Recommend a good, multi-player, FPS game.

[GreyKnight]

Chaps,

I don't know why, but I just fancy getting in to a real good first person shooter game, multi-player of course. So I know a lot of you play some of these and I was wondering if you could give me the pros and cons of the games you play.

I see Arma2 is a recent release and doesn't look too bad, even if it's got arcade-like flight system in it.

I used to really like playing America's Army a while back, even more so since it was free. But I just tried to download version 3 recently, and after 3 full attempts (1 with Steam, 2 direct from site) they all said it had a corrupt file(s) and I wasted HOURS downloading all 3GB every single time. Apparently you can pay for the shipping and get the DVD sent to you. But I'll wait to see what you say about the other games out there.

The BattleField series seems to be popular too, but I don't know much about them.

All I'm after is something that is top quality, realistic, and not full of idiotic teens like Counter-strike. A game that really forces you to fight in a squad and not be some John Rambo, who can take being shot 10 times. I'd lean more towards modern day/slightly futuristic theatres, but I'm okay with WWII. And I've got no problems playing on the Russian/Chinese/Fictitious bad guys side.

So...?

[Jediteo]

Project Reality for Battlefield 2 is rather good. You could try Red Orchestra, a very good game, the darkest hour mod for it is good too.

[Snacko]

I've been playing ArmA 2 with Boomer and the War Hawks now and then.

[delta7]

I

[sged]

Hey GK!

If you want to play Red Orchestra for the tanks, then ok, if you wanna have a go as infantry, its a big nono, sorry for those who feel different about this.

RO (red orchestra) and Darkest Hour are fine as for playing the tankstuff, but the engine is fairly old, and the chars behave like wooden puppets.

A good infantry only game would be CoDWAW (WWII version)

Arma2, well, let me say this about that.

Since you might know or not, I've been working on a tanksim for about a year now, with this mod team, and our first few months we worked with Crysis.

When AA2 came out, the decision was rapidly made to switch to this game-engine.

Graphics are not as good as crysis, but it makes up for the gameplay a lot.

Tanksim is going good, and the best thing is, we have the possability of combined forces....but I'm dwelling

[delta7]

yeah sged Iv read about the expansion here

[Perfesser]

We're playing America's Army 3 now but I have to admit it sucks as bad as ArmA.

[GreyKnight]

Why Perfesser? What's wrong with AA3?

[Perfesser]

We, [CHG], played AA since about 2003. Even though dated it had excellent gameplay, very smooth and fluid, required skill and teamwork to play well. If you didn't aim carefully you hit nothing.

I tried Arma before but thought the gameplay was ... awkward. I can't really explain it any better than that.

Then AA3 came out and it seems to be the same as Arma ... without the cool vehicles.

2 days after the release it was a disaster, the Army fired most of the development team.

Hoping it's even possible to fix it but it's so full of bugs .... Once you get more than 10 in a server it gets laggy as hell and crashes out a few rounds later. They can only try to improve a bad system. They've spent way too much time and money to change directions now.

It desperately needs more than the 5 maps.

Every day I see more people giving up on it.

[DoubleTap]

Greyknight,

[Jediteo]

Red Orchestra started out as a mod to Unreal Tournament 2003, many years ago. It later got a stand-alone release, now via steam. Quite entertaining in some manners, but quite lacking in how infantry moves. Be prepared to be mowed down by a pixel and some annoying german kid. Tactically, the game has some flaws. I play COD4 with some of my olf friends, but it is mostly a run and gun sort of thing.

[Rattler]

I play ArmA2 with the guys from the OAC, and I play on some other servers as well. I very much enjoy it. The vehicle operations are quite simplified, but adequate. It really is an infantry sim, not vehicle or air.

It has an extremely faithful and sizable community of modders, and is very open to modding, so there are already a fair but of mods to use. I find the gameplay to be excellent - I haven't encountered a bug yet.

There is hope that an accurate tank fire control system mod is in the works, as there was in ArmA. It really enhances the tank warfare. In ArmA, it was quite realistic.

I don't have any experience with the other games guys have mentioned.

[sged]

We with i44 are very busy on enhancing the tankplay in AA2, but, for a WWII tankmod.

A problem we encountered, is that the line of sight doesn't allow you to see tanks up to 2 km away, which was there in AA1, it seems the dev's enhanced gameplay on other stuff in the game to make it better, but on behalf of eyesight.

