The response to my Section 8 review on Eurogamer seems to have been tempered somewhat by the release of a demo on the 360. It’s worth stressing that I haven’t seen 360 code and can make no judgment there, but impressions have not been favourable. I tried playing it on the 360 pad and, well, yes. Mouse and keyboard will be the default choice. It seems like the release of a demo on the console might actually have seriously damaged the chance of the game on there. As a relatively complex multiplayer FPS it does seem to me like it carries some serious PC heritage, however, and you won’t win any prizes for guessing what version I would recommend. One other thing that I didn’t mention in the review was how impressed I was with the way the game scaled. I played a bunch of five-on-five games pre-release and the smaller maps still delivered tight games with so few people, which is pretty impressive.
However, ugh. It also seems that the PC version of Section 8 is having some technical difficulties in its US launch. The culprit: Games For Windows Live failing to intiate. Another fine game marred by Live? Why oh why… Developers: use something else, please.
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I think the review is spot on. I first tried the beta for like 15 minutes, felt like it was very much just another shooter with open environments and really not much point to it. I disliked it, hate is too strong a word.
Few days later I realized I kept thinking about the game and finally decided to really get into it. It’s definitely all those things mentioned in the review and 8/10 is exactly the score I’m thinking. It certainly won’t attract huge crowds and it grows on you slowly but I bet the 10,000 players or so who keep playing it have the best time of their gaming careers. I decided not to be part of those players because nowadays I just play in public servers and such and this might not be the best game for that. For LAN parties it’s going to be a gem.
i hate the GFW branding, apparently MS force the devs to implement “auto language” switching during install, and they almost ALWAYS forget to add any options to change language during install or the game (some games even give you the finger and let you choose the install language that has no effect on the game language), so you end up with crap like Wolfenstein that would install in spanish in my box even tho my region settings are set to australia (which i was forced to change a few years ago from my spanish country thanks to the gfw installing in spanish)
Let’s see what happens on Friday when the game is released in the UK.
Games for Windows Live is awful shit. Fortunately it is also irrelevant because Steam rules that particular market. Games that use GfWL which I would be interested in can be counted on one finger.
I don’t think I’m the only person in the world who has had absolutely 0 problems with GFW Live. Dawn of War II has worked fantastically well for me in all aspects (except for a couple of minor, inconsequential Achievement glitches that were due to Relic, not GFW Live, and were eventually fixed), and even Gears of War has worked well for me too. Though I didn’t get Gears of War on PC until after GFW Live was completely free.
I managed to score a free copy of Section 8 at PAX over the weekend, and so far things seem to be running well there too – though all servers were down temporarily yesterday. But hey, that happens with Steam games too, so it’s not exactly a unique occurence.
GFW Live isn’t perfect obviously, and I’m not using my anecdotes as proof that others are wrong or anything absurd like that. I’m just saying that hey, my computer setup doesn’t do anything special or differently, I haven’t set it up in any way special, I haven’t had to use any weird hacks or tweaks or delved into config files to get it working – it just works for me right from the outset. Obviously, the same must hold true for a huge number of other people as well, and people encountering problems probably isn’t anywhere close to the majority.
Also – the GFW branding has been *FANTASTIC*. I love that every game with that logo supports widescreen out of box, without question, and that (where appropriate), they also effortlessly support the 360 controller.
Both my copy of Fallout 3 and Dawn of War 2 behave perfectly fine when using GfWL, so does Universe at War for that matter, but interface is quite badly designed.
So I assume it’s not always just the software that is at fault, but a combination of hardware and software as most bugs are these days.
The closest thing to an issue I’ve had with GfWL was after installing v3.0 of the GfWL client, the Fallout DLC no longer displayed in “my media” in the client, Fallout 3 could find them just fine though, and uses them without problems.
I mean the Universe at War interface for GfWL, not in general, I quite like the unobtrusive feel of the default GfWL interface, it’s never in the way unless you call it down yourself.
