5 Reasons Why the Resistance 2 Beta Sucks
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Our Trophy Wars competition isn’t the only internal battle here at PS3 Attitude.
Whilst that is our personal ‘deathmatch’, the Resistance 2 Beta has created a ‘team deathmatch’ by splitting us straight down the middle.
Some of us (wrongly) think the R2 Beta rocks, but the more balanced members of the team aren’t blinded by the light of new-ness. We’ve seen all sorts of ‘wrong’ in the R2 Beta. Here’s our top 5…
1. Unbalanced weapons
Use the Wraith, you win. Use anything else, you lose. Seriously, could the guns be more unbalanced if they tried? Even the (formerly) mighty Carbine can’t match the new weapon on the block and in a game like Resistance this can’t be good. The day everyone starts using the same weapon because it is the only one worth using is the day the game dies.
2. Bugs. Lots of bugs.
Now don’t read this the wrong way, but when we’re playing Resistance 2 Beta we spend a lot of my time inside other people. And walls. And hills. And logs.
If it can be walked up to, it can be walked halfway through. In one game we even saw the enemy sticking halfway through a wall. I know it’s a beta, but please! It comes out in exactly one month from today – you think they have time to fix that?
And whilst we’re talking about the graphical issues, let’s just point out one more thing. The ‘water’. We say ‘water’ in quotes because it looks and acts like oil. Or treacle. Or honey. We’ve never seen such a uniform and unrealistic ’splash’ in all our lives, and the resulting wave is about four times the size of our puny human bodies. It’s as if an invisible – and yet perfectly spherical – elephant (named Gertrude, just in case you were wondering) jumped in with us.
3. 60 players online creates confusion.
60 player online is one of the big selling points of Resistance 2. And organising everyone into squads seems like a good way of getting small teams to work more strategically.
But there is no real incentive to do so. You don’t get penalised if you stray far away from your squad and there is no organisation of tasks, so there is no incentive to play as a team. The voice chat can be as clear as you like but with no goals or incentives to work together it’s a mute point.
Consequently you get 60 people who, at the sound of the starting pistol, scatter across the map. The end result? Twice as many people as usual running around like headless Chimerans not knowing what to do next.
4. A million bullets later…
Just how inaccurate are the guns in R2 right now? You shoot, and shoot, and shoot and still the bullets don’t hit the target. Or if they do, you need so many of the darn things that your enemy needs to look like Swiss cheese before they drop.
“But it’s OK”, we hear you cry, “you can press L1 to increase accuracy”. Except that in our tests the L1 button makes almost no difference to accuracy at all. Shooting from the hip is as accurate as using L1. The only benefit we’ve seen so far is that the Wraith keeps spinning under L1, so it starts shooting the one million bullets you need to take out your opponent just that little bit faster.
5. Where’s the fun stuff?
Insomniac make some of our favourite games in the world. Through the Ratchet & Clank series they are known for their inventive weapons and fun gaming experiences.
Resistance: Fall of Man had some of that pedigree even though the subject matter was all together darker. The weapons in the first game showed the same kind of invention seen in the R&C series (especially the Bullseye, Hedgehog grenades and Auger) and the multiplayer was good fun because of the variety it offered.
But Resistance 2 just doesn’t feel as much fun to play in multiplayer mode. Maybe it is a consolidation of all the problems I’ve highlighted above, or maybe it is just because I’m so used to Resistance: FOM that this doesn’t feel like a huge leap ahead. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
Unlike the other half of the team here at PS3 Attitude Towers, we know that CoD 4 is still the multiplayer daddy. Warhawk is still second.
Thankfully everything we’ve mentioned in 1-4 above can be fixed before release or by way of a patch. Let’s just hope number 5 is fixed by improving the other 4.
Disagree with this half of the team? Pre-order Resistance 2 now using our price comparison checker below. Remember, all revenue generated through game sales goes to charity.
Looks like I’m the swing vote!
For the readers out there: I’m also in the beta but my (much moaned about) “tinkering” with my PSN ID left me stranded in the Sony Ether; unable to earn Trophies or, you guessed it, connect to any betas.
Therefore I literally only got about 5 minutes of playtime with R2 before my catastrophic account failure took place.
Now that my account is back up and running (thanks again to XLR3 from the PlayStation Forums for his/her suggestion of simply deleting my profile and starting from scratch!) I’ll be in there tonight with my clipboard and pen, taking all ten reasons presented into account before I give my final assessment.
Regarding the above 5 gripes:
1) Weapon Imbalancement.
