CMT Public Beta Feedback

[Reaper Man]

• You can't crouch with the hunter gun
• Cortana repeats lines as you escape in the pod
• Marines don't follow you, so you get no help for most of the level
• Floor needs arrows or something
• Lots of empty space
• No music
• When you need new brg ammo, you have to pick up a new battle rifle
• Sometimes the plasma pistol overcharged particle doesn't appear in first person

[Dwood]

There was one point where I was tagged with a nade by a brute, and the game decided to save. BETTER YET, it decided to save again after I died. So i was kinda stuck in 'death' position. Due to the ai throwing nades so often, it is almost inevitable something like that will happen more often. So in CMT extras could you add something like "go back 2 Checkpoints" or something?Oh ho

oh how could I forget? http://www.xfire.com/screenshots/dazerl/

In there you will see bugs (such as portalling problems) etc, and some other things

[teh lag]

• New BSPs are, with few exceptions, either too boring or too irritating (specifically, easy to get lost and horribly dark lighting in some parts) for me to have any fun.
  
• We need the armored marines back. If tagspace is no longer an issue, we can afford to have them and the crewmen be separate bipeds.
  
• Hunter cannon needs a serious battery cap. It's an absolute rapist of a weapon, and you can keep using it for an incredibly long time.
  
• Hunter cannon's melee has the damage occur before it should. You also cannot couch while holding it.
  
• All of the grate textures are messed up in some way. They're either horrendously ugly or missing their alpha entirely. (See the maintenance doors).
  
• Most textures in fact look ugly to me. I would rather revert to the original (yes, original H1 campaign) textures to be honest. I know we're trying to be all "new everything," but we are not doing it right. Tons of bumpmaps are overdone, some textures don't fit period, and some just look ODD. (Ex : the screen in the opening cutscene with "unseal the hushed casket").
  
• Flashlight needs its power upped. Seriously.
  
• We need background sound on the new BSPs and we need music in the new encounters. It feels like a chore to fight them without anything in the background.
  
• In general though, they feel like a chore to fight. There is nothing to break up the elite-grunt-brute repetition except like 3 or 4 stealth elite or hunter fights. I don't know how to fix this. I get the feeling that the level has become too long for its own good.
  
• The damaged BSP really makes no sense to me, even though it was probably the most fun of all of them. I have no problem with keeping it, but then we NEED NEED NEED NEED NEED NEED NEED better lighting. I cannot see shit, and it's not good gameplay to make the player have to keep on their flashlight or charge up a PP just to see if they're walking against a wall. Even just small emergency lights running parallel to the rout you're supposed to take would be fine.
  
• Chiron BSP needs to go, or get a massive makeover. It is unbearably boxy and bland, and completely clashes with the other BSPs' style.
  
• I know I've told you this many times, Masterz, but it is impossible to tell where you are supposed to go. Even a navpoint would be fine. I'd rather have a navpoint in every section than have to wonder which way I'm supposed to turn in some of the new sections.
  
• One of the marines looks like he has a major case of liver failure. The face is tinted a very odd-looking yellow/orange.
  
• The Halo is tinted an odd green and does not "spin." I don't remember if a10 uses an animated ring or if it's shader scrolling, but this needs to be fixed. It's small things like this that totally break immersion and make this look low-quality. The self-illum also flashes on and off, when it should be constant.
  
• I don't know how, but we need to re-work brutes. I don't care what's involved in that. Make small-arms reflect off their shields and do minimal damage maybe? Something needs to be done. As we stand, this is what we have. I know we've talked together about ways to make them have all sorts of crazy shield systems with armor falling off and all that... I think there are better things that we can do.
  
• There should be some way to lead a player to health packs. They're there, but just lying on the ground with nothing to really indicate their presence. I'd suggest putting a dead marine or something by them so they can more easily catch the player's eye.
  
• Why are there sleeping grunts? Why are the grunts asleep only ~30 minutes after they've landed on the ship they're trying to attack?

[CabooseJr]

Here's some feedback from me.

• Loved the new BSP(Though it kinda made the level a bit longer than it should)
• The hunter FRG was fun to use(Though, I couldn't crouch with it)
• The new Master Chief Biped is a lot cleaner and more detailed
• I felt the plasma pistol was a bit overpowered
• The blood decals somewhat hurt my framerate, in some places the room was simply filled with blood

I had a couple bugs here and there as well.

Also, too many spec op elites

[chrisk123999]

There was one point where I was tagged with a nade by a brute, and the game decided to save. BETTER YET, it decided to save again after I died. So i was kinda stuck in 'death' position. Due to the ai throwing nades so often, it is almost inevitable something like that will happen more often. So in CMT extras could you add something like "go back 2 Checkpoints" or something?Oh ho

oh how could I forget? http://www.xfire.com/screenshots/dazerl/

In there you will see bugs (such as portalling problems) etc, and some other things

I had the same problem, it was about to revert to the last checkpoint when it saved another one and I had to restart. Can't you make the script check to see if the player is alive or not before it saves?

