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[nenjin]

I was sort of afraid of this after watching the 17 minute playthrough.

Especially unlimited ammo. I get why. Being out of ammo sucks. But there is probably nothing more Spacehulk-y (in terms of story) than either a) "By the Emperor, my bolter has jammed!" or b) "Brother-Captain we're running low on ammunition."

Melee did indeed look one note and near impossible to see anything. I kept mistaking the power fist for like, a forearm parry because the animation is a backhand....?

Are levels decently procedurally genned? Cause I got the impression they just swap around the order of fuck-off huge tilesets.

I wasn't expecting the world of it but it seems like visuals is where all the love is in this game.

[boki]

There is only one level in multiplayer that is pre set (no randomization) and a tutorial. The level is big and "open", as you can explore and chose the path you want (its not linear). You have a set of objectives that you need to do in order.  Mobs are pre set on same position and same scripted triggers. No randomization of anything in the beta. I know they talked about dynamic AI, but nothing from that is in beta (or it doesnt feel like its in)

[Sirus]

Just watched TotalBiscuit play for less than half an hour. He's a pretty big 40k fan, so his lack of enthusiasm was pretty damning even if the less-than-stellar gameplay wasn't bad enough.

Compare this to his video on 40k: Space Marine and see the difference for yourself.

[pisskop]

piss enjoyed this game.  or at least playing a digital copy with somebody.  Not sure hell ever play an fps

[GiglameshDespair]

It's by the same devs as EYE divine cybermancy?

Oh dear.

[Rolan7]

...Oh!
Well now I'm conflicted.  EYE is... off... but ran well, and the unease works well with the setting.  I strongly recommend it.  I played through 6 times, of the 4 necessary to get the "real ending" which only asked more questions opened your mind

But while the gunplay and swordplay are alright, I'm... skeptical about buying an actual 40k game by them.  Which is tricky, because they were clearly inspired by 40k, but they did their own thing.  And it was very good.  No answers, much dread, maybe insane.

Which would work pretty well on a dreadnought, but... hrm.  On the fence.
EYE is damn good though, if you don't mind unanswered questions.

[Retropunch]

I thought EYE was fantastic - it's very original, and whilst janky, that works well with the setting.

They've obviously got some real skills in atmosphere and stuff, but I'm worried they won't be able to pull off what basically needs to be a really solid FPS with a bit of horror thrown in.

[Cthulhu]

They pushed release back to the 14th but still put the game on the front page to fuck with you.

[nenjin]

All in all, I'm comfortably back into "wait for full release, see what people say about the full game and/or wait for a big sale." Single level previews for games with lengthy campaigns are probably not best to judge the whole game by....but they're a good way to judge how the core mechanics feel. I enjoyed E.Y.E as a playable curiosity but it was so far out there that I forgave most of its glaring, awkward problems, like you do with amusing mods. I'm less willing to do so with a licensed IP I care a lot about. Streum has clearly leveled up as a dev studio since E.Y.E. But it may not have been enough.

Compare and contrast Deathwing with Vermintide. Vermintide has enough depth in combat mechanics and handling, mob AI and spawning and enemies, that it's really replayable. There's a variety of melee attacks per weapon, directional attacks, charged attacks, shoves, animations for staggering, dodging. Levels are richly designed although not procedural and enemies swarm in large numbers from all parts of it. Swarms large enough to actually get a reaction out of like "holy shit" even after hours and hours of playing. But it's a MP game with the "campaign" woven into a light story to accompany each level, and it's got a gear acquisition mechanic aimed at replaying levels a lot for randomly chosen loot.

Deathwing by contrast seems a lot more primitive in some ways, and focused on a more traditional singleplay style campaign and narrative, with bigger levels to explore and xp-based experience gain. You get ur gun and ur punch, maybe ur psychic powers...and the ability to use some AI features like healing, there's unlimited ammo.....that's pretty much it.

So I dunno. If it's not improved at release or a while after, I'll probably get it on sale as a single player game to just grind through for the 40k experience, rather than trying to rope friends into buying it to play with me like I did Vermintide.

