i liked BiA1, it was a quality game emphasizing traits seen but never used effectively in a shooter. plus is attempted to stir more than fear or adrenalin in it's player.
I hated BIA1 so deeply that it drove me away from BIA2. Teammates were so few, battles were so small and teammates would often die from one very likely bullet from an enemy, which was especially true near the end of the game. It was so annoying just shooting at walls the entire game. Aiming down the sight was rigged because I could shoot a million times at one guy with his head out in the open and I would never hit him. Then one of my allies would fire one bullet and the guy I was shooting at for the past ten minutes would die instantly.
The sniper rifle was just a big cheating weapon given to the player for free. There was no way to miss an enemy with the sniper rifle, even though aiming down the sight of any weapon would make the screen shake and throw itself around in a completely mechanical and unrealistic way.
And the plot was weird. Some characters would die and not a word would be said, while others would die and it would become a big, dramatic deal. One character was hit by an explosion and was getting helped by one guy while the other said, "Leave him!" They left the guy that got hit behind, even though he was still alive. He was blinking and everything. At one point, the character gives a narrative saying that "Baker's Dozen" became "Baker's Half-dozen", even though I wasn't aware that six (or seven?) characters had even been killed.
And we all know the multiplayer was terrible. Only support for four players, with three bots for each player. I was unbelievably stupid enough to buy the PS2 version for FIFTY BUCKS of BIA before I even played the game (it wouldn't work on my PC at the time), which only gave each player two bots. Two bots instead of three? The PS2 isn't THAT much worse than the XBOX. That's just stupid. The PS2 version had too many inferiorities compared to the XBOX and PC versions, you'd think the PS2 version was some kind of crappy beta leak.
When European Assault was released, it was only $40, probably because it didn't support online play, which somehow means everything to a video game, now. But that game was way better than crappy BIA, which came out for $50. The first Medal of Honor for the Playstation was better than BIA.
Sorry for taking a dump on the topic. I just have a horrible hate for BIA, so much that I would never pay for the sequels. I don't care how nice a game looks, it means nothing to the gameplay. Not that I have much room to talk, because I don't pay $300 for video cards, thus I can't have extremely nice-looking games, anyway. I pay $50 to $80 for the sake of being able to play the games with all of the settings all the way down.
You have to admit, those screenshots do look AS REAL AS REAL LIFE, though.
I still own that crappy BIA PS2 game because it wouldn't sell for very much on eBay, and nobody plays it online, anymore. The Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series are definitely the only WW2 games for me.
I saw the tv ads for ghost recon for xbox360, really looked amazing, they bought a 360 at work the other day, ghost recon looked about 40% of the quality of the tv ad, I played it for about 20 seconds, got bored and went back to my desk.
I think its wrong to advertise the game with fake renders, it can only lead to disappointment for the player that buys it.
They do that? Fake renderers and stuff? Ouch. Still, the BIA3 screenshots look like maybe the real thing. Perhaps those screenshots were rendered on some $5000 super-industrial God PC or something that not even the XBOX 360 could reach?
I'm not going to buy an XBOX 360 because I'm a cheap penny-pincher, and I'm more into games that work on my PC (mostly my laptop), but it'd be disappointing if the graphics weren't as good as they'd advertised them to be.
Those BIA3 screenshots, if they're not fake, would be taking us one huge step closer to the very end of good graphics, which would be graphics that look like reality.
I still think Allied Assault looks impressive because characters actually move their faces in neato expressions and the textures look great, but I'm so behind the times.
MoHAA (well, basically all Quake 3 engines) would be very close to modern engines if just 2 things were implemented - dynamic lighting and bump mapping (preferrably parallax - creates an amazing depth illusion).
Hmm honestly it does not come that close... quake3 geometry is pretty inefficient compared to newer games... even on a good system fps will be bad with ~50,000 tris in view or at higher resolutions, whereas other games can easily support a multitude of that. Besides, geometry in mohaa cannot change lod and I also tend to believe vis abuses memory and cpu, although I'm not overly sure about the latter.
renders are common, but the company usually sidesteps saying they are INGAME renders. if they dont outright say it they're probably 3dsMaxed.
and yes most game studios invest a good deal of money into a powerful, cutting-edge machine and a more mediocre one. sometimes even an old one just to see waht casual gamer's experience might be.
Pfft. I hardly believe anyone ever considers us poor people, anymore. Basically, if the creator of something has a PC of his own that is all-powerful, they'll base their game (or whatever program) entirely on the idea that EVERYONE has a PC just like theirs, and people that don't can suck a phallic device or spend $1000 on an upgrade.
Most modern games tend to work on my PC, even though it's as cheap and old as I could manage. The only game I've had problems with, even with all of the graphics and sound quality and whatnot all the way down, was Pacific Assault, which is pretty well-known for its memory-hogging.
jv_map wrote:Hmm honestly it does not come that close... quake3 geometry is pretty inefficient compared to newer games... even on a good system fps will be bad with ~50,000 tris in view or at higher resolutions, whereas other games can easily support a multitude of that. Besides, geometry in mohaa cannot change lod and I also tend to believe vis abuses memory and cpu, although I'm not overly sure about the latter.
Well, I believe that's a result of using BSP (binary space partition), which has become obsolete over the years. But now that the Q3 source's out it won't be too hard to implement for example the Adaptive Binary Tree.
Wow. BIA3 looks friggin' awesome in that video, though I can't imagine how they'll implement all of that cinematic stuff dynamically, such as the player grabbing the dying soldier, without annoying the crap out of players.
And, like I've already said, I feel too betrayed by the first BIA to buy any sequels. I'd probably play them if given the chance, though.
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