I was recently on holiday in America-land seeing my girlfriend for the first time in months and I arrived back exhausted and jet lagged and with no luggage to speak of. Feeling miserable, lonely and about to run out of clean clothing I stumbled home to find my pre-order of GR: FS has arrived.
I don't want to sound like a loom smashing luddite trapped in the past but I really enjoyed the original GR games because they were pretty difficult. You had to plan your moves carefully and when a firefight kicked off, good planning helped and fast reflexes helped but there was always an element of random chance - would the guy with the assault rifle whom you had not spotted be able to hit you from that distance or would you get him first?
You could die very easily and the difficulty could be nigh-on impossible at times but when a mission was successful I genuinely felt a little rush of pride and accomplishment.
I still enjoyed Advanced Warfighter games although they felt a little bit dumbed down to me.
GR:FS on the other hand...
My primary complaint is that it's far, far, far too easy even on the highest difficulty setting. I get that we're meant to be in the future with really advanced kit and whatnot but the problem with having such a technological advantage over the enemy is that there's no challenge.
Almost from the outset we have x-ray vision, stealth camoflage, drone surveillance and a few missions in... a walking tank. The friendly AI is so effective at killing that a viable strategy for getting through missions is simply to stay in control of the drone and tag every single enemy that appears for team mates to kill.
Missions come and go, at no stage do I feel any sense or urgency, threat or pacing. The environments vary a little and look pretty enough but any exploration leads to a message warning that we've strayed too far and must return or 'lose the signal'. In villages where we're being ambushed or whatever, it helps add a sense of claustrophobia to have small levels but most of the time I just felt constrained.
The gameplay doesn't even feel like GR anymore. It's more like Gears of War. Let me stress- I LOVE Gears of War; it's noisy stupid fun. But noisy stupid fun has its place; I was expecting some depth from GR:FS and instead I have a game which plays like a GoW clone. A bad one.
Also; Ubisoft, I don't care if we ARE in the future, a 5.56mm LMG is not going to be enough to take down a Hind. If I'd had the patience to chip away at the health bar, I could have shot it down with a sub-machine gun. If you're going to piss away the realism to that degree you may as well go the whole hog and have me kill the terrorists by eating mushroom, doubling in size and then throwing shells at them.
How would I fix it?
1) Limit access to the space age technology. Make stealth camo, x-ray vision etc things to unlock rather than readily available.
2) Nerf the advanced technology; introduce a trade off - stealth camo should only be permitted with certain weapon sets. Or at least, it should be less effective.
3) Increase the enemy lethality.
4) Vehicles need to be hit with heavy weapons to knock them out. Access to these should be limited and carrying a bulky anti-tank weapon should invalidate the stealth gear.
5) Injuries should mean something. Make me limp for the rest of the mission or something.
/rant
Apologies that the above complaint went on for as long as it did. When I did the original draft it was only a couple of paragraphs and then it got longer as my rage built.
What I wanted to ask is: What game(s) have you been looking forward to that let you down badly? What was technically wrong with them? If you could issue a patch what would you do to fix it? (Or is it beyond patching?)
I don't want to sound like a loom smashing luddite trapped in the past but I really enjoyed the original GR games because they were pretty difficult. You had to plan your moves carefully and when a firefight kicked off, good planning helped and fast reflexes helped but there was always an element of random chance - would the guy with the assault rifle whom you had not spotted be able to hit you from that distance or would you get him first?
You could die very easily and the difficulty could be nigh-on impossible at times but when a mission was successful I genuinely felt a little rush of pride and accomplishment.
I still enjoyed Advanced Warfighter games although they felt a little bit dumbed down to me.
GR:FS on the other hand...
My primary complaint is that it's far, far, far too easy even on the highest difficulty setting. I get that we're meant to be in the future with really advanced kit and whatnot but the problem with having such a technological advantage over the enemy is that there's no challenge.
Almost from the outset we have x-ray vision, stealth camoflage, drone surveillance and a few missions in... a walking tank. The friendly AI is so effective at killing that a viable strategy for getting through missions is simply to stay in control of the drone and tag every single enemy that appears for team mates to kill.
Missions come and go, at no stage do I feel any sense or urgency, threat or pacing. The environments vary a little and look pretty enough but any exploration leads to a message warning that we've strayed too far and must return or 'lose the signal'. In villages where we're being ambushed or whatever, it helps add a sense of claustrophobia to have small levels but most of the time I just felt constrained.
The gameplay doesn't even feel like GR anymore. It's more like Gears of War. Let me stress- I LOVE Gears of War; it's noisy stupid fun. But noisy stupid fun has its place; I was expecting some depth from GR:FS and instead I have a game which plays like a GoW clone. A bad one.
Also; Ubisoft, I don't care if we ARE in the future, a 5.56mm LMG is not going to be enough to take down a Hind. If I'd had the patience to chip away at the health bar, I could have shot it down with a sub-machine gun. If you're going to piss away the realism to that degree you may as well go the whole hog and have me kill the terrorists by eating mushroom, doubling in size and then throwing shells at them.
How would I fix it?
1) Limit access to the space age technology. Make stealth camo, x-ray vision etc things to unlock rather than readily available.
2) Nerf the advanced technology; introduce a trade off - stealth camo should only be permitted with certain weapon sets. Or at least, it should be less effective.
3) Increase the enemy lethality.
4) Vehicles need to be hit with heavy weapons to knock them out. Access to these should be limited and carrying a bulky anti-tank weapon should invalidate the stealth gear.
5) Injuries should mean something. Make me limp for the rest of the mission or something.
/rant
Apologies that the above complaint went on for as long as it did. When I did the original draft it was only a couple of paragraphs and then it got longer as my rage built.
What I wanted to ask is: What game(s) have you been looking forward to that let you down badly? What was technically wrong with them? If you could issue a patch what would you do to fix it? (Or is it beyond patching?)
