Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

[Stoney Mason]

The more I play, the more sour I get on it unfortunately. The rifle class is overpowered because of the chest armor. You shouldn't give one class more health in a game like this where the health count is so low in the first place. There is an unlock to counter this but who knows how the game will play once all the unlock stuff is added.

The spawn trapping on pipeline is annoying. And the net code is scary bad. I know its a beta, but its taking a bit of a leap of faith that it will be improved to where it needs to be because right now its awful.

I'm still getting it, but my confidence in the end product has been reduced a degree because of the beta. I saw an interview also saying that the horde mode has no online matchmaking. You have to invite your friends to play it to get a full squad. In this day and age that's stupid.

[Stoney Mason]

GRFS Beta - Balance and Game Play Changes
As part of our dedication to the community and showing you how your feedback is directly helping the development teams, here are the first feedback concerns that we’re addressing:

360 ONLY - Grenades are over-powered: we are reducing the grenade blast kill-radius according to your feedback and the analysis of your matches.
360 ONLY - Confusion was caused by the 4-man party and 6-man team matchmaking: we are increasing the maximum party size to 6 in order to align with the team size.
360 & PS3 - We are universally increasing the speed of XP acquisition in order to gain additional feedback on the weapons and equipment unlocked later in the character progression system.
360 & PS3 - Last but not least, in thanks for the feedback you have provided, we are releasing the Saboteur game type early today.

In Saboteur use stealth and cunning to capture the explosive briefcase and detonate it on the opposing team's objective. Saboteur really emphasizes the teamwork aspect of Ghost Recon Future Soldier, and we hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

Currently Grenades and Party changes will only be active on Xbox 360; we are working to bring these changes to the PS3 Beta as well. Changes will be active across the platforms listed and require a reboot of the servers (currently scheduled for 6:00pm EDT). We will revise this thread with additional updates as we publish them.

[Stoney Mason]

As part of our dedication to showing you that your feedback is directly helping the development teams, we will release today at 2pm EST a new update for the Xbox 360* version of the Beta:

Riflemen are over-powered:
Increased minimum recoil for the ACR and AK200 to align them more closely with the other assault rifles.
Reduced maximum assault rifle damage range, making the sniper rifle more valuable.
Increased minimum damage of SMGS, making them more effective against all classes at further ranges.
Dramatically reduced the radius of the heartbeat sensor.
Additional Weapon changes:
Reduced the dispersion to make handguns generally more effective, especially for the bomb carrier.
Adjusted shotgun effectiveness.
XP adjustments:
Adjusted XP values for Confidence & Hack Objective.
Additional Equipment changes:
Adjusted Flash Bang Duration.
Adjusted Flash Bulb reload time.
Adjusted EMP air burst radius for EMPs launched by a underbarrel or standalone grenade launcher.
Adjusted the amount of UAV’s in match.
Increased the duration of the Sensor to make them more susceptible to countering.
(*) When will those changes apply to the PS3 version of the Beta?
We will deploy those changes as soon as possible

Good stuff. I like that they are listening to feedback. So many devs don't.

[Stoney Mason]

Passing on this game.  I cancelled my order. The beta has just utterly pissed me off and I don't have confidence they will address that stuff in the full retail product. There are a lot of good ideas but the current level of intel in the game is just obnoxious and overbearing. You are constantly getting detected. I'd like the idea of intel to stop camping as much or more than the next guy but they went way overboard with it. It's just annoying. And the maps are way too small for the level of intel in the game. The spawn trapping is nuts. Unfortunate. I really like a lot of the ideas in the game. But in the end it isn't designed well enough to support them.

Max Payne and or Hybrid will instead have to be my summer mp game.

[Stoney Mason]

I'm weak. I went ahead and picked it up. I'll post some impressions this evening.

[Stoney Mason]

Some reviews

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-22-ghost-recon-future-soldier-review
http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/5/22/3035887/ghost-recon-future-soldier-review-eyes-forward
http://www.edge-online.com/reviews/ghost-recon-future-soldier-review
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/22/ghost-recon-future-soldier-review
http://www.strategyinformer.com/xbox360/ghostreconfuturesoldier/reviews.html

[Stoney Mason]

Played a few missions in the campaign and a few mp matches. It's about what I expected. It's not offensively bad. It's not great. It's decent. The campaign plays a bit like a mix of splinter cell meets cod which isn't as bad as it sounds. No this ain't the ghost recon you played on the og xbox or pc. Get over it. But its not bad for what it is. You basically are these soldiers with all these over-powered little detection toys so you can dust the enemies. That part is fun. Most missions so far have a stealth part and then a balls out action part. (Or maybe I'm just screwing up on the stealth part and it turns into balls out action). There are some parts where stealth is strictly enforced and if you fuck up you have to redo it and then some just turn into action bits if you fail the stealth. One annoying thing is that the co-op campaign and horde mode have no matchmaking. You only have the option to play with people on your friends list which is a really lazy move by the devs. The squad controls are fairly limited as you mainly do the mark and execute stuff with them but so far I haven't run into them doing any overtly dumb things. It's kinda neat how with the intel and the mark and execute, I can almost just tell them what to do on simple stuff and I don't even have to get involved with the combat which makes it feel a little strategic which is nice. I also ran into a bug where your squad is supposed to huddle up against a door to do a door breach and the breach never happened and I had to reset to the checkpoint. Hopefully that doesn't happen a lot.

The multiplayer is less buggy than the beta but still buggy. I got stuck in a few lobbies with no timer countdown and the dumb host migration that just resets the current objective is still in effect. I'll have to play a lot more to give any real constructive feedback but most of the stuff balance wise that bothered me in the beta still seems to be there. It does seem to trigger alternative spawn points a little quicker though to try to relieve some of the spawn camping. We'll see if its an improvement.

[Stoney Mason]

[Stoney Mason]

Is there an online pass?

Yeah

http://ubisoft.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16535/~/ghost-recon%3A-future-soldier-uplay-passport-info

[Stoney Mason]

[FatalT]

I ganked one of those uPlay online pass cards out of a box at BLockbuster when I was getting Dragon's Dogma. I'll rent it in about a month when I finish Dragon's so I can play online, heh.

[chronovore]

Wait, you stole something out of a box at a store? And someone is going to bring that box home and then have to go back to the store or work it out with the publisher?

[demi]

Wait, you stole something out of a box at a store? And someone is going to bring that box home and then have to go back to the store or work it out with the publisher?

Blockbuster is a rental chain... nobody was going to use that pass.

[Stoney Mason]

I played a good deal of the multiplayer today. It's fun. It's solid. Unfortunately a lot of the really good unlocks are way down the road so who knows how the final balance will be at that point (and some of those unlocks look like they could be annoying).

It really plays much better with a party of multiple people actually communicating. That's superficially the case with any shooter but it really applies here. I played with about 5 or 6 people in a party today and had a ball. I've also played by myself with randoms and had an absolutely miserable time because of the lack of communication and such. It's even more team oriented than say battlefield because with only 6 people per team, if a couple guys are fucking around and the other team is organized they will murder you.

One very annoying thing is that a lot of the connection issues and lag they claimed would be fixed in the retail game from the beta still exist. Amazing in this day and age that people release games with such basic matchmaking issues and then are shocked when people keep playing COD or Battlefield which at least almost always work on a basic level despite their own issues.

The campaign unfortunately is kinda weak. I would guess I'm about halfway through it. I think they show off all their tricks pretty early and the novelty starts to wear off. I find myself only interested in doing a mission or two a day before I'm bored and either switch over to multiplayer or some other game.