Anyone Else Unimpressed?

I've tuned into WCNews.com for years waiting for a WC fix and it finally came out, but i'm unimpressed by what this game offers. I'm mainly focusing on the gameplay, not the other things like music.

1) You join a game, but if you're not there when it starts, you can't possibly win. This is because you're too far behind on the frag count to do so, or the capital ships are already too far gone, etc.

2) No way to balance teams it seems, and this is especially annoying when you are playing the capital ship games where numbers matter more. You might be able to out-fly an opposing team in a frag game, but you're not going to blow up the ship faster than they are. On top of this, you can just put everyone on one side and you'd never know. THe game needs to autobalance teams!

3) leaderboards are going to be rather pointless once people just start letting friends frag them to get their frag counts up. I'm in 28th place right now on the beartrap frags with 9 kills...i don't expect that to be in the top 3000 once people start just letting people run up their kill counts.

4) Servers don't allow for people to keep playing together for several hours at once. INstead, once the game is over, everyone is ejected from the server and must find a new room. I'm sorry, but if i get in a good room i'd like to stay there for a while. I can understand this for ranked rooms, but not for the casual player match rooms.

5) Umm, has anyone found any reasoning to unlocking the ships? I don't know if i've unlocked more than 1 kilrathi ship yet, and i've unlocked 4-5 Terran ships already.

Overall i'm mostly frustrated by #2 and #4. It's a huge waste of time to find and join a room just to realize that everyone's on one side, or that the game is almost over and i'm just going to be kicked out of the room when the game ends anyways. Has anyone else felt similarly?
 
I've tuned into WCNews.com for years waiting for a WC fix and it finally came out, but i'm unimpressed by what this game offers. I'm mainly focusing on the gameplay, not the other things like music.

1) You join a game, but if you're not there when it starts, you can't possibly win. This is because you're too far behind on the frag count to do so, or the capital ships are already too far gone, etc.

2) No way to balance teams it seems, and this is especially annoying when you are playing the capital ship games where numbers matter more. You might be able to out-fly an opposing team in a frag game, but you're not going to blow up the ship faster than they are. On top of this, you can just put everyone on one side and you'd never know. THe game needs to autobalance teams!

3) leaderboards are going to be rather pointless once people just start letting friends frag them to get their frag counts up. I'm in 28th place right now on the beartrap frags with 9 kills...i don't expect that to be in the top 3000 once people start just letting people run up their kill counts.

4) Servers don't allow for people to keep playing together for several hours at once. INstead, once the game is over, everyone is ejected from the server and must find a new room. I'm sorry, but if i get in a good room i'd like to stay there for a while. I can understand this for ranked rooms, but not for the casual player match rooms.

5) Umm, has anyone found any reasoning to unlocking the ships? I don't know if i've unlocked more than 1 kilrathi ship yet, and i've unlocked 4-5 Terran ships already.

Overall i'm mostly frustrated by #2 and #4. It's a huge waste of time to find and join a room just to realize that everyone's on one side, or that the game is almost over and i'm just going to be kicked out of the room when the game ends anyways. Has anyone else felt similarly?

I'm sure every game has things that could be improved and it can be beneficial to have good feedback instead of the horrible generic people who decide to hate things before they try it. I also thought it was odd that you don't get to reconnect right away to the same people. However, If you have certain people friended you can see where they are playing and join in, or start a game and invite them.

About unlocking fighters, the order of unlocking is a puzzle for most of us so far. However I can say that if you fly confed ships you will unlock confed ships. And likewise flying kilrathi vessels will unlock kilrathi fighters.
 
I agree whole heartedly with #4 and I think everyone else does too. It's avoidable by adding people to your friends list but it would be nice to be able to stay in the same room in player matches.
 
1) You join a game, but if you're not there when it starts, you can't possibly win. This is because you're too far behind on the frag count to do so, or the capital ships are already too far gone, etc.

You might want to go to ranked games for your capship battles. Players can't join those (and they disappear off the available games list) once they've begun.

2) No way to balance teams it seems, and this is especially annoying when you are playing the capital ship games where numbers matter more. You might be able to out-fly an opposing team in a frag game, but you're not going to blow up the ship faster than they are. On top of this, you can just put everyone on one side and you'd never know. THe game needs to autobalance teams!

