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[xoen]

I like idea of part third, but i am assuming that game is made just for multi...

shame.

[Soulwynd]

The cloak only helps against marines anyway.

Speaking of that, marines... Screwed as always... But I do hope you can place sentries in MP.

[fenrif]

where did this idea of predators not attacking whilst cloaked come from. Im pretty sure the point of cloaking was to assist in attacking, and they use it in Pred 1 & 2 and avp 1 & 2 games. Ive always favoured the marine, as i like the survivalist paranoia.

Avp 1 and 2 were two of my favourite games, if i had a pc that could run this, i would be in eager anticipation.

The books and the comics I think. The predators are meant to be all about the honor of the hunt, and are only meant to use an equal level of force as they think their prey has, or something like that. Thats why against arnie its ok to be cloaked and use a plasma caster (it blows holes in anything... except the flesh of arnie!)

If you've not read them I'd definatly reccomend them, especially if you're a fan of AVP.

[Soulwynd]

That arnie was a terminator.

[fenrif]

Terminator Conan!

[Cthulhu]

Technically Arnold did not survive getting hit in the chest with a plasmacaster.  It hit his gun and the shrapnel is what wounded him.

Anyway, yeah, not attacking while cloaked is all about honor.

If I were a marine and I saw a predator, I'd motion for it to hold on.  I'd then drop my pulse rifle, grab a stick, hold it in a menacing position, and do the "You.  Me.  Right here" finger-pointing sequence.  It would be honor-bound to accept my challenge and come down for an old-fashioned one-on-one rumble.  I'd take off my helmet.  He'd take off his helmet.  I'd ready my club.  He'd ready his Combistick.  I'd drop my club and quickly draw my pistol from its leg holster and put several rounds in his head.  I'd then pick up my pulse rifle and empty two or three clips into him, just to be sure.

Yes, I'm talking about those 99-round clips.  I want to be very sure.

EDIT:  This was my 8000th post. 

This plaque is for posterity.


       ____________________
     /           Here be            \
    |  Cthulhu's 8000th Post    |
    |                                   |
    |                                   |
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Jakkarra]

I wonder what they'd do if you just cowered in a corner...

[Cthulhu]

They'd kill you, probably with an extra helping of contempt.  Part of hunting is chasing.

In AVP2 I didn't take a trophy if something else killed them, like an explosion.  I didn't earn it.

Speaking of which, do you actually do anything with trophies in AVP2?  Or is it just for fun?

[Strange guy]

I've been playing AVP lately, and I think I'm getting a bit more energy when I take a trophy. I presume that mechanic would stay the same.

[fenrif]

Technically Arnold did not survive getting hit in the chest with a plasmacaster.  It hit his gun and the shrapnel is what wounded him.

I've not seen the film in about a year, but im pretty sure arnie takes a plasma shot to the shoulder, and all it does is leave a scorch mark.

And aren't they meant to not kill unarmed people? Isn't there a scene in the second one where it doesn't kill someone cause they aren't a threat? Might be thinking of one of the comics or something there. :S

[Cthulhu]

Demo is out right now.

Is anyone else downloading or playing it?  Want to have a game?

The only thing to play as far as I know is Deathmatch, which kind of sucks, given the nature of the game.  I'm not sure if there are any campaign or tutorial levels included.  I hope there are bots so I can practice first.

There are no bots.  There's no server browser.  COD-style matchmaking all the way.  That had better be because it's prerelease, or I'm going to be mad.

Matchmaking is terrible, took me like 20 minutes to get into a game.  It's loading now.  Apparently the full game has dedicated server support which makes me wonder why they thought it would be a good idea to release a half-assed demo that will just scare people off.

[Ssiissuu]

 I grabbed the demo. Started 'er up ready for some hissing and biting, a normal Thursday night in other words, and had to wait 10min while it searched for matches. The match I was finally dumped into was so laggy that movement was impossible, a tap of any key would send my viewpoint soaring outside of the architecture inside the level, only to rubber band back to my original viewpoint a few seconds later, with my feet cemented to the floor. About half of the players in the server were encountering significant connection issues, including a message directly declaring connectivity as an issue, the chat was fine, the game was not so much.
 
