my hapless opponent, blowing him to smithereens. Damn, that
felt good. One of the other fellows at Bragg mentioned that he had some
difficulty adjusting to the regular hand-thrown grenades, so I tried
those out next. Now, I've never been a nade whor, uh…master, so I just
kept it a simple test of throwing a nade through a window a short-med
distance away. Seemed OK; they didn't seem to sail on me or anything. I
find most games give a different "weight" to grenades, so perhaps it's
just a matter of getting used to it.
There wasn't a lot of time left, so I switched to the MP40 for
a bit of smg action before the night was up. At close range, that
thing's a killer. It was easy to control and fired in a tight pattern.
Matt was making good progress with a sniper rifle, racking up a number
of kills quite quickly from a rooftop. Seems his opponents didn't look
for the smoke trails.
I wasn't able to find any cover to shoot under using the
peek/lean system, but I did use it over and to the side of a small
object I was hiding behind, and it worked quite well. I don't know if
my opponents saw me or not, but if they did, they didn't seem to show
it and they were dispatched forthwith.
Those of us at the MP summit back in July saw little moments
of fun here and there, as was written in several of the reviews at the
time, but weren't quite sure of what the game had to really offer due
to the problems with shooting. Even though the session at EALA was
brief, it was enough to show that with these issues resolved,
Airborne's MP gameplay could properly shine through. For those who
haven't yet seen it, here's an
HD video of actual PC MP gameplay in action (with scenes from Destroyed Village, Remagen, The Hunt, and Neptune to name a few).
Scoreboard
At the end of each round is now a more expansive scoreboard. Stats
tracked will depend on game-type, but some of the numbers now logged
are kills, deaths, headshots, total points, team points, as well as a
summary/awards screen showing the most accurate player, best
teamplayer, deadliest player, etc, etc. It's a relatively small thing
that other games have as well, but encouraged a lot of chatter and yes,
more trash talk at the end of each match.
PerformanceFor those curious as to the performance
difference in fps between the Ft. Bragg MP summit and my second look at
EALA, here's the lowdown. At Bragg, the lowest spec PC was an AMD +3800
(2.0 GHz) Dual core, with 2 GB RAM, and an Nvidia 7800GTX 512MB video
card. Frame-rate was mostly in the mid 20's to low-30's range. Most of
the other PC's were a bit of a step up using 7900GTX 512MB cards
(similar RAM and processor), and did a little better cruising at a
mid-30's range.
Two of the exact PC's from Bragg were shipped to EALA for
further testing. Optimization code was checked in, as well as more
investigation into proper settings. At my visit to EALA, the 7800GTX
now ran at a steady 40-50 fps, with the 7900GTX running above 50 fps.
The Dev Team mentioned that they were actually still working on this,
and were hoping to squeeze out a few more fps on these cards if things
went well.
The rest of the PC's at EALA were Intel 2.66 GHz duo's, 2 GB
RAM, and on 8800GTX 768MB cards, and ran smoothly at 60 fps with maxed
out settings.
Servers
At the MP summit, 12-player "listen" servers (ie. your PC is the
server, and you play on it as well) were used to demonstrate the game,
as the dedicated servers were not yet functional. A few weeks later at
EALA, we were shooting it out on full 16-player dedicated servers (ie.
the PC running the server is only dedicated to running the server
itself). In speaking with the Dev Team, higher numbers had already been
tested with some success, and they were still working to get as many
players as possible functional for release. They wanted us to make it
clear, however, that specifics would not be released until both the
number of players and the necessary supporting functions (which many of
us forget about, such as changing scoreboards, database sizes,
information transfer issues, etc) were implemented and fully tested.
The game ran smoothly with no problems in a pseudo "real-world"
environment. Basically, the dedicated server and all the PC's were in
the EALA building, but were all connected to each other through the
Internet (ie. not a LAN setup). Latency testing has also been done with
other locations across the USA, with good results even against higher
ping numbers, and is continuing in true "real-world" environments on
the Internet.
There is an in-game server browser that will allow you to scan
for various LAN or Internet games to play, along with filters to help
narrow down your choices.
In regards to dedicated server install, the plan right now
looks as if the entire game (both client and server files) will need to
be installed in order to run a dedicated server (approx 7 GB total
during the MP summit). However, since this often causes extra work for
server admins during the patching process in having to determine which
files have been updated, the Dev Team's goal is to have separate client
and server-only patches available for download whenever an update is
ready. While the initial setup will still take awhile, this should help
make things smoother down the road for updates.
As for setting up a server configuration, a GUI application
has been built to which different options can be selected. It is a very
simple app with tick-boxes, text entry fields, and dropdowns to quickly
create and configure a server file for launch. Options/selections are
still being finalized and tested, but a list of these options will be
released to the public as soon as they are more-or-less locked for the
initial launch. It will be possible to add more options later through
patches.
A separate, stand-alone remote (rcon) server app has also been
created. This is a simple, command text entry app that will function
very similarly to the console rcon of previous MOH's.
For those interested in Linux, work on this is in progress and looks quite promising for the near future.
Ranked vs. UnrankedThere will not be any ranked
servers on PC at release, and specific EA-partnered GSP's will not be
necessary. Servers will be able to freely run with either all weapon
upgrades enabled for use, or all upgrades disabled, with more options
possibly investigated for future. Ranked servers will continue to be
investigated and researched for possible inclusion sometime down the
road in a later patch/update.
Anti-CheatThere are currently plans for 2 forms of
anti-cheat. Punkbuster will ship with the game out-of-the-box, and be
available at launch. EA is also working with another A/C company, DMW,
in order to have them be able to integrate with Airborne and also
provide support. Once complete, admins will have their choice of the
two.
We have also learned that users will have to set up a unique
account name for use with EA in order to play. No two account names can
be the same - each must be unique, and each specific account name will
be linked to the user's CD Key and cannot be changed.
ModdingNot much information on this is available
at this time. An SDK/MDK/toolset is a high priority item, along with
HTTP redirect and auto-download functionality. Much of this will be
dependent on future releases/updates of the Unreal3 engine by Epic.
With UT2007 targeted for release in late fall/early winter, it is
believed that more of the information needed will be available in the
coming months. For anyone not keeping up on the news about this, it is
a bit of a muddy situation. However, the Unreal 2.x versions of the
engine have proven to be very mod-friendly in the past, so there is
reason to be optimistic, but it may take a bit longer than we all want.
New ContentTo recap what's in some of the above
sections, I've seen both work-in-progress, and future plans for new
weapons, new game-types, and new maps. In my opinion, many of these
things are really exciting, and will make a lot of players happy.
Nothing has been finalized as of yet, however, and the Dev
Team is taking a very cautious approach, not wanting to promise what
they can't deliver on for certain. They are well aware of the failures
of Pacific Assault, and the damage that has caused their reputation. An
aggressive patch plan is already in place, with items/features/content
prioritized accordingly, and would roll out in waves over a period of
time.
Conclusion
This dev team itself is unquestioningly committed to providing robust
post-release patch support to Airborne and its community. If EA Exec
gives them the support they need in terms of time and manpower, and the
MOH community also supports the game, then with a little patience I
think we'll see some very impressive things in the not-too-distant
future, making Airborne the game we all want it to be, and setting it
up nicely for continued future success.
The SP demo is now just around the corner (Aug 23).
Here's a taste of what's in store.
So until then, there's only one thing left to do…
"GET READY TO GET AIRBORNE!"
News Source : Here
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 posted by Churchy
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