Remember when a player could blindly throw down a spawn at the doorstep of a search-and-destroy objective and then his teammates were free to just spawn-rocket-die-repeat?  Remember how confident and annoying they were, assured they would get at least one rocket off before they were blown up (often by their own rocket), thereby creating a colossal, unstoppable clusterfuck you were powerless to stop even if you saw it coming?  That second or two of invincibility after spawning was enough to make clusterfucking easy to do, and impossible to stop. At least now, if you want to spam explosives in a key area to create the sort of clusterfuck that the upstairs S&D objective on the ISA side of Radec Academy is infamous for, you have to at least be tactical about how you set it up.

So sure I got kind of annoyed the dozen or so times this past week I spawned, and was shot in the head before I could get my bearings—but I think what really annoyed me was lousy spawn placement. I try to go out of my way, often taking bullets, to place the things somewhere sensible. The removal of spawn protection in 1.27 essentially means a spawn grenade in a bad spot or facing the wrong way is punished harder than it was (presumably upping interest among semi-reasonable players in playing Tactician… fortunately, good tacticians are just getting better at hurrying to key locations and dropping good spawns before some idiot wastes all the community spawn grenades). One bad spawn can, and does swing a body count match the other way.

In short: spawn camping is easier than it used to be, but it’s easy enough not to fall victim to it, and clogging up key areas with clusterfucks is far less commonplace now because it requires skill and planning.. many online FPS players have skill, but very few have planning.

I used to be able to get away with spawning on a badly placed spawn because the two-second invincibility game me time to run for cover. Now, I can’t get away with spawning on a badly placed spawn; I’ll get shot in the head.

Things that make you go "hmm"—How can an FPS that looks this good, make people complain this much?

Dunno about you but I think that’s an improvement.

But then, in either case, I’ll laugh. People aren’t sure how to react to someone who laughs when he makes a sneaky getaway, AND who laughs when they shoot him. It kind of creeps them out, hopefully.

But the spawn-camping/spawn protection patch issue in Killzone 2 speaks to a broader issue.

Nothing in gaming is ever perfect, and to some, never good enough. Spawn-protection was turned off in the beta, people complained, so they changed it, people complained, and they changed it back, and guess what: people are complaining. I think it’s just the latest debate born out of the era of… the console game patch.

It has advantages (bug fixes are possible) but in the old days, the game was the game, period, and players acclimatized to how it behaved, sometimes laughing about it, sure, but at least they weren’t fighting about it. Giving players the ability to request changes and negotiation power can cause ridiculousness like the flip-flopping, game-changing spawn grenades in KZ. In the era of console game patches, users also feel a) entitled to demand changes be made, and b) ripped off, if their changes aren’t implemented.

Btw version 1.28 will… get this… reduce the strength of the air support turrets. Flip. Which were just beefed up in 1.27. Flop.

Let’s stop the retardation for a second. I love Killzone, but wtf, GG?

Of course gaming is better when bug-fixes can be released after a game has some real-world mileage. In a world of online multi-player games and servers that heart-breakingly and controller-throwingly crash and die, nearly every game patch includes fixes related specifically to network reliability. This is a good thing.

But we’re not talking about bug fixes, we’re talking about changes which affect the texture of the game, and those sorts of changes belong in Killzone THREE, people. Not a Killzone 2 patch.

But then in a highly competitive big-money environment, where developers constantly push the technological envelope and things change so quickly, studios are putting new technology into our hands as quickly as humanly possible, including, for instance, an element of a game which really should undergo more QA testing because its developer is only 75% confident it works properly, but after all, “we can always patch it later.”

But I’ll take it; I love new shit. Maybe patches and fixes and the rest of it are the cost of cutting-edge.

Or maybe, people need to start a petition, write their Congressman, and get spawn protection flip-flopping in online video games outlawed.. I don’t know.

So I’m a little short on examples besides Killzone… My computer games, apps and system software have been fixing and updating themselves for years, but not so much my console games. So if you’re inclined, use the comment box and talk about other examples of patched-in features that really changed PS3, Xbox or Wii games, and whether you think it worked out well or not.

UPDATE: It’s now about 2am on Monday night (July 13/14) here on the west coast, and the Killone 1.28 patch is out! You can download it now and, while they had warned of server downtime coinciding with the rolling out of the new patch, the servers worked briefly between midnight and 1am Pacific and a few of us were able to play for 15 mins or so before they went down.

“Detailed information screen when browsing games” is the biggest and best change. You can see which maps are activated and what the rules are BEFORE you join games, finally… you did good, GG.

This is what I was getting at; THIS is the right kind of change to patch into a game.. navigation and practical stuff. It makes perfect sense to patch in the ability for a player to browse a game’s settings and maps before they sync with the game server. I can’t count the number of times I wasted time and server load joining a game, deciding I didn’t like what I saw and bailing immediately.

No comment so far on the tweaked bots, haven’t seen them in action yet. But the new Medic gun and new dead Scout graphics look good, and 200 kill (not 200 point, it’s 200 kill. I think that’s a typo that’s been circulating on the net with regards to 1.28 changes) body count matches are awesome… 32 player matches capped at 100 kills were kind of short.

So yeah, I’m not ready to eat the words in this article… but 1.28 has indeed made Killzone 2 better.