Homefront

What was wrong with gears of war? Was it expensive and short?

Quote from dux

What was wrong with gears of war? Was it expensive and short?

I tried it out and hated it, everyone took forever to die and it was super ugly. My experience was only one level though so I don't know how long the game was. Too long I guess.

I have played Gears of War mind in coop and by myself on the 360 and the pc. Didn't seem all that bad to me. I dunno how long it was though in comparison to its price. Can't really remember, was ages ago.

okay clarification gears of war (and its sequel) is a good game !

... BUT ...

its not good enough to hold my interest for the length of its campaign which i believe is about 7-10 hours.

at the end you dont care anymore about the plot the characters that mcguffin resonator device everything just blurs together.

instead of making a 10 hour okay game epic should have made a 4 hour awesome game !

really gears of war is just an example for me of one of those "complete package" games that has a long campaign + multiplayer + extra game modes + coop + dlc (sometimes comes with a code in the box) + massive amounts of marketing.

and the price tag for me was 70 euros ! thats about 250% more than what i think the product was worth for me ! i only played the campaign once and tried a couple of levels coop ( which was fun mind you ! )

cliffy said on the irrational games podcast that he is only interested in making the games that people want to "merry" and not "date".

well i am more of a fan of shorter more awesome titles that are offered for less but deliver 100% what i want ! ... like portal ... i completely exhausted what that game had to offer and loved every second of it while 60 % of the gears of war package remained unopened by me ! but i had to pay for it anyway !

some games dont need multiplayer or that survival mode or any of that other crap that artificially bloats the package to justify its 70 euro price tag !

another example: bioshock 2 that game should have come out at 30$ without the multiplayer that would have been awesome !

how does this relate to homefront ? i say nobody should be bitching about the length of the campaign people should be bitching about its price !

Tried out a friend's copy of Homefront, played through the first level. Game looks like Half-life 2, which, given the theme of being a resistance against a monolithic faceless occupying force, makes it feel a bit odd. The outdoor areas look a bit better, mostly cause bloom. Multiple times I noticed a disappointing lack of detail and once, saw the edge of the world, looking around at areas I guess they just didn't expect anyone to notice, like at one point I had to sprint across the street and decided to stop in the middle and look both ways. I'm pretty sure I also saw enemies spawning in from nowhere at one point, while you fight around the wreckage of a plane.

I don't think I'll be getting a copy for myself.

@ warby

interesting commentary and i agree with some of the points (i actually enjoy a long game if done right, most games cannot manage this and i lose interest, this does not mean it can't be done. see: STALKER for a game done right).

the main problem is that i am guessing you have not played homefront.

because homefront is a strange game, and by strange i mean bad.

the campaign, you can check my steam account, i have played 2 hours and i am on the final mission.

i payed 50 euros for this and got 2 hours out of it. i don't really find myself drawn to the multiplayer.

after playing the single player i can give you a rundown of what to expect:

- hugely scripted, you follow AI around waiting for them to open doors for you

- gameplay is so heavily inspired by Call of Duty that it's practically copyright infringement

- inspired by CoD, but lacks the polish of the CoD games (so you'd think instead of trying to copy another game, play to your strengths and make somethign good within it's own right.. however I can imagine publishers stepping in and deciding that what the world needs is another CoD game)

- glaring absurdities in the gameplay. i geniunely encourage you to watch this video:

EVERYTHING he says so beautifully sums up the game, from the little things like "this is like call of duty 4" and "this is like ghillies in the mist but not as good" and "do i even need to be crouched here?".

then check out the "stealth", it is so incredibly forced, it's like a revisitation of the old school rail shooters of the past. when you're actually in the level it feels even more ludicrous and forced. and it's a shame because i am sure on paper it seemed like a great mission, the sniping was great but the rifle you use is LOUD, and i mean god damn how can nobody hear this fucking thing?

- there's some super fun moments like the sniping from the church tower and the helicopter level (even if they have some quirks), but these are drowned out by the bad elements. the AI is truly just designed to "be spawned", "run to a given position", and then "pop up and down out of cover" or if no crouchable cover exists then "stand still and shoot at the player until player or AI is dead". the levels have to be built around this, and to be fair they do a good job of working with it.

- there are moments where you just have the same scripted moment cycle over and over until it's deemed you have killed enough enemies to progress (ie: the AI open a door for you).