I didn’t notice this (obviously within 5 minutes of play!) but I’ll check it out. You’re right though – this is fixable and it wouldn’t be the first time that a weapon was tweaked by the dev team post-launch (or even before the release date)
2) Collision Detection and OIL!
I’d be more worried about the former than sebaceous water effects (let’s face it, water has never been the developer’s friend) but let’s hope they can fine-tune the “Why Am I Walking Through Walls?” aspect as that is something that is personally quite annoying to me. I agree though, one month to go and this would be a tricky one to address in the time presented.
3) The 60 Player Confusathon
I noticed this too in my brief foray into the action. There’s just people EVERYWHERE running around … dying! There’s no strategy, no balance, no idea what the hell is going on. In its defence, the beta is obviously full of the proverbial “newb” as no one knows the maps that well yet. I’m hoping the much lauded 60 player frag-fests become better when people start to actually behave as teams and not individuals.
4) More Bullets!
Also fixable but … maybe you just suck at aiming?
5) No Fun
I didn’t notice anything in your bombastic slating of the beta about co-op. Did you check that out as it appears, if from the 5 reasons why it ROCKS is anything to go by, that the “fun” is mainly found in that mode. I’m really looking forward to checking that out tonight. Fellow PS3 Attituders: PM me at about 8pm to show me the ropes.
Oh for goodness sake! ‘60 player online = bad?!?’
Gimme a break!!!!!
I don’t recall you shouting that about MAG, with it’s 256 players!!! The squads are a great concept and make for a more refined game when the people playing it actually work together!
Oh well… You have your opinion and I’m right.
you’re on Brodie!!!
Brodie is going to get his butt kicked tonight!!
Woohoo!!!
It’s not a mute point; it’s a moot point.
The Wraith has an incredibly short range, and a ridiculously long warmup time to actually shoot bullets. Sure it has a shield and a gigantic clip, but any noob with a Marksman or a decent carbine player can flank a wraith user. The real unbalanced weapons are the Marksman and Fareye.
Regarding 60 player chaos — I guess you didn’t play any Skirmish, because the objectives are clearly laid out to the player with audio cues and on-screen markers showing what the player’s squad needs to accomplish. In TDM, even, your rival squads are MUCH more visible, due to the red lights underneath them, and the game does its best to spawn people in the same squad near each other and their rival squads.
I don’t know how you tested the bullet spreads, but you should definitely try it again, because iron-sighting does give a noticeable increase in accuracy. The recoil is toned down when you zoom, and it’s way easier to get headshots. Try shooting against a wall from a close to medium range from the hip. Then move over and empty a clip while iron-sighted, and compare the bullet spreads. They’re definitely tighter when iron-sighted.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but please do some proper research and learn how to play the game before you post a poorly written article bashing a game because you’re not a good enough gamer to understand the basic mechanics of aforementioned game.
Hi getgoodscrub – welcome to the site.
I’ll be honest, I was reading with interest until the point where you slipped and launched your little attack on my gaming prowess (that’s me in the Team page you see with the 170+ trophies).
I will take all your former points on advisement and I’ll try the R2 beta one more time (I really did research this a lot, to be fair), but I’m going to ignore your snipe since I’ve been gaming longer than most people have been alive (not you, necessarily, since I don’t know your age)!
Note: an article is NOT poorly written if you just so happen to disagree with its points.
As the resident “Chief of Grammar Police” here at PS3 Attitude I can attest that Dolph’s article is VERY well written.
He’s just wrong.
I agree with you about bullets, weapons and bugs but it’s not so bad and it’s only a beta. However this beta is better than the private one which was even worse. I hope bugs and the problem of the bullets will be fixed with the american release.
People of the Interwebs, can’t we all just agree on the hilariousness of the picture?
I hate shoothing games
I have the beta and i didn’t notice any half way going through walls or anything like that all i noticed was you can’t jump on alot of things that you probily should be able too the one thing that really bothers me is the accuracy or the hell of alot of bullets it takes to get a kill the only guns in which i was able to get a kill was the wraith and snipers (I tried every gun) which is retarded because cause i’ll be the first to admit i don’t have the best aim but come on in cod4 i never had a problem getting a kill (I compare to cod4 because that game is the standard right now) what is good about the game is it won’t come down to throwing nads like cod4 is right now over all i give the beta a 7.0 i definatly needs to improve it weapons or the ammount of bullets it takes to get a kill i really hope this game isn’t a waste of money like socom was
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