[nenjin]

Arise, servants of the Emperor!

So I never did pick this game up. Sounded too thin at release, had performance issues.

The devs are releasing the Enhanced Edition soon, a free update to the game. It improves performance and adds visual customization options that you can grind to unlock by playing through missions.

It's also $15 on the Humble Bundle for the next day or so. Praise Him.

Downloading it right now. According to some the performance is already improved over release, so I figured I'd get familiar with it then really dig in after the EE drops.

[Sirus]

Let us know how it is!

[nenjin]

Well after a couple hours and 2 missions.....

I like it! Some stuff in the current non EE release is...a little embarrassing that it's still there, after this long. Like French translations instead of English on the odd weapon, annoying mission VO w/ graphic staying on your screen like, the entire level so you can't read some fluff text. Guys getting stuck in spawns on occasion. Those are small but kind of annoying blemishes to see.

Those would be my biggest criticisms for it right now.

It runs well on my machine with everything maxed out at 1920x1080.

For gameplay, it's less like L4D than you think from looking at it. Levels are _yuge_, and they blend the tiles really nicely together so it feels almost organic the way levels are put together. There's no real gating that I can see, you're just kind of free to roam in whatever direction looks interesting (for me it's usually in the opposite direction of the objective.) I enjoy exploring levels, they're chalk full of detail, and there's the handful of collectibles to look in each level to encourage you to check the hulk's dankest corners.

So far it's also unlike L4D in that there aren't really "special" enemies. I've just started seeing hybrids firing krak missile launchers (dangerous) and autoguns (laughable.) I know there are like, Tyranid Warriors or Broodlords or some shit later too as quasi boss enemies. But you're not constantly on edge like in VT2 or L4D. Instead keeping an eye on your radar a lot of the time and keeping your ears open for the sound of genestealers coming for you, often planning where you're going to hit them instead of just reacting to ambushes coming from nowhere. Spawn points for swarms are clearly marked on your minimap so you sort of know where to look for trouble before it finds you.

In terms of the meta gameplay, there's XP you get from your rating on the mission, where various parameters are measured like "Honorable kills" and the # of doors and turrets you hacked, and how many times you retreated using the Psygate during the mission. (Completion time is noted but I don't think it gets rated.) The XP you get translates to skill points to spend on three different skill trees (loosely titled  "Psychic Disciplines", "Resistance/Defense For You","Resistance/Defense For Your Allies.") Nothing terribly fancy going on there. You can also tweak your weapon loadout and the loadouts of your other squad members as well.

Speaking of the Psygate mechanic btw, it's another contributing factor to why SH:DW doesn't feel or play like other games in its genre.

It goes like this....

The only truly important resource that I've seen in the game so far is the Apothecary's heals. (Maybe some heavy weapons later on have ammo counts, but most weapons have unlimited ammo.) Apothecaries get quite a few heals but there is a limited number of them. They pretty much heal a Terminator to full health when used. But if a Terminator goes down they're just dead. They don't go down in to a pile with temp health waiting for pats on the back and buttocks. They don't respawn some where in the level for you to find again, ala L4D or VT. They're just dead.

And the Psyker has the ability Psygate, which after taking a few seconds to cast, immediately teleports the whole party to a safe area (your battleship) where everyone is fully healed/revived and all the consumable items (i.e. the Apothecaries' heals) are refilled.

How many times you can use the Psygate depends on your willpower, which so far increases in large chunks when you recover relics in a level, and maybe as you kill lots of stuff.

So unlike L4D or VT where it's this constant urgent forward motion to not die to attrition or get pounced by a special and wrecked, and resources are super limited and need to be carefully rationed, in SH:DW it's more like a dungeon crawler with light horde elements where you just "go back to town" and heal up when you need to. As I see it, you'd have to be doing pretty shitty to run out of Psygates completely and suffer a total party wipe. So overall the game is structured to encourage to exploration, taking in the details, killing endless trickles, streams and clots of guys, playing methodically and taking your time to get the best score.

