exaVolt 3 CTB First Impressions

I had my first chance to catch an exaVolt tournament yesterday, and was fully impressed. exaVolt is a series of tournaments for Microvolts, and yesterdays match-ups featured some of the top teams in the game.

In the Stream I followed I managed to see Shank (21st seed) upset 2 teams, and nearly upset a third, only for them to invite an extra player into observer mode which got them disqualified. This was quite a shame as they did well in their second game. The first one they were 4-1 down, and Death Valley (12) seemed to just give up, then 2 of them left the server almost thinking they had won. This gave Shank the chance to grab a cap back, and after that they just steamrolled. In the second match, we saw them playing Crazy Toys (5). The match was played on PVC Factory, and was extremely evenly matched throughout the course of the game, with Shank surprisingly managing to pull off yet another upset.

Match 3 was Exordium (1) vs Nordic (8), and was certainly one of the most entertaining matches I have seen in eSports for a long time. Both teams were very evenly matched, and the game went back an forth for ages. In the final few minutes of the game Nordic were one capture up, and no matter how hard Exordium pushed they just couldn't manage to capture. They had 2 pulls in the last minute, with the final one getting within a few feet of the flag, only to be stopped as the timer ticked down to about 3 seconds to go. Nordic managed to hold on to the lead, but sadly lost out to inHarmony (4) in the next match.

inHarmony originally lost to Shank, but they were allowed to advance through as this was the game that Shank got disqualified. The game seemed to be in inHarmonys favor all game however every time they seemed to go anywhere AngryDay would step-up and make a seriously clutch play. Out of all the players, he impressed me the most as some of his kills were incredible and really kept his team in it. As we moved onto the Semi-Finals where inHarmony knocked out Nordic, we saw Forbidden (2) vs BlackBox (3). This was meant to be a grudge match since the two teams appear to be rivals. However the map it was played on (Neighborhood) is far to big for 4v4 and the majority of the game teams we just sat back in their base. There was very little action so overall it was a disappointing match.

The final took place on PVC Factory, and was between Blackbox and inHarmony. The game was over far faster than expected, with Blackbox picking up some quick captures and ending the game fairly quickly. Forbidden managed to defeat Nordic in the 3rd place match-up which was played off stream.

The commentating was fairly good as well, and was from a player known as Chipz. He was fairly new to the commentating game, as you could tell sometimes he wasn't sure what to say. However his energy when something big happened was incredible and was certainly entertaining to listen to which the matches were being played. With a few more weeks practice he will defiantly be a great caster to watch, and will offer a lot to the games being played.

Overall I was really impressed by the quality of matches being played, and the stream was fairly good quality. It was slightly lagging frame rate wise at times, but certainly watchable. The community was also hanging out on IRC, and I learnt quite a bit from them during the evening. I would like to also put a thanks out to Bacon, who is a Mod over on the MV site, for sticking behind after the tournament and explaining quite a bit more of what goes on within the scene. It was interesting to learn about it, and for such a small community there is a lot going on!

Battlefield 3 expansions revealed

EA have just announced information on the next two Battlefield 3 expansions. Battlefield 3 Close Quarters is to be the first released, followed this fall by Battlefield 3 Armored Kill. While I am excited for Armored Kill as it contains lots more of the typical Battlefield arsenal, (vehicle combat, large maps and so forth), Close Quarters actually fills me with a bit of worry.

When Battlefield 3 came out, one of the biggest complaints that I saw was about the maps. People complained that they were too enclosed, and there just wasn't enough space for proper vehicular combat. The levels Metro and Seine Crossing were commonly complained about due to their urban setting, something people felt belonged more in Call of Duty. I personally agreed with such comments at the time, and still do. What Battlefield has always had is its own niche of combining infantry and vehicular combat almost flawlessly.

In todays current gaming selection, modern combat is taking over. Nearly every game is either modern combat, or bases itself very closely to the Call of Duty formula. What Battlefield 3 did was push itself away from this by giving people the option of vast environments, which they could happily destroy with tanks, jets and other forms of armored weaponry. With the release of BF3CQ they are planning on moving more towards that CoD formula, which is something they really don't need to do. On the BF3CQ preview page they mention the word competitive. This is something that most likely won't exist in Battlefield.

Battlefield has struggled to make a huge impact in the past at events, and I believe that it will continue to struggle. The problem is that while Battlefield 3 is a great game, it requires far to many players to actually form a team, so organisations aren't willing to sponsor teams as often. By reducing it to Close Quarters they are now allowing for making teams smaller (Something we could have already done anyway with Squad Deathmatch and Rush), which makes it easier for teams to form and organisations to send teams to events. However by doing this they are now losing the niche and entering the 4v4 or 5v5 area of competitive FPS, a scene dominated by Counter Strike and Call of Duty 4 on the PC and Halo and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 on the Xbox, and personally I don't think that it can compete.