I actually like that it lets you do this, because it creates a "coop" mode. People in #Wingnut have been forming up groups of 8 people and assaulting capships for fun and practice. I wonder if ranked capship battles force the teams to autobalance. They might, I'll have to check. They do fill in open slots depending on which team needs players (and you can check how many people are Terran and how many are Kilrathi by pressing the Back button).

3) leaderboards are going to be rather pointless once people just start letting friends frag them to get their frag counts up. I'm in 28th place right now on the beartrap frags with 9 kills...i don't expect that to be in the top 3000 once people start just letting people run up their kill counts.

Unranked (Bearpit) games don't show up on the (Bearpit) leaderboard(s).

4) Servers don't allow for people to keep playing together for several hours at once. INstead, once the game is over, everyone is ejected from the server and must find a new room. I'm sorry, but if i get in a good room i'd like to stay there for a while. I can understand this for ranked rooms, but not for the casual player match rooms.

Yeah, this would be a nice feature to have. If you know a host is going to restart a game though, it's not too many clicks to open up the Recent Players (or Friends) blade and join his new game. When you get to the final post-game score screen, you're still connected to the other players via audio link. That's a good time to ask if the host is restarting the game if you don't already know.

Overall i'm mostly frustrated by #2 and #4. It's a huge waste of time to find and join a room just to realize that everyone's on one side, or that the game is almost over and i'm just going to be kicked out of the room when the game ends anyways. Has anyone else felt similarly?

If I want to play competitively, I use the ranked games where these aren't too much of an issue. If I'm just hopping around for fun, arriving late into an unranked game isn't too big of a deal. I have been using the player/friends blade to see who's in games with open slots and which hosts are restarting games too.
 
I wonder if ranked capship battles force the teams to autobalance. They might, I'll have to check. They do fill in open slots depending on which team needs players (and you can check how many people are Terran and how many are Kilrathi by pressing the Back button).
Yeah. When you connect, the game always makes a suggestion so that it all balances out. In Player mode you can change what team you're on initially, but in Ranked mode you can't.

Yeah, this would be a nice feature to have. If you know a host is going to restart a game though, it's not too many clicks to open up the Recent Players (or Friends) blade and join his new game. When you get to the final post-game score screen, you're still connected to the other players via audio link. That's a good time to ask if the host is restarting the game if you don't already know.
I played a bunch of games with the same people. The host just sent out ten invites each time. Some kind of lobby would have been nice to have, or a restart button for the host.
 
Yeah. When you connect, the game always makes a suggestion so that it all balances out. In Player mode you can change what team you're on initially, but in Ranked mode you can't.


I played a bunch of games with the same people. The host just sent out ten invites each time. Some kind of lobby would have been nice to have, or a restart button for the host.

Yeah, lately I've been hosting games because I have a good connection and all I do is go down my friends list and invite everyone playing Arena. We had some pretty good matches yesterday I have to say with quite a few CICers.
 
Yeah, lately I've been hosting games because I have a good connection and all I do is go down my friends list and invite everyone playing Arena. We had some pretty good matches yesterday I have to say with quite a few CICers.

That's a good idea. I need to add some of you guys to my friend list and fly with you sometime. Don't we have a page somewhere on the CIC that lists everybodys gamertag?
 
Anyway to make this a LAN game?

I am sadly unimpressed, this kind of reminds me of the old Armada games for Dreamcast, with Wing's ships.

At LEAST they could have had a cockpit view
 
Anyway to make this a LAN game?

I am sadly unimpressed, this kind of reminds me of the old Armada games for Dreamcast, with Wing's ships.

At LEAST they could have had a cockpit view

I really like cockpits too, but having played with the behind-the-ship camera I don't see how that would help you in arena. You just can't tell what's going on or see to navigate enough (especially while doing manoevers) from that angle
 
I really like cockpits too, but having played with the behind-the-ship camera I don't see how that would help you in arena. You just can't tell what's going on or see to navigate enough (especially while doing manoevers) from that angle
Yeah. Since it's an arcade style game, having a cockpit view of things might make it difficult to keep up with the pace of battle in Arena. Whereas in most Wing Commander games, you're usually not engaged in battle with as many ships at once and you don't need to be aware of powerups around you.
 