And the swarms are of a smaller magnitude than in VT, at least playing SP and this early in the campaign. There's usually a trickle of guys coming from somewhere and they show up on your radar/minimap so you vaguely know when you're about to get hit. It keeps you paying attention while not necessarily constantly bracing for a life or death struggle.

So the net result is kind of a cool dungeon crawl/bug hunt through a derelict gothic ship, backed up by adequate 40k voice acting, great visuals, and some mild RPG leveling/collecathon tidbits to help keep you invested.

Combat....I dunno. Because there's so much shadow and lighting from gun fire, it's often hard for me to actually see wtf is going on some times. You just kind of unload at where you see a pair of yellow eyes, or where you see targets lit up when you're aiming down sights with some weapons. I'm kind of used to the visceral crush of combat like in VT2, where you can usually see and feel and appreciate most kills. This is much murkier and shadowy. Everything feels very cramped, the HUD doing you no favors there, so the "crush" is more like a whole genestealer filling up your screen while you unload on it at point blank. Melee combat is a little slugginsh and plodding, it feels, and I don't like a lot of the animations for it. Although moving and sprinting and so forth actually feels pretty spritely for Terminator armor, so that's a plus. Not like, canon-breaking levels of spriteliness. Just enough so you hate life a little less back tracking through levels. Combat is engaging but so far it's not really delivering those "hohoho YEAH BABY" moments like say, VT2 or Killing Floor 2. There's psychic powers for the Epistolary to use too, but they feel more like a little +1 to your combat capabilities than something you can really lean on or that needs to be managed. Just quick abilities on cooldowns you fire off on occasion. The meat of this game is played at the end of a blade or the barrel of a bolter.

The story is ok so far. A little confusingly executed at times, but there's a wonderful sense of presence in the levels which the logs and lore help you understand and connect to. Like reading a log of a Cadian Battleship about going home and thinking "yeah, ok, this section of the hulk must be an Imperial Guard troop ship." Levels do kind of feel like a crazy labyrinth through an actual space hulk, with wildly varying rooms, dead end collapsed corridors, walls and bulk heads to smash through, the screech of metal, hissing of pipes and the rumble of the ship replacing any actual music.....it's the kind of game that makes me want to play it in the dark and get really immersed.

There's plenty I'm still unclear about. Like I'm not sure what the point of having different sections of your Terminator armor take damage independently is. Maybe I need to have one section completely wrecked to understand, but right now it just feels like an abstraction of a health bar. The Apothercaries' heal turns all the red parts blue, so uh, I guess that means something? The game is kind of bad explaining some of the finer points of the mechanics. Like it didn't explain how Willpower works at all, I had to Google for it.

Despite that, in balance I'm enjoying it so far for $15. At $40 I might be a little miffed at some of the more glaring parts that have gone unpatched up to now. A friend bought it today too off the Humble Bundle though, and it said they were temporarily out of Steam keys? Was kinda of disappointed we didn't get a chance to play coop together today. I assume there was too much demand for how many keys were released....? Seems like a dumb mistake to make.

To try to summarize this ramble again, Space Hulk: Deathwing Unenhanced Edition feels like a good SP game so far, as long as you're not worried about getting the best mission ratings because the AI partners can be a little dumb, and juggling them with commands in the middle of combat is not easy sometimes. It remains to be seen how hard the game gets later on down the road, in sections designed for coop/mp. Might it aslo get a little repetitive once you start seeing the same stuff over and over? A definite possibility.

It also remains to be seen how much of the game gets a polish pass in the EE. Because there are a couple of spots that need it. But if they add that missing polish, and the cosmetics is all its cracked up to be (looks like every weapon has like 6 skins, a couple gameplay tweak options, and there are like 8 or so armor skins), anything else they would do would be a bonus and I'd call it a very solid game all around.

[Sensei]

Well it looks like Enhanced Edition is out. Someone who owns the game, is it good yet?

[nenjin]

I don't have the time to play it and won't for a while. Here's what I can say though:

You get account XP for completing missions. You spend this XP outside of the main game loop on quite a few different things.

First, it's broken down by character class.

Then it's broken down by their weapons (about 6 per character), their armor set, their "Perks" and their banner.

