Ook nu weer f een copy van mijn post op tweakers,anders blijf i9k mij het lazarus typen
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Hieronder volgt een review,overgenomen van de officiele soldner site,gemaakt door een gamer,die beta tester is geweest.
Hij zegt eerlijk dat er fouten inzitten,o.a. de ai in deze game in singlepalyer,maar eigenlijk is deze game daar niet voor gemaakt.Er was/is nog steeds sprake van 128 players op 1 server.
En ook over de lag,er zijn servers die goed draaien,met een ping van 35,dus speelbaar.Het punt is dat deze game,gezien de grootte van de maps,nou eenmaal veel vraagt van de server,en zeker de verbinding moet top zijn.om met 16 man te spelen,heb je minimaal 64 kb/s up nodig volgens de manual,en dat is dus het minimum.Ik denk dat wanneer je een echte ded server hebt,met bv 10 mbit up,en genoeg ram en een snelle processor hebt dat is dan top draait.
Tis zowieso voor mij een dejavu gevoel,want dit gold ook voor Operation flashpoint bij de release,dit zoog ook verschrikkelijk.Pas na de release van resistance en de laatste patches liep die eindelijk goed.
ok,dan nu f de quote van die thread op het officiele forum (tis wel engels):
First impressions (long!)
Well, I've been watching this game since I first heard of it on a BF1942 forum about 18 months ago, and played the betas and patches since the first one was released so I suppose my 'first look' review is as good as the next ranting thread on these forums.... I was going to wait for the patch, but as everyone else is offloading here and it IS a release version...
My laptop: Pico Oscar Plus (re-badged Clevo), 3GHz P4, 512Mb PC2700 DDR333, Mobility Radeon 9700 128Mb (equivalent to desktop Radeon 9600 Pro), on-board AC97 sound, Belkin 54g wireless LAN connection to Belkin ADSL Router/firewall/modem and BT Internet 512kbit ADSL, 80Gb HD 5400rpm. WinXP all updates, Catalyst 4.1 (I think - not changed them since buying the lappie), recent WHQL drivers for AC97 (v3.52). 15.1" TFT screen, native resolution 1600x1200 (4:3). DX9.0b.
I picked up Soldner from Game on Friday, and I've managed to fit in a few games over the weekend (Daddy doesn't get to waste too much time on silly computer games...). My intial impressions are fairly positive, so let's start there.
As a multiplayer game, Soldner is already very good right out of the box. The unit customisation options are excellent and allow a wide range of uniform styles, headgear, boots, gloves, and camouflage patterns to be combined for a very personalised look. This helps draw the player into the game world a little more, and is better than any other custom avatar feature I've seen to date. There are fewer usable or distinct combinations than the theoretical and mathematical limit being touted in some of the marketing blarb, but there are still plenty of variations from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to WW2 German Soldier via a swathe of modern combat uniform styles, webbing types, backpacks etc.
Once the Soldier is customised, the rather clunky but simple and easy to use GUI makes setting keyboard controls and other preferences pretty easy, though I'm surprised that you still have to exit the game when switching video modes. I set mine to 1280x1024x32 with everything on maximum except grass off (it has killed me too often in the beta) and shadows down one notch.
Joining a server has for me been straightforward since around beta v2, and this hasn't changed in the retail. The 'portal' system is needed to control piracy, fair enough, but as a stock offering it doesn't have buddy lists, player searches, or built-in IRC chat. These will either have to be added in a patch or the game ported to ASE or (shudder) Gamespy to match the expectations of most modern online players. I know modders have already added a buddy list to the beta, but I'd like to see some movement in this area from the devs so that we know everyone has the function.
The server list itself is no better in retail than the latest beta and still slower than in many other games to ping and poll the still relatively small list of servers (around 60-70 for the EU version's portal at a very rough count). Joining a server once you choose one takes about as long as most games, but there is often a discrepancy between what's listed in the server list and what's reality when you try to connect to a full server that was advertising an empty slot. This then leads to the annoying gap between hitting the cancel button and hearing "Soldner" for the millionth time. You can hit ESC to get back to the server list instantly, but this seems only to stop the GUI portion and the netcode continues polling the full server in the background. You'll sometimes see this when you click the next connect to server attempt, and notice the original SendChallenge is still going on.
Loading the game takes a little while, but given the added complexity of the game over BF1942 there's not that much difference in the loading times on my system at least. On getting into a game, I seem to get quicker initial caching of textures etc than in the beta, and I've not so far seen a reccurrance of the bug that stops you doing anything other than hit the ESC key when you first spawn. I don't know if this means it has been fixed in v28054, just that I've not seen it yet.
In-game performance is as good in MP as it was for me in the beta. At 1280x1024x32 I notice only the occasional local lag while my laptop accesses the hard drive or a lot of explosions are going off, but I've noticed that performance in this game is crucially affected by having a fragmented hard drive. If you have a badly fragmented hard drive (a lot of people have without knowing it) and you don't have 1Gb RAM, you need to download DKLite or some other decent defragging software and check your drive.
Server lag is a little more of a problem, but this only really becomes noticeable when one or more vehicles are around or you are fighting at very close quarters. I was connecting to games with pings in the region of 17 to 35 and this was staying steady throughout apart from one "lost connection" - a bug which has obviously not yet been fixed. I haven't had a CTD with the retail so far, but then I only ever got two with beta v2.
