Okay, so I tried to keep an open mind and remain optimistic about the multiplayer but given what I've seen online and from the rumblings about staff layoffs and no future Linux support for Wolfenstein, and the pitiful number of people on servers at any given time, there's really no point in slogging through the Wolfenstein multiplayer anymore at it seems to me that the publisher is giving up on the game too so why should I wait around for it when I can easily play Quake Wars or TF2 for some solid online multiplayer.
If this game had come out maybe in 2000 then we'd have something here but this is 2009 and this game is missing team based multiplayer aspects that have been in team shooters since Return to Castle Wolfenstein which came out in 2001 and were further refined in Enemy Territory, Battlefield 2, and Quake Wars.
In fact, how hard would it have been to just take Quake Wars, drop the vehicles, reskin everything for Axis vs. Allies and make some new maps? Using Quake Wars as our template lets go through all of the things missing from this new iteration of Wolfenstein.
1. Maximum slots on server. Currently, a Wolfenstein server can only have 16 players total or eight per side. That's not even enough for a baseball team, and baseball is about a million times more boring than any shooter ever made. Yeah, that's right baseball is more boring than Daikatana. Now, they try to counter this limitation by making the maps more cramped and I'm fine with that but if you really want longevity in most shooters you have to make the population per server a bit higher so people can get in to a server with their buddies pretty easily and to allow people the chance to meet more people and potentially get clans going and so forth.
But more importantly, a higher population count results in more carnage and the chance for pubbers to get a good, solid fix of gaming, and blow off some steam or just be a dick to total strangers. Bloodshed and owning the other team is the name of the game but if there's only eight people to square off against it loses that choatic feeling of more populated servers.
2. No team communication chat. Yes, the game contains voice chat but remember gamers are an introverted or shy lot who play games because they won't be running for class president anytime soon so giving orders or talking with strangers is not their forte. But, if the game had included any sort of quickchat or comm rose system then this might have been avoided. Besdies which, with the right mapping of quick commands to the keyboard, hitting one or two keys to give an order is quicker than typing it out and often quicker than using the voice chat anyway.
As it is right now there's no way to comm chat except by using the team text chat command which can be severely limiting since you have to move your hands away from your movement keys or worse, off of the mouse at which point you might as well tell send up a signal flare to let the enemy know where you are since you're a sitting duck.
There are also a myriad of gameplay mechanics which probably only mean something to the hardest of hardcore RtCW old school players so it probably is not worth delving into those too much except in the forums where the developers and game testers (assuming they haven't been fired) can read them.
The most upsetting part about this is that if those two big pieces were corrected, this game would be above average. The graphics are spectacular, the mechanics for shooting and moving are solid, and the class based balance and the need to make choices on your upgrades gives the game a nice little extra tactical decision making process. At the very least it would make the game an excellent alternative to the BF2 Project Reality (aka March-Dig Simulator 3000) game which a lot of my friends enjoy.
As it is though, pretty graphics don't make for a long lasting game. Good gameplay and a robust user interface to encourage teamwork is what makes a game like this last and unless these things are added or corrected then this game server population will be gone by Christmas. It's a pathetic end to the descendent of the two finest team shooters of this decade (RtCW, Enemy Territory) but the genre has grown way past what's been offered here.
3 comments:
I have to agree with your assessment, it looks as though the MP was always an afterthought and was not given any serious dev time. As you've pointed out the purists may have been happy with a re-skinned ETQW sans vehicles (although the vehicles are fun to many ppl). But what we got was a lobotomized W:ET rather than a slightly castrated ETQW so everyone looses. Some ppl looked to this game as the next big thing in MP games and made excessive remarks about uninstalling earlier games to step up to the next big thing. Many of them have sheepishly returned to their old games and quietly mumbled how bland Wolfenstein turned out to be. A huge opportunity was lost here. RIP.
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