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Judged: Firearms: Source
Posted on July 26th, 2010 12 comments
I’ll admit that I was a little apprehensive about trying this out. The words “it looks like Counter-Strike!” kept flashing through my mind while I was downloading it. I was never really a fan of those Calls of Modern Duty games, so I figured that if I set my standards low enough no matter what happens I would be pleasantly surprised at the results. Oddly enough, Firearms: Source manages to not only meet my low expectations, but surpass them by far. Beneath the tried and true modern warfare exterior lays a polished and well-executed shooter.
But it’s of no surprise to me at least that Firearms is a good game. I mean, there’s only 12 years of multiplayer experience that they borrow from the original Firearms game, even though the original team has very little to do with the Source remake. The Source remake channels the classic Half-Life Deathmatch feel really well, and I’ve never been happier to be wrong about something. If you remember, I said that Firearms was something akin to those pretentious “realistic” games, and it’s nice to not have a video game try too hard to take itself seriously.
Yes, despite my apprehensions I actually ended up having fun playing Firearms: Source. But as I was playing, Firearms’ little flaws kept cropping up and making the four or five complete matches I played into a somewhat sour experience. For instance, the complete lack of a deathcam (or even CS:S’s pre-update camera that looked in the general direction of your killer) led to many deaths that left me wondering what happened.
Another niggling flaw was the actual health mechanics. When fighting another person one-on-one, the element of surprise was the only thing that kept me from losing duels. It boils down to whomever started shooting first would end up the victor. This was incredibly inconvenient for me, since my usual loadout was a sniper rifle, the game’s only shotgun, and bandages. The shotgun just couldn’t shoot fast enough to match, say, an M16-A1. I wish there was more weapons besides the usual assault rifles, snipers and pistols. There’s only one shotgun, and a grenade launcher, which made me kind of disappointed.
I’m pleased to say that the mapping is superb, though. There weren’t too many chokepoints and plenty of ways to actually flank the enemies. A flashlight is needed in some of the darker maps though, and it’s unfortunate that you can’t buy one. The dark maps also make it harder for you to snipe, because the indicators that show if a person is friendly fade out after a certain distance. This is only compounded by the fact that there isn’t much of a difference in uniforms between the two sides (one is tan and one is dark green), and in the dark it fades to a bluish color that is hard to distinguish. Oh, and the UI, especially the Skill trees, is kind of dull. Just saying.
But don’t mistake my criticisms for condemnations. Firearms: Source is great–not perfect, not by a long shot–and the skill trees give a nice little differentiation to FA compared to the thousands of other Source multiplayer mods. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and once the community starts churning out maps for it, you’d be hard pressed to find something better.
12 responses to “Judged: Firearms: Source”
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Hi, a patch being released on Friday should address some of these niggles – we’re fixing some of the more onerous bugs and tweaking things that the community has picked up on to give us a stable base. Plan thereafter is for a content and features patch in a few months (new shotguns!) that should build things further.
Thanks for the helpful review – I think the one thing that we could have done slightly better is to mange people expectations of what the game is actually all about. The realistic look tends to make people think that it’s a MW2/CSS clone whereas the focus is (as you quite rightly say) on a more fast-paced arcadey shooter sort of a feel with a veneer of reality about it. The other thing we really need to do (and the next patch should go some way to addressing this) is help out the player a bit more and do a better job of explaining some of more unique stuff like the medic and artillery systems.
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Jakkar July 27th, 2010 at 12:00
I believe the one big flaw is that they’re using the copied structure of an earlier project, in balanced form, but they’ve changed the damage rates/health significantly without changing anything else.
It feels imbalanced – particularly for veterans of the original mod.
All these weapons, all these options; virtually meaningless, because in Firearms: Source, the winner is the guy who simply sprays the most bullets in the right direction, finally disintegrating his victim.
The original.. Well, it was simply a lot easier to kill/die, and that led to a tense and enjoyable shooter experience.
Why they’ve changed it, I cannot imagine. Feels a bit like shooting Combine in HL2 singleplayer.
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Schmung July 27th, 2010 at 12:45
We think there’s a bug with the hitboxes thats causing a lot of these issues with it taking too many bullets yo kill someone. Testing this week and hopefully releasing the patch at the weekend. The problem with mods is that because your testing group is always fairly small your first big release always throws up these issues that you just didn’t see coming when you were testing.