 Two matchmaking sessions later I was finally able to play, move about and all without severe lag related issues. As a marine you'd best get used to being one hit stunned or killed by Predators as well as Aliens. Steady aim with the old pulse rifle allowed me to net 2nd place with kills, straightforward'ish. Never has been my favorite race.
 
 My true love has always been the Xenomorph, so that was my next play choice, and I suppose that the movement didn't bother me all that much, nor lag, the absence of any other game modes, aside from straight death match, is what turned me off from the game. DM on a full server, that is to say playing with seven other people, was less than tense and more of a hectic brawl with players dog piling anyone who performed an insta-kill, with melee attacks. The intro to the demo proclaims that the demo is using pre-release code, maybe so, maybe not. I'll wait for a single player demo, or an updated demo, before I slap any cash down for this one. This demo was a disappointment, but I think it was just the culmination of several bad ideas, foremost being a multi player game mode that is not exactly representative of what the game will play like, or what it has to offer. Infestation game mode would have been a better choice, in my opinion.
 
 I'd have been happy if they'd just let me run loose on the ceilings, breaking lights, hissing, and scurrying about whilst defying gravity and chomping a bot or two, instead I was thrust into an arena with poor net code and three species running full tilt into each other in a button mashing frenzy. I look forward to an updated or new demo.

Edit: Here is a Youtube trailer for the infestation game mode. Perhaps it's too much to give away in a demo, or just enough to set players salivating at the prospect of gettin' their grubby hands on the full game.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, deathmatch is a really weak mode for a three-team game.

So I joined a steamgroup, To Hatch a Predator, so I can get into games right away.  I've played all three races, and I'll post a more detailed analysis later.

It's growing on me.  I was pretty pissed for a while, but it's growing on me.

[Ssiissuu]

It's not my meaning to say that the game is un fun, quite the opposite, just not where I'd have expected it to be, or where I'd expect the developers and publishers to want to show it off. If you can get past the endless 'searching for games', there is some great fun hidden away, albeit well hidden.
 
 Had a great two games earlier with 3 other people, 1 pred, 2 humies, and me as the xeno. A lot more tense, and a lot more skill involved, rather than the e-trains that develop with 8 players, it was a tense game of stalking, while being on the lookout for anyone trying to sneak up on you in turn. Encounters were mostly decisive with one player winning out and the two not involved in the combat rushing to the source of the noise in hopes of catching a kill, often far too late to do anything more than check the scene of violence for a clue as to flight direction of the victor.
 
 My last game was 1 on 1, and an absolute blast. A humie versus me as xeno. He was a great player and it was tremendous fun stalking him through the level waiting for a lapse of his vigilance/judgement in order to strike. He was a great shot and managed to keep me well out of his line of sight, with short accurate bursts of fire. Using the multiple levels to confuse his motion tracker and then setting mini-ambushes was a great time. It became a thinking game. Knocking lights out in certain areas to create small ambush areas, as well as to herd him away from some areas that were not to my advantage by knocking all the lights out there and hoping he'd be disinclined to risk grues. He played well and won by two points, but that was the most intense five minutes I've had so far in AvP3. This is more the experience I was looking for when I installed the demo, whether it's the intended experience is another matter.
 
 Keeping in mind that the code is apparently 'beta', I do hope the controls are improved. Often, as the alien, I've been unable to transition from one surface to another, ceiling to wall, wall to floor, et cetera, and have sometimes become stuck on a surface and unable to do anything save let go completely, dropping to the floor. Still quite button-mashy, even 1 on 1, and there is noticeable warping when using the grab key, but perhaps this will be resolved, and it's truly not as horrid an issue as it's being made out to be. The sounds and graphics are completely satisfactory to me, though the animations could use some more work. The marine animations seem not quite right from first person, they feel wrong, and others have voiced similar concerns, but to be honest I hardly noticed once my motion tracker started to whine, slowly at first, insistently, and I was soon completely immersed in checking my surroundings for the first sign of my hunter.