Our gunoptics are already behaving like they should, also, our tanks have the correct turning speed, speed, and turretspeed + suspension is working like a charm as well.....in AA2 tanks drive like they are on ice actually.

A coder of our team has put together a testmission, where al forces are combined. Inf and tanks (panthers)

[GreyKnight]

Wow! Lots of good info here, thanks for that.

I had a look at a trailer for Red Orchestra, from their website, and although the tank battle scene looked great, the infantry looked rather dated. I also don't like WWII FPS, as there doesn't seem to be varied roles to play. It's just like your 7 identical guys with a rifle, and your team leader has a pistol and a whistle instead.

I think the best bet is just try Demos of the ones I'm interested. So I thought I'd buy the latest PC gaming mag to see if they had any decent demos in them. But it costs €10 for PC mag and DVD over here! So for a demo and a mag I'm not going to read (German) I'm going to skip that and just download the demos from the publishers site.

So I'll start off with Arma2.

[Jediteo]

If you like a realistic infantry and combined arms sim try battlefield 2 with the Project reality mod, a bit of learning curve but once you get going it can get pretty intense. It is modern weaponry in a variety of locations including a insurgent mode.

[Perfesser]

The one good thing about all America's Army versions is that the full version is free and they don't use the respawn feature.

The rounds are short but once dead, you stay that way till the round ends. Cuts down on the idiot Rambo punks.

I see quite a few people are still playing AA2.

[GreyKnight]

I do like AA Perfesser, but I had enough of trying to download it after 3 failed attempts.

[Perfesser]

Yes there were some issues before patch 4 came out about 3 weeks ago.

Honestly though in it's current state I couldn't recommend the game anyway.

[gec]

i played AA with =Mr= clan few years ago. our main map was SF Recon. we practically owned the place with one other clan that i do not remember the name. Next map we played a lot is Mountain Pass, and Sand Storm. All of these are highly stealth and team play based maps.

[Perfesser]

I loved any of those huge outdoor maps in AA2, maybe not Farm Raid so much. Trout's favourite was Sandstorm.

Not much like them in AA3. Almost all CQB stuff.

[GreyKnight]

Right, I managed to download all 2.8GB of the Arma2 demo in about 45mins. Which was fantastic, as the AA3 downloads of a similar size nearly took me over 12 hours.

Installed the Arma2 demo and jumped straight in to the single player training to get used to the interface/controls. Was enjoying the training until the bit were you do the Anti-Tank practise. After firing my 2nd rocket, you get attacked by the enemy. So all I had was a rifle with no ammo and an anti-tank launcher with 2 rockets left and I had to get to the next area, with several enemy around.

I jumped in the hummer and headed to the area, which was surrounded by enemy. I used one of the anti-tank rockets to kill a guy and I ran over and took his AK-47 and ammo and ran back in to cover as quick as I could. Then I just camped inside this house and attacked anyone who came close. Finally I got killed and thought sod it, lets try multi-player.

Which is cool they allow you to play multi-player in a demo.

There were about dozen servers with a handful of people in. The biggest one had 6 and was a deathmatch, I would of preferred to play teams, but jumped in anyway.

Sheesh! You get spawned in to this tiny area and often get killed right away as you spawn in front of some guy. So I quickly got used to running in to cover as soon as I spawned.

I got used to the game and enjoy going around John Rambo style and killing everyone I saw. And getting killed in return too.

Overall, not bad indeed. I'm going to try the command training bit tonight.

[DoubleTap]

Just a follow up to this thread.

Having played it for what it most likely the last time last night, I cannot recommend Call of Duty World at War, at least for multi-player, AT ALL.

I tried to like this game, I really did, and there are good things to recommend it, but one major thing kills it for Multi-player, and I primarily buy these games for MP.

Bottom line, the spawning in the game is #%$^& ridiculous, for two reasons.

One, you often spawn in the open, and within range of the enemy, sometimes RIGHT in front of him.

Two, spawning is too random, meaning areas you just cleared might have enemy pop in right after.

[Perfesser]

There was a big patch to America's Army that has fixed a lot of the problems that were an issue for me.

I actually enjoyed playing it for the first time since release.

I won't say I recommend it yet but at that price it's worth a try.

[delta7]

I have just traded in arma2 - its the shortist time any game has lasted in my hard drive and I feel shafted as I paid full price for it and got peanuts in return.

I got the graphic glitches and crashes and life is too short to try to fix the unfixable

kids are happy , they got a couple of older wii games in exchange