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In Development: Special Operations Mission “War”

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https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/development-special-operations-mission-war

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One of the main Update 0.35 features will be a new Special Operation called “War”, taking place one month after the events of the first Apocalypse Special Operation, “Plague”.

...

For this mission, we have overhauled another well-known map called Waterway, also known as the Panama Canal. A massive storm ravages the area and much of the city adjacent to the installations themselves is now flooded. This will make traversing the terrain more difficult and you’ll have to be careful where you step – or rather, drive your tanks!

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The mission will also bring its own set of achievements (some of them quite difficult) as well as various visual customization items, including a player avatar and a new camouflage.

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Click the image to open a larger version

 

We are, of course, hard at work on the next mission of the series. The sequel to this operation is coming later this year. For now, we hope that you will enjoy this one mission and, as always:

My first reaction is cringe, not from the name but from the prospect that this will be yet another corridor shooter. This corridor meta needs to be beaten to death and burned so it stops popping up, not continuously encouraged the the point where squishies have little to no purpose in the game.

Also this:

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Achievement hunters will suffer, this I don't particularly care. It's the shitty chapter system that I hate because if there aren't any infantry to kill on the map, I'm going back to doing everything I can to stay on ch1 for the sole purpose of having easy access to infantry for killing.

Fuck the chapter progression system.


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I'd guess they are awkwardly trying to reference four horsemen with chapter titles but they half-assed it like usual.

Also hurray for railroading. Don't you dare to deviate from the path, player!

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Meh.  These are far enough apart that I really don't think Achievement Hunters will suffer at all.  I got all of the achievements (that I wanted) for Plague easily and I usually struggle to finish them.  I skipped completing the "play Plague on Extreme 30 times" achievement because randumbs were terrible at it and I have a difficult time putting together platoons to do things.

I don't like the corridor meta, and the Panama Canal map was already pretty tight.  Flooding it is just going to make it a bad map, I fear.  And then they say they're putting in some really difficult achievements?  Ugh.  And no, also-constrained "alternative routes" don't solve the problem, so Plague is a bad corridor map also.

I get why they do it... their AI is terrible and can't handle players roaming free.  Doesn't make it any better.

4 hours ago, Schlock said:

I'd guess they are awkwardly trying to reference four horsemen with chapter titles but they half-assed it like usual.

Yeah, but most people get the 4 Horsemen wrong anyway so I don't really blame them for screwing it up from the start.

(Plague is not one of the 4 Horsemen - they are Conquest sometimes also called The Conqueror, War, Famine, and Death.)

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Yeah, the corridor meta can go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned. MBTs are already strong enough in PvE, they don't need to have the maps tailored for them too.

As much as people hate Moscow Calling 3 for the delivery mechanics and a single player being able to screw over the entire team, it actually has the best map of any spec ops mission imo (probably because it is a full PvP map with minimal modifications). The objectives are far enough apart that they don't need physical barriers (like buildings) isolating them from the rest of the map, there's plenty of open space for squishies to do their thing, while still having enough hard cover in parts of the map for MBTs to be able to keep their flanks covered. All told, it's a good map for a mission that gets hate for the half-polished game mechanics that came with it.

Edited by MK_Regular (see edit history)

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16 hours ago, MK_Regular said:

it actually has the best map of any spec ops mission imo

I would say 4th chapter of Caribbean Crisis is best as it combines size of pvp map with variety of activities on it, and in same time no dimwit can break the mission (aka teamwork dependency) for entire team.

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Looks like they were trying for a Mad Max style of maps but all we got is a "C" movie rip-off that just leaves you feeling dirty after playing.

A magical girl who lost to a tentacle monster would feel less violated than the players of this next set of missions will.

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MC 3, CC 3-4, and BSI 2-3 are all good.

BSI 1, AN 1-2, CC 1, and MC 1 are pretty good.  They're pretty structured, but the structure of them is flexible enough that you have options.

AD really seemed to start the "all corridors all the time" meta and is where things really went downhill, in my opinion.  AD 3 isn't too bad because you have options running back and forth between objectives, but it's too close quarters and frenetic to be considered good.

Overall, BSI and CC seem to be the best Spec Ops to me.  BSI 4 isn't terrible - I mean, how many options do you really need when your objective is literally to storm the castle? - and CC 2 has options even if the flow is pretty rigid.  I'd probably like CC 2 better if it didn't still have a bugged achievement to this day, which I've completed twice but it has never registered.  (Support acknowledged it, too, and said there's nothing they can do.)

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I think this stream of opinions is a testament to how challenging it is to design a good PvE map... I've mentioned this before, but perhaps we should have a map design contest where players could submit some neat designs... the best design(s) could then be brought into production.

If we were going to modify maps to make them part of the storyline, I would suppose we could start with a really open map like Tsunami and put some more features on it.

DVC,

QR

 

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