Quote:
Originally Posted by Phazon
I don't think there is anything wrong with the multiplayer code itself. Sure the GUI could have been better (which MG has been working on) but the code itself is fairly solid. It also offers some impressive features that are unique to Cliffs of Dover. There is alot more possible with this new engine, people just need time to figure it out. Lack of documentation for the FMB slows this process down, as does missing features and bugs.
It also does not help that MG had problems with Steam not listing the servers and the current critical bugs that make it hard to enjoy MP. There are so many people who have currently put the game on the bench, waiting for the game to be fixed. The sooner we get this "one patch to rule them all" that the next update seems to be turning into, the sooner the online community can start to develop and grow.
|
Pretty accurate assessment. I was never a regular multiplayer flier back in the IL2 times (i would usually fly online for a couple of weeks on Spits vs 109s or warclouds, go back to single player for a couple months, then back to a couple weeks of multi and so on), so that carries over to CoD. However, i initially did get discouraged from all the negative comments until a few days ago i got on Syndicate with a buddy for a few sorties and guess what? I shouldn't have listened to these people in the first place, multiplayer is currently better than single player even for a mostly offliner like me.
It works fine on my rig with AI voices disabled and trees set to very low (no sound bug at all in more than 3 hours of flying last Friday) and it also covers the lack of variety in single player content until we start getting more user made campaigns and missions with scripting (like the excellent ones people post in this very forum): i have a sandbox environment with a few thousand objects, about 200 AI bombers in the air randomly spawning all over the place, plus human opposition.
I think there is no single reason that people don't massively migrate, there are many.
For some the game doesn't work well enough, no use denying that and i'm not out to convince somebody that all is fine, there are still things that need work.
However, there are also a lot of other people for whom the game works well enough. This "well enough" is also a matter of what you want to do. If i were more interested in how things look then sure, i'd be discouraged that i have to turn down the trees. However, since i'm mostly interested in gameplay i have a very simple formula: turn my settings down to maintain playability, as long as it looks better than IL2:1946 to my eye it's acceptable for me.
This kind of people don't flock to MP for other reasons. Many are mostly offliners like me, some don't like the unrealistic behaviour that players adopt in multiplayer, others don't like the fact that their unrealistic behaviour is curbed by the new realism settings and most of all, there is a huge number of people who expected this to be a jump forward in time to the point where IL2:1946 is after 10 years of development: rock solid, runs maxed out on pretty much any 2 year old PC, has a few thousand user made additions to choose from (how? we just got the game a few months ago, some did mere days ago
) and a huge multiplayer base.
Well, if we take a look at hypperlobby we'll see that a lot of this is servers with relaxed difficulty settings. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if we are among the so called "full real" fliers (i prefer the term full switch/difficulty) the thousands of people on Hypperlobby don't mean much, it's the handful of full switch servers and the squadron based coops we care about and even then, some people's opinions are further divided: some fly both modes, other only fly coops and others yet only fly in DF mode on objective/mission oriented servers.
Much in the same way, the almost full switch servers constitute the majority of current servers for CoD. If people just want an updated IL2:1946 experience with better graphics and FM/DM, they won't join because they don't know CEM and don't care to learn it.
I certainly don't advocate relaxing the difficulty settings on the few servers i might be interested to fly on (i want it to be possible to crash without enemy action and i similarly want my opponent to suffer from multitasking overload in a fight if i'm better at CEM than him) just to swell the numbers. However, until some servers with more relaxed difficulty appear, the people who prefer this gameplay style won't spend much time in MP.
This hasn't got so much to do with the state of the game as much as with the fact that we don't have enough people yet on the whole to overcome these divisions.
If we had enough people interested in running servers and ended up with 3-4 full switch servers, a few more with CEM off and yet a few more with semi-arcade settings, then there would also be a lot more people flying online.
Long story short, people like different things or place varying importance on them and we can't just expect to shepherd them into a handful of servers we like until they want to join or something more suited to their taste appears.
Like i said, MP runs fine for me and the difficulty settings used on the majority of servers are exactly what i prefer, but i still don't see myself flying online more than a few times per month. That doesn't have to to with the state of the game (which on my installation is completely playable at a standard that i consider more than acceptable, it's actually on the "rather good" part of the scale), it's only got to do with the fact that i'm not a 100% onliner.