Playing 10vs10 games on the retail servers is a novel experience for me, as the official beta servers never seemed to offer more than 8vs8. This is an improvement, and apart from my lost connection session the servers do seem more stable than in the beta. There are still very long pauses when a round ends, however, and this needs to be optimised. We also need death chat for those who are sitting out the rest of a no respawn game. This is vital if you want people to hang around that long without quitting to go to another server.
Possibly the most irritating thing that's still there from the beta is the lag when clicking the fire button in automatic fire mode. Semi-automatic single shots are fine, but there's still a slight pause when in full auto and this only adds to the difficulties at close quarters when server lag kicks in. It's not a show-stopper, and should be patchable, but it's still a pain in the rear.
Driving vehicles has been a constant source of criticism for the game, and the vehicles in the retail haven't changed much so far as I can see. I'm not going to attempt a pseudo-scientific 'physics' review, but in playing terms the ground vehicles are easy to control at lower speeds, and almost unmanageable at higher speeds. So long as you keep this in mind, you can get around the maps without crashing into stuff. I've yet to put a vehicle into the water with the release version, so I don't know if they still fill the rivers with nitroglycerine .
Helicopters, in my opinion, are still a joy to fly once you get used to the control method. Aiming rockets is as difficult as in the beta, but I don't mind if the flyboys in this game have to be skilled as opposed to the bomb-spammers you see in BF1942. I can't comment on the fixed-wing planes, as I've not had time to use any of them.
Sound, to my ears, is only slightly improved over the latest beta, though I hasten to add I am using headphones and the Miles Fast audio settings so I don't know if the other settings are better. Directional audio is fine, but distance effects still need work even if they do sound a little more convincing (could just be me - the difference seems small enough).
What can I say about the maps? BIG would be one word. This applies to all the maps apart from the obvious DM throwaways like Deep Forest. I wasn't one of the people who ruined his release day by unpacking the beta files and messing with hidden content, so I've been enjoying the view a lot! The view distance is huge, and some of the maps really make the most of it with wide valleys spreading out below tall hills. More use of day/night times on the release servers means you also get to see Soldner in a lot of different lighting conditions and this also adds to the game. Sneaking through a heavily wooded area at dusk with reddish light from a low sun casting long shadows is very different to the noon on a bright day we got in the beta's default Riverside map or the murky afternoon in Norway that we got with Cold Winter. I'm more than happy with the overall look and feel of GFX considering ADS and the breathtaking size of some of the environments.
Gameplay itself continues to evolve on public servers as people get more used to the game and how best to play it. The ADS system, big maps, diverse forms of transport, ease of concealment, and long view distances make for a unique flavour of gameplay and no playing "styles" have come to dominate yet as they do in other less open games. Run and gun works in some situations, sneak and snipe in others, and good tactical fire and maneouver tactics always seem to be rewarded, helped not least of all by the fact that you can always find several ways to approach any objective on the mostly wide-open maps.
The cheap stingers are a good way to ensure enemy teams had better use their air assets carefully, and for all those people complaining that a cheap hand-held missile should not be able to take out a multi-million dollar chopper so easily, ask a Russian Hind pilot who flew in Afghanistan whether "fair" comes into it.
I noticed that ballistic drop seems once more to have been applied to AT launchers to a greater degree, or at least to the PzF3 I used that failed to hit from 100m because I aimed it flat.
Other aspects of gameplay continue to shine. In my second game, I was able to carry out a classic Soldner move - base-jumping off a cliff and parascending to an enemy base 500ft or more below me, landing on the rooftop and taking out an unwary enemy soldier before turning the flag our team's colour. Base-jumping seems to be easier than in the beta, btw. When I first jumped, my avatar seemed to get stuck, and I thought it was the dreaded slow-mo stuck-to-the-cliff bug. However, he got unstuck after a couple of seconds and I was able to jump properly so the bug didn't kick in like in the beta. Again, this doesn't mean it has been fixed, only that I've not noticed it yet.
On the whole, I feel happy with the Ŗ30 I paid for the game and I know I'll be playing it for a long time. Unlike a lot of people who are unwilling to put up with some of the game's obvious faults (I can't criticise them, as that's their choice), or those who hoped the retail would be vastly improved over the beta, I find the game is more or less what I expected it to be - ambitious, in some ways ground-breaking, but flawed and in need of more work. It's definitely playable at the moment (for me, anyway) and a lot of fun, so it's staying on my hard drive.
It helps that I have a lot of good feelings for the way Wings supported their Panzer Elite title over the years despite the publisher (Psygnosis) disappearing. That means that when Teut posts on these forums about the future plans for add-ons, regular patches and so on, I believe him. Soldner could probably have done with another couple of months in beta testing with a couple of patches to iron out the few remaining big issues, and this will probably harm its player base. However, it offers enough playability and unique combinations of features that it's still a worthy release and can only get a lot better with patches and mods.
NOTE: SP has for me always been just a training mode, but Soldner's really does need a couple of bot patches to make it worthwhile, because even the bots' pathing isn't complete never mind their combat AI. SP is a good way to see more maps and practice flying, but that's about it.
Just my two penn'orth.