 Body awareness is great fun for the alien player, you can chase your own tail. I know, not really an issue, but there are times I've glimpsed tail movement moving across my peripheral vision and thought that another alien player was sneaking up on me, so I began spinning round trying to track him, only to find I've been chasing myself.

 Time will tell, but it isn't all bad, just not quite what it could be. My experiences with fewer players, and as a result more of a team death match feel, has me convinced that the game might be able to pull off a fantastic multi player experience, despite DM being such a poor first choice for an initial demo.

 Hope!

[Cthulhu]

Alright, my thoughts, now that I've had plenty of time to play it.

Graphics are good, but the engine may be a bit poorly optimized, I had framerate issues before I defragmented my hard drive.

Sound is pretty good, but there are some microphone issues.  There's no mic at all in-game because it's freeforall, and when you get to the lobby your mic is always on, leading to really heavy feedback and earsplitting noises.

Matchmaking is awful, if you don't have friends to play with or aren't willing to join a steamgroup for PUGs don't bother.  The first four hours I had the game I maybe got a half-hour of gametime.

Default controls are pretty bad, and obviously were thrown in as an afterthought (Q to sprint?  Do you know what a keyboard looks like?)  Mouse control is sluggish at anything below maximum sensitivity, and could still stand to be a bit slicker.

Marines are pretty powerful, they don't get owned like one might imagine, but they stand virtually no chance in melee.  Watch the ceilings, because if an alien is above you you're boned, two tail-stabs and it's over.  They're very slow, and even sprinting aren't fast enough to outrun a sprinting alien/predator.  Get into a corner and spray/pray.

Aliens are probably the strongest class as it stands right now, wallwalking has become both better and worse than it was in previous games.  Transitioning from floor to wall sucks, and is impossible under duress, but you can now jump into a wall and automatically grab it, which is quick and easy.  My advice: Don't bother running up to a wall and transitioning, just jump into it.  In addition if an alien walks off of a ledge he'll automatically transition onto it instead of falling, which is cool.  Aliens no longer have to worry about hunt/navigation vision, they always have darkvision and can see enemies through walls up to a certain distance.  It's very tempting to circle-strafe and spam E, as doing so will almost certainly net you a sync-kill.  The sync-kills are pretty neat, and range from headbiting in combat to covering their mouth and impaling them with your tail for a stealth kill.  The only way to counter a sync-kill is to press both mouse buttons just as the attack connects.  Good luck.  Like I said, aliens are very powerful, and everyone wants to be one, which leads to some frustratingly mismatched sides, as aliens are no fun to fight as Predator or Alien. 

I haven't really gotten the hang of the predator, it's a much different experience and is hard to handle.  For one, there are too many buttons for the predator to comfortably handle, and I found that most of the keys around my WASD were occupied by functions I didn't fully understand.  Instead of simply jumping at walls, a Predator has to press a button to activate the jumping reticle.

The predator starts out with just his wristblades, and has four other weapons he can get: disk, proximity mines, a spear, and one other weapon I couldn't find, I'll assume it's the plasmacaster.  Since the predator has to pick these weapons up in the map, it often plays like a big, slow alien with hit-or-miss stealth capabilities.  Depending on where you are you're virtually invisible or you stick out like a sore thumb.  Once in close range you don't have much of a chance of staying unseen, though.  The map isn't too friendly toward the Predator either.  Apart from a large central area with several high vantage points, the map is mostly narrow corridors which provide long lanes of fire for marines and shadowy corners for aliens.  Predators don't have much luck in there apart from sprinting after unwitting marines and stealth-killing them.

As Ssiissuu said, the only available mode is 8-player deathmatch, which is a nightmare and runs against what AvP is all about, which was a bad move.

Overall I like the game, it's fun, but they made some mistakes with the demo that hurt my enjoyment.  I haven't decided whether or not to preorder.