http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLXyC1cuN3M

(Those of you who don’t appreciate the classics can skip to 2 minutes 38)

Ironically, I quit because they weren’t listening.

It was the 9mm Parabellum.Something was wrong; the Axis players complained their pistols and machine pistols were nerfed.. I remeber a few times in close combat by an HQ, I’d fire several rounds, and still die.. But the game didn’t give you any feedback if you shot someone, so there was no way to tell what happened. On the beta boards, the Rats said there was nothing wroong that they could find; we shouldn’t expect a pistol round to have the same impact as a rifle bullet.
One of the problems testing WW2OL was that it took so damn long too load that unpaid testers were unwilling to conduct tests that didn’t involve playing the game. I know, some of you are thinking that this is true of amateur testers in general, and while I’ll concede that (I did ‘test’ Hovver Bovver long before I did paid work, and the difference in methodology was humbling), WW2OL already required so much BS time that game time was precious. Besides, it took several minutes to spawn, and you only had three clips and no resupply.
But often you’d spawn somewhere to find the battle had passed you by. There I was in Anhee with nobody around and a Luger. I fired some shots and walked about 100 yards downrange.
were those bullet holes in the ground?
Some tests: the rounds were dropping early. But they weren’t dropping early enough to explain why you could fire a clip into some dude point blank and still miss.
Wait… Point Blank, indoors, WW2OL’s engine: that’s when the game became a slideshow. Could the bug depend on frame rate?
I went offline to the gunnery range (~50 FPS), and took aim at the bullseye. Perfect grouping. I tried again, this time using the screenshot button to load up the CPU. Now there were bulletholes at my feet. Before too long I was able to stand in front of a sign, aim just above it, fire, and put a bullet hole in the opposite side of the sign. In low-FPS stiuations, the bullets were not slowing down properly: they would slow down so much they’d fly backwards! Clearly they had screwed up something basic in the distance per time slice calculation.
From my days doing PC testing, I knew why the devs never saw it. They all had top-of-the-line machines. I mean, you wouldn’t play WW2OL at punishing frame rates if you could avoid it, so they avoided it, as much as possible.
Totally energized, I posted to the beta board bug forum in, I believe, mid-July 2001. I had isolated the bug that crippled one side’s infantry and that many people didn’t believe existed! A few other testers congratulated me. Undaunted, I provided more information, screenshots and ways to reproduce my work. Still no response from the Rats.
Finally, six weeks after my posting, the Rats made a progress report. They had found the bug with the Parabellum! It turns out that, under load, the bullets would fly backwards!
On the beta board, in the thread dedicated to that update, I expressed my disappointment that they hadn’t bothered to respond to the thread where I’d isolated the bug six weeks earlier. I think it was Gryf who responded along the lines of “well, you know, we can’t read every bug report.”
So I stopped playing. My still unused retail code I gave to Lapwin. And when anybody brings the game up, I ask if you can bail out yet. “Despawn” is such a ridiculous concept compared to opening the door and walking away.

Unfortunatly the whole platnetside thing past me by, me being knee high to a grasshopper at the time and living on dialup I could neither afford nor run the game properly, but i alway wanted to.

Oh well, heres to Huxley proving me wrong, hopefully

Planetside was glory for awhile, and I still have screen shots of bridge-storming charges and the beauty of my dbl-mortar heavy holding tower doors.

But yes, the endlessness *did* bug me enough to quit. And I’ve always wanted another PS experience.

So looks intersting, big shame that seemingly the WH40K MMO won’t be FPS, which if it is just sounds silly to me.

Marines wearing hotpants though…that’s how you can tell this is a Korean MMO, as I really can’t think of any Korean MMO that doesn’t have female character eq that follows the “less is more” idea.

Huxleys pending release does not improve my mood

Well, not yet. Truck drivers now have the ability to create spawn points with their trucks, and they are free to despawn out of the truck without the spawn point going away.

If you played 6 years ago, you’ll be happy to hear the devs added bouncing grenades about a year ago, as well as other server tracked objects. So now we also have dead bodies and tank hulks littering the battlefield.

They are working on version 1.29 now (Which will also be released on the Chinese market!), which will include a new rendering engine, which in the future will allow for a new terrain engine as well. The devs have added all sorts of new things since six years ago, including a big sound update, division based decals for vehicles, a lot of new equipment (We even have mortars and paratroopers now! Along with numerous new tanks and aircraft), and numerous bug fixes and graphics updates.

Infact, I urge all of you who want to play a massive, team based first person shooter in a persitent world, where the map is reset once one side wins, and which lets you drive, pilot, or sail what you want, to definetley try WWII Online now.

Especially since they have a free 14-day trial, where no credit card is required.

It’s not the mess it was back in 2001, and so far as I know it’s the only example of a persitent online world where the game is actually improved with every update. The Rats are the only dev team I know who listen to the players, and slowly but surely add in every feature they promised, along with new features asked for by players to improve gameplay.

Instead of focusing on large scale team-based combat (the competitive advantage of MMOFPS’s), the knuckleheads at SOE introduced numerous spam and insta-kill weapons, ushering in the era of “SoloSide.” So instead of being a game that focused on teamwork and combined arms warfare, PlanetSide became a crappy Unreal Tourney knockoff…only without competent hit detection, cones of fire, and strafing. Such deficiencies in “core” FPS elements could be excused back when PS offered interesting team-based combat. But by choosing to become yet another deathmatch FPS, such flaws became readily apparent.

Unless Huxley has massive transport dropships, troop transports, and a command system, I’ll stick to other FPS games.

Mayhaps the word “Korean” just made you think it was manga styled?

Everyone who compared it to a low-grav UT:

Yeah, it definitely looks like it’s cribbing from Epic’s cradle as far as design goes. Oh, wait. I think you’re talking more than just art.

Uh… *ahem*

Hmm. Yeah, FPSes do have the tendency to feel “floaty.” There’s third person games with a stronger sense of personal mass and gravity, so one wonders why first-person games can’t do it right. (Then again, I think this was a marketing point for Mirror’s Edge.)

One can overlook that if Huxley turns out to be pretty good, though.

And:

Why does that poor lady have no pants?