Battlefield 3 was never made with competition in mind, it was made for the huge maps and 32-64 player games. Trying to bring that formula down to 8-10 player servers is only going to ruin the experience. They would be best leaving Battlefield as it is, and actually do something with Medal of Honor if competition is where they want to go. The last iteration of Medal of Honor was forgotten in just a few weeks, and failed to make a big impact on the gaming world at all. Battlefield Expansions are gaining far more discussion than Medal of Honor is, which is something EA need to change if they want to continue spending money on the series. Now personally I would love to see them go to Medal of Honor with competition in mind, and take it back to WW2 and it's Allied Assault roots on the PC. Even today MoH:AA is still one of the finest PC games made, and still has quite a healthy community.

EA has the money, and certainly the talent, within their company if they wish to make a truly incredible competitive game. Turning Battlefield into EAs flagship competitive game, and moving it towards CQC will only upset the hardcore Battlefield players and be yet another question to the long list of "Why does MoH actually exist?".

SMNCs staying power, and a brief update on Halo 4

Recently I was accepted on to the beta test of Super Monday Night Combat. So far the game has been enjoyable, and is certainly a very good attempt at bringing the DotA genre to a shooter perspective. The game has multiple maps, which is something the DotA genre never managed, which are all well made and each one has it's own completely different feel to it. The Pros, this games name for champions/heroes, are also fun to play with most been unique even though a couple are a little too similar. In this respect I can't praise the game enough, so what makes me think that it might not live around to tell the tale?

The casual market is certainly the biggest market right now, and while yes I strive for competitive aspects in each and every game, if the casual market is over looked then the game will rapidly decline. This is bound to be the case with SMNC. Being a DotA style game, it has the learning curve of running head first in to a brick wall. League of Legends countered this with a fantastic tutorial mode, and good in depth write ups of what champions did. They have now also added videos to all the characters so you can easily identify what is what.

SMNC doesn't do any of this. The practice mode it has is actually a custom game mode, with no practice to be found. Also finding information on characters is difficult as the option is a tiny little button not clearly marked. While they have moved it to a better location instead of being down in the bottom right hand corner on it's own, it still isn't clear what it does. This is all in the store page however, come match time when you choose a character I still haven't found a single way that tell you what each champion does. So you have no idea what you are going to be playing as, nor fighting against, if you didn't find it in the store before. With this being a free to play game I doubt peoples first reaction will be to jump in the store. The UI is also horribly clustered, and it force you in to a global chat room which takes up a huge chunk of the home page, something everyone I have played with has complained about. The other major issue I have with this game is the matchmaking system.

Matchmaking is something that is now rapidly growing in the PC market, and I no longer mind this as they are running on dedicated servers and it is used to make sure you get a good match. Sadly this isn't the case with SMNC. The matchmaking just slaps ten people in a game together. Which means that if a premade is going somewhere, as a single player you have a chance to end up fighting against it. I have been in many matches where the premade just destroys me, and I have no way of fighting back. The worst problem about this, is that you can feed champions like in any DotA style game. As you level up you can increase your skills and damage, as well as gaining a passive health and damage increase. Now when you hit level 8 you have already seen you damage increase, and you are also now doing 50% additional damage if you choose to spec into it from the offensive skill. 50% is far to big a number, as if you get fed early on it's not uncommon to be level 8 while the opponent is around level 4-5. As a premade you will most likely have a team of level 8s fighting a team of level 5s, which means the non-premade team has even less of a chance.

The game is a really solid game, with a few balance tweaks needed. This wasn't meant to be a game review saying that SMNC is a poor game, far from it in fact as I love playing it at the minute. However I am used to playing in competitive rule sets and against higher skilled opponents. As a casual player I can only see this game been hell right now until they tweak things and massively improve the matchmaking (Which is something they have actually attempted in Patch 27).  The game will be free to play so I recommend it to everyone upon release as I'm hoping these issues will be sorted out by then.

Halo 4


Just a brief update on Halo 4 folks. Frank O'Connor has come out and told us that "I’ve responded to it a couple of times. There aren’t ‘perks’ in the game as being described here. And classic Halo is still there."

This is good news as it means that CoD style perks won't be used. I didn't think this would be the case as such, and don't think I mentioned as such yesterday. He has also said that the engine isn't the same used for Anniversary, and more news will be out on the composer soon. 343i also asked for some questions which they were planning on answering in an update. Once that update is out I will dissect the information for you all.