At LEAST they could have had a cockpit view

Thats not much of an arguement anymore. Its just something everyone says over and over because its not there. Just because there isn't a cockpit view doesn't immedeately make the game not fun to play. I'm having a blast at Arena - though I'll admit it takes a little time to really get a feel for any one fighter.
 
I'll throw my opinion out there, at the risk of being flamed for it. Be advised its a second draft since i lost my first to a copy paste error (and some firefox/javascript suckage thanks to these less than wonderful richtext edtiors...)

I was very unimpressed. Maybe I was so hyped to get a modern crack at WC, maybe i was expecting too much, I'm not sure. After playing through the demo several times, i doubt i make what would be a rather small investment in a franchise i love very much. The graphics look too much like an old DOS game with some fancy effects applied; they seemed very polished, but even a crappy paint job can shine with enough clearcoat. The controls were simply infuriating for 15 minutes, which was the amount of time it took me to realize that they had half-ass cloned FPS controls, which, if done properly, would have been a nice move given the nature of the game, but their implementation sucks. I didn't investigate other control methods in the demo, so if anybody wants to flame me for that, at least be constructive and advise me otherwise first. I won't point out any other flaws that may or may not exist in the game, the reviews seem to be doing a good enough job of that as it is.

Like i said, I really, really, REALLY wanted to enjoy this game and spend the last few weeks of my summer indoors fragging some Joe in a 16 player deathmatch. As it stands, I'm probably going to stick with GRAW2 for my fragging and Aegis Wing for my multiplayer psuedo-flight-sim, though both are growing quite old.

Before i shut my trap, i just want to say that i am very impressed with the longevity of wcnews. While you have received praise that far exceeds the value of mine, i just wanted to say that it had been a while since i had been in the neighborhood (relatively speaking) and I was very pleased to find things still kicking around here. I was especially excited about the many fan projects going on, there are some really kick ass things happening! Hell, after 7 years my Forum account is still active, and that's a feat in and of itself. There are very few (again, relative to the millions and/or billions of sites) internet presences that have survived that long, and most of them had corporate backing. My hat's off to you guys. Here's hoping EA gives us a title worthy of the fan base this series has.
 
Screw the demo and buy the game I think you will be surprised. It sounds like you maybe jaded by the, well, shortness and crappiness of the demo because it limits you to offline only modes.

Trust me, the first time you see a CICer on your wing and hear their voice tell you that they've got your wing everything will change. There's really nothing like seeing ChrisReid, LOAF, BradMick, Frosty and the counterless others covering you while you take a bomber in to nail that battlecruiser.
 
Screw the demo and buy the game I think you will be surprised. It sounds like you maybe jaded by the, well, shortness and crappiness of the demo because it limits you to offline only modes.

Trust me, the first time you see a CICer on your wing and hear their voice tell you that they've got your wing everything will change. There's really nothing like seeing ChrisReid, LOAF, BradMick, Frosty and the counterless others covering you while you take a bomber in to nail that battlecruiser.

He's right. Forget the demo, it doesn't do the the full game justice. The game doesn't really start to shine until you go multiplayer. After you play a few free-for-alls or cap ship battles online you'll be singing a different tune about the game, believe me.
 
The controls were simply infuriating for 15 minutes, which was the amount of time it took me to realize that they had half-ass cloned FPS controls, which, if done properly, would have been a nice move given the nature of the game, but their implementation sucks. I didn't investigate other control methods in the demo, so if anybody wants to flame me for that, at least be constructive and advise me otherwise first. I won't point out any other flaws that may or may not exist in the game, the reviews seem to be doing a good enough job of that as it is.

Not really. There have been more positive reviews than negative. Many sites haven't published their reviews yet, but the hands-on previews were almost universally positive. It's unfortunate that the few negative reviews have marked down the game for lacking features that the game actually does have. If it's not that, I see reviewers go in with their mind already made up and fault the game for not being some $10 million fancy megagame.

