Killzone 2 MP.. has got problems.

In the previous post , I covered the good features of KZ2’s MP, now lets get to the part which really bugged me. In fact, I started writing about the MP only because I wanted to mention how some implementations in the game thwarted its chances of becoming one of the best possible MP experiences.

What I’ll do here is, point out what all I didn’t like about the thing, and try to think of a reason WHY it was put in such a way.. i.e how the devs possibly justified their decision

So lets get to the dark side!

The Class system!

First thing you’ll hear about Killzone2 MP is that its “Class based” well.. class based is when the player is allowed to choose which type of weapons to use during the matches.

BUT, in the beginning,  the game limits the weapon to only the Assault rifles. At first, I was thinking that it was because of the server side settings, but later found out that it was because everything else is “locked” till you level up.

You don’t get a new weapon ability even till the 3rd rank, and the sniper is unlocked when the highest rank is achieved. Its quite absurd actually, if you’re supposed to have a class based gameplay, why not allow the player to choose the class from the beginning itself?

*How it should have been

Once the basic classes are chosen, the levelling up of character should unlock more powerful weapons of the same class, or just allow access to other general weapons and abilities. If the game was of that kind, then everything would have been lot better.

Right now..a person like me, who is itching to get his hands on the rifles, will not get the hands on the weapon till many hours of gameplay. There’s a good chance, that I, after playing for so long with only the assault rifle, will find it to be the best choice. Which will be the case with many other people too.

*Why did they choose this?

Having invested so much on the MP experience, I was wondering why they made this different choice.. the only reason could be that they thought its better to let the player progressively experience every class as he reaches the top rank, and then choose his/her own path. As opposed to having the player choose his/her own path from the beginning itself.

That reason is.. quite good I think, but I think most of the players now a days already know what kind of player they are, assist, attack, defend etc.. so why make them all go through the same thing again? The part with sniper being the last rank is quite sad.. because only a few will want to be a sniper and they have to rank up, using weapons which they dont have fun with.

If only the rankings had nothing to do with classes..

No Assist points!

Another big thing that you notice while playing the game is that.. there’s no assist point in the game! Assist points are those points that a player gets if s/he does a good amount of damage to someone else’s kill. Its not the question of kill stealing, many people are assist type who move around behind people and give backup.. most of the times they spot the enemy first and shoot him so that the one in front doesn’t get hurt, and the one in front kills the wounded enemy.

Its a good tactic used by many when in a good team.. also theres the sniper which people just call “Assist class”.

*So, what’s the problem?

Well, not only does the game requires you to reach a high level to first get access to weapons like rifles and snipers, but then you’re ranking up is slowed down, IF you’re a rifle/sniper user, because of the fact that there is no assist points. Once again.. degrading the whole gameplay experience, alienating a huge piece of player pie.

*Why did they choose this?

Most probably they couldn’t find a way to properly decide when to give an assist and when to not.. or maybe the devs thought that people should be rewarded in non uniform ways.. no matter how you look at this.. it feels like its because of their laziness.

Take Cover!

One of the best things about the Single player campaign of KZ2 was its really nice and unique cover system. I don’t think any other FPS ever implemented the cover system in such an intuitive way. If you want to play with thought, then cover comes into play very much.

But oh noes! The cover mechanics are totally disabled in the multiplayer modes. I couldn’t think WHY one would remove such a good part of the game.. the only reason that could justify this decision was that..

Maybe they thought it’ll allow people to perform some weird wall sticking or other things to glitch and cheat.  Don’t think they would have removed the Cover Mechanism.. just coz, that would be lame.

Super Low ammo, No packs

When you start a match, with the assault rifles, you’re given only 64 bullets for what people usually tend to use like a machine gun. The game has no concept of ammo packs and such, therefore, making the player to learn how to frugally use ammo. You can run and pickup ammo from the downed players however. The problem arrives only during stand-offs and last man each team type situations. You’ll have to think a lot and only then shoot, and if you’ve lived for a longer time then you’ll have to keep moving in search of others dead bodies for ammo.

On Second thought, if you think hard enough.. it feels like this decision was made so that many situations can be created where the tension is high.  Not only will it teach people to use ammo properly, but it will also make the player want to move from one location to another, because staying in one location and shooting will deplete the ammo and then you cant do anything but move out of there in search for more ammo.

What’s my Ping?

I dont understand why many console games just don’t show ping while selecting server? With many of the servers being player created ones.. ping should be an important factor for deciding which match to join.. BUT they don’t show it.. in any form.. not even those traffic light type signals.

I mean, Warhawk has a really neat match selection area, where it shows and allows us to sort things by ping.  I don’t know if there’s an internal mechanism which auto sorts everything by ping or whatever. It just isn’t nice to not show the ping while selecting matches!

The other Stuff

There are some more smaller things that bother me a lot.. like that fact that you die too easily in CQC conditions, You need to press X to respawn, and then in the menu that comes after that, pressing X takes you out, but pressing O re spawns you.. you if you press X twice (of which there are LOTS of chances) then you will be taken to the quit option.. and if you’re really in the heat of the battle.. you will immediately press “Oh no, its O” and then quit the match.

A very irritating irritation indeed!

All in all.. the game is quite enjoyable, but its sad to see that many easy to do things were taken out of the game and many features are not implemented well.. Its hard to think that its been under 5years of development, and still have such simple problems. Oh well.. I guess after a few months, when EVERYONE is top level.. that’s when the real games start, because that’s when all will be free to choose their own class of interest and play how they like.