Chardok wrote:I personally had a lot of fun traversing the free fire zone. It had a really good balance of cinematic splosion-race, sense of accomplishment, and frustration. Any takers on that?
That was really awesome. Shame they didn't make some kind of multiplayer death-hell-race mode using a super-extended FFZ, preferably one going through all the different terrain types.
I caught myself muttering "stay on target...
stay on target!" when the other
racersRed Faction suicide drivers wound up skidding out or turned around, and the occasional expletive when one of them was driving at
me or got thrown through the air by a cannon impact and landed on my roof.
MKSheppard wrote:ShadowDragon8685 wrote:It never did that to me. Of course, I bought it through Steam. It bitches about Micro$uck Live!, but doesn't disable loading and saving.
I got mine through steam. It disabled loading/saving.
I don't know what to tell you, then. I've not had that problem. I don't know why you're experiencing that nonsense.
Would you rather that the Super Seekret Red Faction Base be a group of buildings just off the main highway, or would you RATHER drive ten hours through Martian wilderness fending off notReaver attacks to get to an actually legitimately hidden base?
Since you play the game in single player, it would not be that hard for you to drive down a canyon which acts as a transition point in which the screen fades to black and you see "ARRIVING AT THE BASE / LEAVING THE BASE.
As the game was designed to be as seamless as possible, that would have required hacking the engine up - not to mention the question of where you'd put the damn base in Eos, since you've got cliffs on the west, EDF galore to the north, sheer mountaintops to the east and the recently-conquered Free Fire Zone to the south, and the idea of respawning all the way back at the freaking free-fire zone if you get splattered in northern Eos sucks.
They
could have done that, sure, but not a lot of people have trouble believing that either the EDF are complete retards without satellite/drone recon and no human intelligence worth a damn (which is not implausible given the way they treat Martians,) or that the bases are an acceptable break from reality.
Stark wrote:Since the bases are pathetically small and largely useless, you could just give the player a phone and let them use civilian workshops and remove the need for bases entirely.
You could have, and that probably
would have made things more realistic - instead of having a big fuckoff "Red Faction Here" base, have a weapons locker in the back of some tool shop in a garage garage that outwardly doesn't appear to be a weapons locker as is only marked as a UI element, and your last vehicle and a new one can spawn in the garage...
The problem, of course, is what happens when that garage
gets demolished, falls down for no apparent reason, as is so likely to happen to any free-standing structure visited by Alec Mason.
The Red Faction base gets rebuilt, even if you raze it to the ground; even if you blow the whole base sky-high with a fuel tanker truck driven off a cliff and landed nosefirst in the garage, a gigantic fuel silo, an absurd number of portable hydrogen tanks, a ridiculous number of landmines and an insane number of demolition charges.
(What? Why are you looking at me like that? They shouldn't have built the goddamn base in Oasis at the bottom of a walled crater if they didn't want me to take shortcuts and ramp off the cliff edge, whether I'm in a dune buggy or a tanker truck or a tank.
)
Point is (aside from mega-explosions, which leave only Samanya, a weapons locker, and one very startled radio operator at a radio desk as the only objects taller than 3cm where the garage used to be,) you can believe that the Faction could rebuild their base after the
player Drones inevitably demolish it, but if your safehouses are actually in the middle of the civilian terrain, what then?
Do the civilian buildings get rebuilt, too, which would seem to be odd that the EDF is allowing the materials to be used to reconstruct civilian buildings while they're apparently so short in supply that they can't rebuild bases or guardhouses of their own. Does only the garage that's a hidden Red Faction safehouse get rebuilt, inevitably leaving one standing building amongst a sea of bare foundations? Does the garage stay demolished, leaving a monster pickup truck with machine guns welded to the bonnet and a tool locker full of demolition charges and machine guns spawning atop a bare foundation? Does the garage's demolition make that location no-longer-a-safehouse, and no longer spawning monster pickup trucks with machine guns for Alec?
All of these solutions present problems:
If civilian buildings including the garage get rebuilt, it creates as much of a break from reality as the whole "seekret base 900m off the freeway" does.
If just the garage gets rebuilt, sooner or later you'll have a funny aneurysm moment wondering when the Drones are going to think to look at that building that keeps getting rebuilt no matter how many times it blows up - not to mention the fact that it screws with the "run away to safehouse to shake your wanted level" mechanic.
It's even worse if the garage stays demolished but the armed Red Faction(tm) vehicle and the weapons locker continue to spawn. I don't know about you, but I'd think that would get the attention of any Drone in the area.
The last option, of course, is the worst of all, because what happens if the player demolishes all his safehouses? Does he get a save-erasing game-over like it's some kind of Roguelike? Is there like, one hidden base in the back end of beyond that respawns but none others do, meaning the player has to drive for five minutes across Mars to get from the Badlands to Eos? I guess you could mitigate it by rebuilding buildings.
Honestly, I think you're right in that it might have been more
realistic if the Red Faction was run out of the back of ordinary buildings and you found boxes of ammo in somebody's fridge and got your weapons out of a cache in the fifth locker from the front on the right in an old Ultor airlock at the bottom of a steep slope half-buried in dust, and Samanya worked her technological miracles out of random tool-shops and all. It might even have been as much fun if not moreso.
They could even have implemented tech to allow for this to be random, so the reload point/vehicle point/weapon cache points would be from a random and wide selection, chosen anew when the player enters the area and sent to his HUD. As areas became too demolished they would've been written off until they'd been rebuilt - they could even have implemented tech to allow for buildings to be reconstructed piece-by-piece, and for prefabs to be erected on the sites of previously-existing buildings.
But that would've been a
lot more work for
very marginal gain, in the eyes of a game developer pushing to get the game out in time for Christmas.
Shep's idea could have worked, too, but again - it would've been more work for next-to-no gain. Most people can just accept it as a bit of an abstraction or an acceptable break from reality, just like they can accept Mars now having a dense enough oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere for human beings to walk around without any kind of respiratory assistance whatsoever, let alone pressure assistance.
Besides, it would've fucked with the "get these random people back to the Red Faction base" and the "get this 'hot' vehicle back to the Red Faction base" mission types, they would've needed to be fixed to work with the transition somehow, unless you're just accepting that everybody gets to lose two seconds off their timer during the transition.
