I’ve been able to spend some time in the game during the last couple of days and the first impression is overall quite positive.

At first I was a bit disappointed to see Tribes:Vengeance-like skiing implemented, but the 3-directions jet and overdrive mechanic will probably avoid the learning curve turning flat too soon. I still need to get comfortable with the idea of jetting down, but I’m enjoying learning the new mechanics: time will tell if it’s something adding or taking away from the ski-jet experience.

For what regards weapons, the spinfusor rocket-launcher feeling seems right and that’s really the most important thing. Chaingun: I almost couldn’t hit a thing back in my semi-pro T2 days, I almost can’t hit a thing nowadays, so I’m glad it’s still a finishing weapon in most people hands. Can’t comment on the grenade launcher, as I’ve mostly chosen the rocket-launcher specialist layout, but I’ve seen nice things done with it by more experienced players, and for the bit I used it, it didn’t seem to have received the very sad treatment that Epic reserved to the flak cannon moving from UT99 to more recent installments of the franchise (read: it’s pretty much an hitscan weapon in most usage scenarios).
I think they’ve made a good selection of the weapons to implement, given the current gameplay.
I’d love to see the shocklance added too, but in Legions it would really be just to showoff.

Having a selection of light-medium-heavy armor wouldn’t probably make much sense in Legions, at last in the maps currently available, so the decision to keep things simple but still provide an equipment choice through weapon loadouts (and special alternative fire) makes sense – the only annoying thing being that it seems that all loadouts but one will have to be unlocked (by playing the game, not by paying money) according to the FAQ (but it’s a beta, nothing is written in stone). The armor feels like a slightly lighter T2 medium armor: I would gladly trade a bit of health for a bit more speed and reactiveness but the current implementation is probably more appropriate for Legions gameplay.

What I think should currently receive more attention is the HUD: the game would benefit of at last a flag status indicator (”On flagstand” – “Returning in… [seconds]” – “Carried by [playername]“), and world objects indicators should scale a bit better at higher resolutions: recognizing the flag icon near a player name at 1920×1200 is not exactly immediate (not asking for an happy mod eh, just something a bit bigger). Ah, and slow minded people like me tend to have a brief moment of confusion when there’s a green text indicating good health under a red player name of the same font size, so having the player side standing out more than health status would avoid those milliseconds of “friend or foe” indecision.

CTF seems to work fine, even if I’ve seen quite a few stalemates that lasted a bit too much for my taste, but that’s possibly a consequence of the disparity of skills on servers at the moment (new comers versus veterans) and of the HUD weaknesses outlined above.

For what regards DM and TDM, I’d have preferred Rabbit implemented instead, which share certain aspects of DM/TDM while being more fun to play in my opinion. The reason I said “instead” in place of “along with” is because I’m selfish grumpy old player getting annoyed by the prevalence of DM/TDM over CTF servers, yes. Hopefully there will be dedicated servers in the Euro-zone later on: most matches are definitely playable on player hosted games, but not without the occasional stuttering and relatively high pings.

Overall I think GarageGames is making a very good job mixing the old with the new, increasing accessibility without excessively reducing depth and balancing the various game elements, it looks like Legions is going to be a great game.

Anyone wishing to shoot rockets in my direction can find me on Instant Action as “Ki5met”.

The game’s throwing up an “Error Code: 510″ at me every time I try to play. I suppose that means it’s desktop only for me, rather than quick games on my trusty laptop. Hopefully I’ll be able to play it there.

“Jim Rossignol says:

You’d be amazed what people still play. I stumbled across people on a multiplayer Sacrifice server a few months back.”

You’re not wrong. I popped on the 3DRealms forum yesterday (Check out the latest Duke screen) and I saw that some guy was still making maps for Rise of the Triad.

C:\Users\\AppData\LocalLow\GarageGames\IAPlayer\products\102\install\Legions\legions\preferences\prefs.cs on Vista. Its slightly different on XP, but still in appdata.

Open prefs.cs in notepad and look for the line:

Code:
$Pref::Input::MouseInvertYAxis = 0;

Change it to:

Code:
$Pref::Input::MouseInvertYAxis = 1;

Me too, I don’t know how to fix it specifically but it doesn’t happen in full screen mode (press Escape in game and click Options).

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-wtc?
InstantAction Web Design/Dev.