[Alwin Roth]

-Brute has alot of blood for some reason (probably mentioned by alot of people by now)
-I can't crouch with the hunter gun (not sure if that's a bug)
-When your walking around the "broken" part of the ship, where you're going a bit downhill, it's a tad bit too dark, but before that event, i couldn't get the door to open, eventually when i loaded the last checkpoint it did...
-The level design is really nice, and chirlon or however you spell it, was pretty big, would be nice if their was some kind of vehicle encounter...
-the hands of the marines in the beginning was, thin... and meh...
-I really can't find any "soldier" marines, did you guys take those out?

Oh, and when im walking around the pillar of autumn, there's like, no Music, seems a bit blank with just Keys talking over the loud speaker...

[chrisk123999]

Your guys play with your gamma to low, I had no problem seeing the walls in the destroyed part.

[boogerlad]

is it the old Cortana in the pb, or the new one?
Also, fuel rod guns are unduckable.

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

Fuel rod guns are fugly.
Also, so are bumpmaps

[rossmum]

In comes Ross with his design-related whinges (rather than gameplay issues or glitches)!

• Why the fuck are Marines controlling the ship? What was wrong with naval officers doing the job? What sense does it make to have ground troops in full clobber sitting around the bridge when someone who can't shoot worth crap or isn't fit to fight on the ground can do it?
• The redone wall and floor textures look shithouse, just putting this out there
• Might want to check the noticeboard over, I gave it a quick once-over and spotted at least one pretty glaring error.
• The Brutes are fucking pointless. They're barely any different in behaviour, strength or whatnot to Elites. I get that the fanboys will be crawling over each other for shiny things, but seriously, make them worthwhile for those of us with brains.
• Everything is jittery as fuck when the speed-changer powerup is in effect. It looks bad and is annoying. Don't say it's my framerate because it's in the hundreds.
• The laser on the pistol is stupid. You don't see laser beams in real life unless they're passing through something they can reflect off like dust or smoke. Straight red lines coming out of models are horrible, if anything make it place a red spot an inch or two across (game scale) on whatever surface, like the flashlight. If that's not possible, just ditch the thing. It looks awful.
• Who had the bright fucking idea of putting a whole shitload of cloaked Elites in the lifepod docking area? Nice pacing and difficulty curve, guys!
• The Hunter cannon is pretty well useless as a weapon. In the time it takes to charge, fire, and fire again, you can drop a Brute with half a mag of AR and a few whacks upside the head.
• More cloaked Elites past the cryo area? Are you guys fucking insane?
• I love the way some Brutes gush gallon after gallon of blood when hit
• Can anyone enlighten me as to the purpose of the new BSP areas, other than to show you can do it? They do practically nothing bar extend the level and they're bland as fuck. Now I know the original PoA was no entrant in the 'complex and detailed levels that will blow your mind' contest, but the new area is even plainer. It's like I stepped through a wormhole back to the early days of 3D gaming.
• The Brute guarding the room full of sleeping Grunts is apparently blind and deaf. I approached him from his front right and he didn't see me at all. I just walked around him and socked him one in the spine. Wow. What a challenge!
• If you want to give the player a hard time, don't put 5 fucking Elites or Brutes in the one area, with very little cover for the player. Give them something that takes brains to win, not a mixture of luck and hosing downrange.
• I'm up to the elevator. This has gone from repetitive to tedious.
• The twisted section: holy living fuck! Variety! Originality! The only part of the new section which is actually worth the space it takes up!
• Another staircase? Fuck off.
• Crew quarters: hooray! Another piece of originality! It looks pretty shitty, but the inspiration was there, at least!
• FUCKING FINALLY!

Overall? Underwhelming, and not worth the hype by any stretch. It's a decent demo of what can be done with CE and the effects, new character and weapon models/skins were pretty good, but the fact some things were nice and detailed (Elites, MC) and others weren't (Grunts, Marines) and those two groups appear together really makes everything look pretty shoddy.

I appreciate the work that went into this, but to be entirely honest, I'd say a LOT of it was misdirected. Instead of bringing the other characters up to the same level or making the Brutes actually DIFFERENT to fight, you guys wasted time tacking a pointless section on just to stretch the level out. It was a perfect length in the original game. Any longer gets boring. This had me wishing it would end, and that's not good at all considering I'm usually pretty patient (hell, I actually finished Combine Destiny, and that was about four or five hours of copy-pasted bullshit).