StarDestroyer.Net BBS

To give the gameplay more of a kick there's something called a direct-fire mode. Instead of you giving an order for the tank to destroy something, you control the tank and its turret. It's basically like an action game, as drive the tank around the map yourself and try and engage targets by using the mouse as an aiming cursor. You'll find yourself mashing the button to get a round off, or be in such a hurry that you miss the target. It makes the action much more immediate and personal as you're not just sitting back and giving orders, you're caught up in the battle directly.

There's also a reason you should blow things up aside from just having fun. The resource system no longer depends on capturing nodes that provide fuel or ammo. In fact, there are no capture nodes. Instead, you're rewarded fuel and ammo for killing enemy units and vehicles. And as for repairing damage, there is a repair ability that costs munitions points. You want to ration it out, though, not only because of the point cost, but because it immobilizes the tank, making it a nice fat target.

This is an RTS that almost looks like a shooter.Meanwhile, each of your crewman have special abilities that they can unlock, not unlike the doctrine abilities seen in CoH. Litzke, the loader, can unlock high-explosive rounds, rapid fire, and improved rapid fire, letting him load the gun faster. Schraf, the driver, can unlock flank speed to drive faster as well as turret overdrive, which lets the turret move faster. Burndt, the commander, can unlock a machine gun atop the turret, as well as a smoke grenade launcher and the ability to call in an artillery barrage. Schultz, the gunner, can improve his marksmanship. All these skills are persistent, so if you unlock them in one mission they carry over to subsequent missions.

Tanasinn wrote:The idea of controlling some of your units more directly at least mildly appeals.

Stark wrote:Didn't CoH have a 'reverse' button? I'm pretty sure it did.

Stark wrote:By 'new' are we to understand 'like World in Conflict'? It's actually quite amusing that they've moved away from resourcing (finally, Relic grew up lol) but they apparently still have the different TYPES of resources. .

Tales of Valor isn't an expansion that requires you to own CoH; it's a stand-alone game that focuses on you controlling a handful of units at a time. In fact, this isn't a "traditional" RTS game, as the single-player campaign doesn't feature any kind of base building or node capturing as seen in CoH. This is a much more tactical game in that sometimes you'll control only a single tank and its crew. The reason is because you become much more invested in your units if you don't have an endless supply of them being churned out at some base. And if you don't have to manage a dozen vehicles and squads over an entire battlefield, you can focus on carefully controlling a small team as it navigates around the map.

Commander 598 wrote:I haven't seen much of anything yet that qualifies as "far off" or "changed" beyond the baseless part. I think you're all just getting worked up over previewers who don't really know what they're talking about. They see "boss fights", I see a commander unit stuffed in a likely linear campaign map, etc.

Of course, I haven't actually seen any of the newer gameplay videos yet, but I doubt it's anything significant.

Covenant wrote:Baseless sounds grand, I'm very hopeful. I'm not expecting it to be a strategy revolution, but it'll take the focus off base-nannying. I hope there's objectives and land to take and sieze though.