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Jakkar July 27th, 2010 at 13:40
Understood – it’s nice to see you out chatting with people =)
But I must speak to the contrary on it being merely a hitbox issue – I put it to the test when I had a decent chance – snuck up behind a sniper, drew a Glock 20 and shot him in the back of the head at point blank.
Blood everywhere, grunt of pain – he kept sniping, being a bit dim and having not noticed he’d been shot from behind.
So I put another point blank pistol round into his head.
Blood, grunting. He kept sniping.
Frowning in disgust, I finished him off with the third shot – really, three pistol headshots, at point blank?
That’s not how helmets, or indeed any current military body-armour works. You might get the occasional deflect, or at extreme range manage to stop a round – but at close range, even a pistol shot will smash through your average helmet.
As an aesthetic, I might also recommend removing/toning down the blood effect when damage is mitigated by armour – give players visual feedback explaining what is happening “Why isn’t he dying when he’s just lost enough of the red stuff to keep the cast of Twilight happy for a month?! D:” is an uncomfortable, immersion-breaking and confusing experience in a shooter with any kind of pseudorealistic intentions.
Given that the server seemed very aware the victim was taking the damage, I think we can discount the notion that the hitboxes were borked in that specific case.
I miss the days when a single three round burst from a rifle could take down a light or medium if aimed at the upper chest, or when a few pistol rounds could do the job up close =)
Only other thought.. I know this is staying very faithful to the old Firearms, but in some ways the world really has moved on; while a massive investment of rebalancing and viewmodel animation, playing a game like this without any ironsights aiming is -killing- me D:
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Schmung July 27th, 2010 at 13:54
Oh, there’s absolutely an element of deliberate design in the damages being pretty low, though we are turning up the headshot damage modifier a bit it’s never going to be a really quick kill.
Loving your idea of having something instead of blood for the first few hits on an armoured opponent though – that’s exactly the sort of thing that’ll make the game a bit easier to understand. I’ll raise it with the other guys on the team.
Ironsights are probably not going to happen. It’s a design decision because we want to keep things quite oldschool in that regard. For version 1.1 you’ll be able stick a reddot on plenty of guns and while in no way a solution for those who want ironsights it offers them something.
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Jakkar July 27th, 2010 at 14:35
Fully understand the ironsights choice – it would be a huge amount of work to add it as an unplanned feature to an already mostly finished game, and it isn’t ‘Firearms’ – I just see it as a pity to see a skilled team putting so much work into something.. Intentionally retro. I enjoy the game, but I’d rather see you making ‘Firearms 2′ than remaking the past. Purely the way my mind works =)
What’s the reasoning behind lowering the damage levels compared to the original game? What seems strange about it is the excellent ‘faith’ of the remake suddenly jarring my expectations when people are massively tougher than they were in the original mod. I’m glad the sniper rifles are still a one-hit kill depending upon the area struck, though.
Pistols, while once very useful, now appear quite useless, though – submachineguns take most of a magazine to take down the average player, machineguns are hideously powerful in comparison to any other gun (resulting in a low of sprinting lunatics with SAWs).. Well, I’m not giving you a balance report and I’m sure you don’t want one here.
Basically, you’ve got the faith right but it certainly needs work, both to reacquire the old gameplay and ensure it remains fun in the modern day.
I hope to play more and watch how Firearms re-evolves. Good luck!
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DrGonzo July 27th, 2010 at 15:35
Please don’t add a deathcam. It’s not suited to the game. I don’t want to know where they were or for them to know where I was.
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DrGonzo July 27th, 2010 at 18:46
@Jakkar
The old Firearms was never a one hit kill realistic game.
It was the only multiplayer game I could play with my dad because of that. He basically gave up on multiplayer games after Counter-Strike made everything instagib.
Please don’t make the game too realistic. I do think it is taking too many hits to kill people at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I want one hit kills.
Also, there are a lot of invisible walls in the maps at the moment. For example, you often find your bullets hitting an invisible wall when they are behind prop.
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Jakkar July 27th, 2010 at 20:07
@DrGonzo
FA was a lot more realistic than this, though. If you were dumb and jumped out of cover while they were watching, you’d be chopped down. Now, you can eat bullets for breakfast. There’s a massive difference.
As for the counterstrike comparison, I recall FA actually being the more realistic of the two. Y’know people could take about 20 shots from a glock pistol in the chest without dying in CS? >.> At least FA: Source only takes abou ten =P
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Schmung July 27th, 2010 at 09:55