The source for the Frank O'Connor quote is found here.

Halo 4 details released. How does it fair up for competitive play?

The first thing I need to mention here, is this is my opinion based on the information released so far. The information comes from the following sources;

Halo 4 First Look Video
11 Things we've learned about Halo 4

In the video we can see at a few occasions that sprint will be back in the game. However there is no visible sign of a sprint bar, so this may just be default now as opposed to being an armor ability. This doesn't instantly make the game un-competitive as quite a few games are using sprint features today. However it did have some downsides on Halo Reach due to the long kill times. It meant that escaping a bad situation was far to easy, so players weren't punished for making bad decisions. We can also see the Battle Rifle has returned, while it's difficult to tell completely it looks like the BR Spread is coming back. When we have the inconsistency of the Battle Rifle combined with sprint, the kill times on Halo 4 could be far too long and player's could easily escape a bad decision they have made. When you get to the higher level of play, players are used to doing everything pretty much step by step perfection. So then it becomes a case of the better team is the one who can punish mistakes the most. When mistakes are hard to punish this removes a lot of excitement from the crowd when they yet again fail to see a team make that Extermination all because the other team just ran away. Now don't get me wrong running away is a legitimate tactic, but it has it's limits.

If we take a look at the 11 things we have learned page, there are a lot of things that don't bother me so much. Things like a new bad guy for the single player, the Nazi Zombies designer now working with 343i and also Mechs. These things shouldn't in anyway affect the multiplayer so they should be of no worries for us. There are a few things that need to be changed, however I don't see it happening. The game running at 30 FPS yet again, but having better graphics than Halo Reach. Reach already had a fair amount of screen lag on some maps, especially forge maps, so increasing the graphics is just going to slow the game down even more. Large "feel good" Text is something that I'm unsure of. I have no problem it making the player feel like they have done something good, providing that it doesn't end up like Call of Duty where your screen is flooded with numbers and icons every time you turn the corner.

The ability to customize load-outs and also improve your character in more ways that cosmetic is something that I am on the fence about. I can see it leading to interesting game play choices if they manage to balance the weapons out. Having a weaker but more mobile player who uses range weapons? Sounds fun. Having a slower but more tanky player who enjoys shotgunning or assault rifling things up close? Again sounds fun. These ideas can also make the game play a lot different, something we know Halo is in dire need of as it's starting to get a little stale. However balance in previous games has been nothing short of awful. There are so many weapons that just have completely no use what so ever. Interesting guns such as the Focus Rifle have been made redundant because it has a cool down of about a second before you can fire it again. Had they lowered it's range and removed this cool down it could have been an amazing tool. Running round destroying shields while your team mates clean up with precision weapons. Having a tool like this on the previously mentioned tanky guy while your squishy ranged team mates pick-up the kills from range sounds like a huge twist in console FPS. This would be stepping the system more towards the style of TF2, which would certainly be the way to go as opposed to CoD. So as I mentioned before, until we see more information I am on the edge. Balance would be a huge factor for this to work, and it's Halos rapid decline in terms of a balanced sandbox that has me worried. 343i are now at the helm though, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and I look forward to seeing what they can come up with.

The final two things I want to briefly touch on are having on screen icons for weapon placements and weapons respawning on random timers. Having icons on screen should act like Tutorial Tooltips for newer players. We should be able to turn them off if we wish. No player should have any reason to complain about this, as after a few games everyone knows where weapons spawn anyway. The only thing could be when a player drops a weapon you can see it, but again in more competitive games people communicate this information anyway. However weapons respawning on random timers is bad for everyone. All it will do is promote camping, as players won't want to move from the area of the power-ups / power weapons. Halo already lacks reasons to move around the map as it is, lets not give them more reasons to sit around and wait. This won't help new player's in anyway sadly, as the better players will still be able to out shoot them anyway. Also this will mess up competitive games as it will start to promote a random element. The best way to stop better players stomping on newer players is to actually great a decent matchmaking system. The one used in Reach was awful and put a lot of players off as it matched anyone with everyone.

To conclude Halo 4 has quite a few issues with it right now which can totally affect competitive play. However with a few tweaks and some solid work on balancing the sandbox, Halo 4 has some serious potential. As a Halo fan would I be worried right now? No not at all. I wouldn't, however, be full of confidence either. If 343i decide to step even closer to Call of Duty then I can see Halo 4 being a mismatch of games that feels nothing like Halo or Call of Duty and just turns gamers away.