To be fair, there were launch bugs other than GFWL. Apparently, S8 was also conflicting with lots of anti-virus programs and would just dump users back to the desktop with little fanfare.
But yeah, the first time I booted up the game and it crashed when GFWL failed to initialize, I was pretty pissed.
I have a certain admiration for Section 8, a little bit. It’s not the game for me – it’s not the second coming of older UT titles that took so much of my time up through UT2k4 (then again, neither is UT3) – but I admire the principles behind its design. It can be a lot of fun with good teamwork.
thanks Derek for the info on the business side :)
Played a couple of games and not had any problems with the GFWL thing. What was the problem people had? It logging itself off Live or?
Section 8 requires Games for Windows Live: Oh balls.
Played this for a bit over the past two days, and while I’m still getting the hang of things, I’m definitely having fun. Best part so far: healing a teammate who was being fired upon by an enemy, using the jetpack to avoid said enemy’s gunfire, and then launching a grenade right at said enemy, killing him.
@ jc
yeah, all GfW titles must support widescreen. Here is the list of GfW branding requirements.
@j c: and because they are also forced to support the 360 controller they usually “forget” to add support for other controllers (or they just make them harder to set up), you know, like those extremely cheap ones that are just as good as the 360 one… i wonder why ….
I played the S8 beta and loved it. It was a deathmatch game that suddenly spawns multiple additional game modes. It requires teamwork, unless all people on both sides are lone wolfing – then you’re okay. But if even 3-4 people coordinate, they’ll dominate.
The guns are not very intuitive. The biggest part of the guns are their shield bypass ranges. Machine gun is okay at med to long, and very nice at very short, because at close range it bypasses shields, goes straight to armor, and fires really fast. Since the shotgun is crap, it’s the only real choice for very close range.
However, as in tons of games, the Assault Rifle is the best all around weapon. It has a longer shield bypass range, does better damage, is more accurate. Unless you’re dropping on people, you’ll most often find the AR best. If you get close, the time used to swap to MG mostly removes the advantage there too.
Sniper rifles don’t work the way you’d expect – they aren’t one shots, unless shields are down. Then they’re deadly.
I was pissed to see GfWL. I didn’t think they were going to use Gamespy, but I figured it would be *something* besides GfWL. The only upside is that my 360 is broken, so I can see my friends that way. ;)
S8 isn’t TF2, but it’s different. I think of it as a shinier, more populated Tribes.
And then there’s the whole build piece – it seems shallow, but it’s very deep to me. People forget that I can top drop in the middle of an AA field with the right setup….
@ Jim (and the rest of RPS): I for one would appreciate an article where you called all of your developer contacts and ask them “Why GFWL?”. It just seems to be shooting themselves in the foot from the consumers’ point of view.
(always worth remembering though, most people just go out an buy games and probably don’t give a flying f*ck if it needs gfwl, it’s just us AIM who care…)
Pretend I put a > where the ? is.
@phuzz
I asked exactly that of Relic at last year’s PAX, before Dawn of War II came out. I asked why they were going with GFW Live instead of Steam’s matchmaking or their own system, especially when they were also doing Steamworks activation.
Plainly and simply, it was easier for them to integrate it. Steam’s system wasn’t yet mature at that time (and even after the release of Left 4 Dead, took months before it got to a good level), while Xbox Live had been doing matchmaking for years already.
And, as Dawn of War II turned out in the end, it was pretty obvious that GFW Live did a much better job than Relic’s own service (Relic Online) ever did previously with Company of Heroes and their previous Dawn of War titles.
@Mungrul
I have the same problem with GFWL and DOW2. In fact, when I updated to the new version of GFWL is deleted my DOW2 campaign.
Are you using ZoneAlarm? Because that seems to be the problem for me. On the GFWL forums ZoneAlarm is a “bad” firewall that has many issues and you should just use the standard windows one.
Retards.
Well, I’ve ordered this, if I’m lucky it’ll be tomorrow, otherwise Friday (I’m in the UK).
This better be good Mr Rossignol, as you are primarily responsible for my hard earned at this juncture :-)