... or how I learned to start bitching and learn to hate peer to peer.
I picked up Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine for my personal computer box last Thursday because I LOVE Warhammer 40k. It's a really good game. It sells the world of Warhammer 40,000 very well, bringing its brutality, ground scope and sheer ridiculousness to life almost perfectly. It is very satisfying to shoot ten orks in their ugly alien faces with a bolter and watch them all explode into gross alien bits. The melee is a bit shallow unfortunately, but it's still satisfying and the game provides a decent challenge throughout. You should check it out if you haven't yet! There's a demo up on all of its platforms. It's very fun!
But don't touch the multiplayer for more than a few hours.
In less than a week my enjoyment of this game has gone from "I really like this game and want to play a lot more of it" to "i hate this fucking game almost as much as i hate modern warfare 2 i wish i had a physical copy so i could destroy the disc and slit my wrists with the jagged shards" and it is not because the game is BAD or not fun to play, but because the networking is fucking awful. As a PC player, I'm used to certain amenities with my online experience, like NOT FUCKING PEER TO PEER INFRASTRUCTURE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
I'd never really cared about peer to peer because it's never really been an issue for me. Yeah, I've played on peer to peer networks before, they're not as smooth or stable as a dedicated server, but hey man, I can play, so it's all good. No longer, brave reader. It took a few years, but Space Marine has taught me that a lack of dedicated servers is a death sentence for your game.
With peer to peer networking on the consoles, everything is gravy because you don't have to worry about differences in hardware or software, how many programs are running in the background, just the actual connection. On the PC, however, there are far too many different setups and differences that may not seem like a big deal, but actually are. I'm not getting into detail, but suffice to say, whoever thought a reflex focused, melee heavy game should be peer to peer needs to be kneecapped. I cannot give those people a hard enough "fuck you."
I recorded a video last night of a standard match of Space Marine. Let's watch together!
Yeah, I could have played better. My tendonitis is acting up, it was 2 in the morning, I'm just awful at assault and video games hate me to begin with. But seriously, what the hell, man. A week ago I was going 15-4 or better almost every match, and now I'm lucky if I go 1-9 because I just can't fight back anymore. I get into an engagement and just die because there's no way I can beat the enemy player because they teleport about or shoot where I was and still hit me, even though I've taken cover or have dodged out of the way. Awesome.
And the unfortunate reality is that the developer, Relic, simply does not care. They have our money. They don't care how much fun we have with their game, or that it's a slow, broken mess that needs some serious tweaking and dedicated servers to remain a viable competitive option. And this is becoming fairly standard in the industry. Rather than take the time to make servers an option for their fanbase, they just shovel in some bogus, barely functioning client dependent networking and give us the bird.
I don't ask for much. I just want a smooth experience that, when I lose, I know it's because it's my fault because I messed up. Not because I did everything right but still died because on his screen, I was running face first into a wall so he could just shoot my retarded wall humping space man to death on his screen and it will kill the actual me.
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