Fifteen minutes also isn't long enough to get a real good hang of the controls, but it is designed to be simple enough that you can just pick up and fly around instantly. All the many posts on people's complex maneuvers, tricks and tactics is a testament to how intricate and intuitive the controls can become with more practice. It took us all longer than 15 minutes to get accustomed to the controls of our first Wing Commander game, whichever that may have been.

Before i shut my trap, i just want to say that i am very impressed with the longevity of wcnews. While you have received praise that far exceeds the value of mine, i just wanted to say that it had been a while since i had been in the neighborhood (relatively speaking) and I was very pleased to find things still kicking around here. I was especially excited about the many fan projects going on, there are some really kick ass things happening! Hell, after 7 years my Forum account is still active, and that's a feat in and of itself. There are very few (again, relative to the millions and/or billions of sites) internet presences that have survived that long, and most of them had corporate backing. My hat's off to you guys. Here's hoping EA gives us a title worthy of the fan base this series has.

It's that very fan base which has really embraced Arena. I'm really glad to see it wasn't just a misguided LOAF and me these past months. Now that the game is out, it's great that so many of our members are already in love with it. It's awesome going into random games in the middle of the night and finding yourself flying alongside someone from Crius.net here. And even our members in places where they can't get an XBox have the incredible Arena maunal. I can't force anyone to like a game, and I wouldn't want to, but the fact that so many other Wingnuts have taken to this one would certainly seem to make it worthwhile to invest a measly $10 for a better look. Even if you're only looking out ahead into the future, there's no better way to help personally bring the next Wing Commander game closer to reality.
 
Not really. There have been more positive reviews than negative. Many sites haven't published their reviews yet, but the hands-on previews were almost universally positive. It's unfortunate that the few negative reviews have marked down the game for lacking features that the game actually does have. If it's not that, I see reviewers go in with their mind already made up and fault the game for not being some $10 million fancy megagame.
We've been finishing a huge project at work, and since my summer internship is up on Friday and i'm the lead developer of it, I've not had time to keep up with the bulk of the reviews. As a matter of fact i've been avoiding sitting in front of the computer as much as possible after spending 8-10 hours staring at PHP and SQL all day :) The initial ones i had seen weren't necessarily negative, but were quick to point out the faults of the game, some of which i felt were justified, others not so much, hence the nature of my previous comment.

Fifteen minutes also isn't long enough to get a real good hang of the controls, but it is designed to be simple enough that you can just pick up and fly around instantly. All the many posts on people's complex maneuvers, tricks and tactics is a testament to how intricate and intuitive the controls can become with more practice. It took us all longer than 15 minutes to get accustomed to the controls of our first Wing Commander game, whichever that may have been.
No offense, but for a Live Arcade Game, 15 minutes is an eternity to learn the controls, and if a seasoned vet of most of the original games gave up that quickly, i'm sure many of a younger, less-WC-Oriented crowd didn't give it that much. To be good and develop talent, sure, you have to devote some time. But after 15 minutes of trying to pull up only to realize that i had brought myself to a stop in the line of somebody's fire, I became rather frustrated. Not to say i gave up immediately. I've been through the asteroids mission a dozen times and the bot melee only a few less, just couldn't get the hang of the controls, they are almost completely bass-acwards of every other game i have that i play on a regular basis.

It's that very fan base which has really embraced Arena. I'm really glad to see it wasn't just a misguided LOAF and me these past months. Now that the game is out, it's great that so many of our members are already in love with it. It's awesome going into random games in the middle of the night and finding yourself flying alongside someone from Crius.net here. And even our members in places where they can't get an XBox have the incredible Arena maunal. I can't force anyone to like a game, and I wouldn't want to, but the fact that so many other Wingnuts have taken to this one would certainly seem to make it worthwhile to invest a measly $10 for a better look. Even if you're only looking out ahead into the future, there's no better way to help personally bring the next Wing Commander game closer to reality.

I may fool around and invest in it, but with so many full scale games coming out right now and this fall, and at the risk of sounding callous i'd rather put the $10 towards my Halo 3 fund.

@LOAF:

Don't we all....don't we all. Well, ok, not Chris, but the rest of us...
 
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