- and enemies just keep spawning, running to a cover point or vault point and getting mowed down until i had exhausted the numbers on the spawner.

- the single player has obviously been rushed, i noticed in one of the first tunnels you enter, that i could see out of a huge seam in between two meshes right out into the world. ok this shit happens, i get it, but it is an indication of a tight schedule or a shitload of changes going on to the design, which is going to hurt the quality of both art and the gameplay.

- they forced a lot of cliche and shallow story telling and character development into the game, and it feels so forced i didn't even care what i was doing or why i was doing it.

so, in short: fuck this game for charging me 25 bucks an hour.

and sorry to anyone i offended from the dev team but god damn i'd love to hear some gossip about the development.

I miss old style fps stealth missions, like in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where you could just kill everyone (and were encouraged to) as long as there wasn't an alarm, like the one where you have to sneak into the secure missile bunker. You use your silenced Sten and sniper rifle to kill patrols as you move, taking care to avoid alarms, until you get to the entrance, avoid shooting the entrance guards, and instead board a truck going inside and hide. Then, once you're inside, no more need for stealth and you just blast everybody.

There's no real reason for that stealth mission at all. "They hear gunfire all the time out here" *witnesses multiple shootings during the mission* but nope can't kill nobody except a few arbitrary people placed for you to snipe.

I suspect half the game's budget was used to purchase large amounts of derp.

The game looks like a half-assed free-to-play shooter from, well, Korea.

That video is just awful. It doesn't really showcase any gameplay worth mentioning; the sniping was just overly simplistic whack-a-mole. The game is just pushing you through a shitty movie.

Kaos Studios really dropped the ball on this one, Fuels of War was actually okay

i think rick spent more time preparing that post than playing the actual game

Quote from Sentura

i think rick spent more time preparing that post than playing the actual game

it's a close-run thing

well i sure killed that thread

Peolple can't eat modern millitary fps all the time anyway.

I won't purchase this title with my hard earned PC funds until it's on clearance on Steam??

Quote from Rick_D

- gameplay is so heavily inspired by Call of Duty that it's practically copyright infringement

Man you're not kidding... I saw the fonts and grenade icon.. they look identical, it's like a Call Of Duty mod... D:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/revie ... ont/711988

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/33702/TH ... hipped.php

It appears to be selling pretty well. Good news for me since I did some work on it.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the review scores for this game, I cannot understand the score discrepancy between black ops and homefront. I really didn't like the single player but I find all the tightly scripted shooters really dull. However, I played a few hours of the multiplayer and it was pretty fun. The maps are huge and well designed, and the battle commander thing works pretty well. It feels to me like black ops in hardcore mode and battlefield 2 combined.

I worked on this game (MP/SP), and a year of dev time gets you about that long of a campaign. It undeniably has its faults, but the only thing that chaps my ass is comparisons to CoD, where HF gets faulted for certain design conventions- CoD gets a free pass with every new release. Meh, what are you gonna do.

I am happy at how the MP is being enjoyed though. Crossroads is my baby. Number 6 on XBL!

grats on the release bro.

as far as the negativity, i think the problem is that the MW games have claimed those mechanics as their own at this point, and when others use them it's seen as ripping them off.

i understand the choices, short dev cycle then why reinvent the wheel when you know something already works. i have worked on enough short dev cycle projects to know that it's fucking hard, so hopefully you won't take too much offence at anything i say

i didn't even load up the mp because i was so put off by the shortness of the sp

Rick I respect your opinions because you seem to keep a level head on most subjects, but not playing the multiplayer because the singleplayer was too short is a bit silly. Most of the time, the multiplayer component of a game is completely different to the singleplayer, and as a games developer (forgive me if I'm wrong on that!), I'd've thought you'd've (holy shit apostrophe explosion) known this.

For example, Black Ops' multiplayer is very different to its singleplayer. Sure, they have similarities but they are still very different in terms of how you play them.

Of course, I've not played Homefront, so I can't really appreciate where you are coming from. Don't take offense to what I've said, I just felt compelled to reply.

it's not so much about basing my opinions on mp from the sp segment, just that by the time i had got 2 hours in i wasn't really that intrigued to load the game up again and play mp.

i don't actuallly have an opinion on mp, i neither like or dislike it, i just don't want to play it.

max payne 1 and 2 were also ridiculously short... I think the key difference here is that homefront is shit*

*in sp.