Within each category (except banner), there are multiple things to buy with XP.

Each class has at least 6 armor variants that are a recolor and in some cases a reskin of their terminator armor. There are also perk like "widgets" you can purchase and attach to you armor. These are broken up in to a couple categories, but the general gist is one category is a straight alteration effect like "20% more this but 20% less that", and the second category is a series of perks that usually are like "deal 5/10/15/20% more ranged damage" or "etc...melee damage" or " etc...armor."

Each weapon that a class can use also has recolor and reskin options you can unlock, as well as perk like upgrades you can buy. Most of them add cosmetics to the weapon along with the package, so you can put a snub nosed barrel on your storm bolter to increase damage, or longer thinner barrels to increase accuracy, or a bigger scope for dat 3x aiming on your fully automatic Storm Bolter...There's medallions and badges an stuff you can unlock and attach to the weapon too that don't do anything but look cool.

Each character class also has a set of perks unique to them you can unlock. So the Assault has melee and survival focused perks while the Heavy Weapons guy has ranged-focused perks and the Psyker has psyker-power focused perks...you get the idea.

All in all the cosmetics I feel are fairly robust but the gameplay side of customization....a little weak. A little drab. It's % based upgrades to broad categories like "melee damage" and "ranged damage" and "armor" and "health". "Make this psychic power do more damage." There's the occasional cray cray mod in there too like "attack speed with an axe." While it might help make a certain Terminator build better at what they already do, or cover a weak point of their's, I don't really think they're going to add that much to game except to let you challenge higher difficulties to unlock more stuff faster. I suppose it's better than nothing at all and certainly gives you something to chase, but let's be honest, we've all been playing enough games lately to be getting a little tired of the whole unlock grind thing. And this one isn't especially interesting to boot. I give them props for the weapon customization and the fact they tried to give you multiple (and I do mean multiple) categories to choose improvements and tweaks. Seems to be a little bit of a case of quantity over quality though.

To note, you can only equip one upgrade from each category at a time.

And then there's several different banners you can unlock, which I think changes the banner hanging in the "ready room" of the game.

In addition to that they've added a Interrogator Chaplain class, which I think has vaguely-team-buffy sorts of abilities and gets a Crozius Arcanum and all that good stuff.

In addition to all THAT. some guy from the steam forums said the following:

Enhanced edition brings a TON of replayability in the form of Special Missions. As a closed beta tester for EE I can tell you they ramped up the number and quality of Special Missions over regular Deathwing by an order of magnitude.

The environements are way more interactive now - you'll operate cranes, ventilation systems, security systems, servitors, CATs, Servo-skulls, ships guns, torpedos, etc etc.

Which, if true, is good because there was pretty no interactivity in the non-EE version of the campaign levels. Just some consoles to click on, doors to either open, close, block, unblock or smash down. And I think I had to shoot a container as part of a mission objective once. And I guess there were plenty of explosive thingies like barrels and pipes and stuff in most rooms too. So I hope what he says is true. Maybe all this stuff has been saved and spent on the post-campaign "Special Missions" which I have not yet gotten to.

So let me just say this about Space Hulk: Deathwing. It is, by far, the most gorgeous and "authentic-looking" 40k game I've ever played. Better than Space Marine. Better than any DoW I've played. Every visual, from every angle is lavished with detail that screams 40k, and I think the game is worth playing as a 40k fan just to walk through all that for a while and drink it in. It's 40k done right and so high res you can read the fucking scribbles of almost every banner and printed thing you come across, that's how detailed it is. Door frames, something so mundane in fantasy or sci-fi most don't think about them, are works of art rich in gothic detail.

So is it better? There's certainly more to do with your time. But the emphasis of this is clearly MP and the Special Missions. As a SP experience its legs are only so long, and let me tell you, the AI is not something you can lean on for something beyond casual play.

Get it because you want to experience being a terminator and stomping through the dankest 40k environments yet crafted by man. On that front it will not disappoint.

[Ygdrad]

Does the AI still friendly fire friendly units all the time causing you to waste what few heals you have?