Good news from Super Secret Sunshine World Headquarters: We’ve gotten ahold of a Resistance 2 beta code. Sony has officially deemed us worthy. The bad news? We’re on level twelve of Dead Space and our mission has been put on indefinite hold. The fate of the whole fucking galaxy hangs in the balance, and we’ve moved onto a world under perpetual siege from alien conquistadors. This is no laughing matter.
I should preface this by admitting that I am not a huge fan of first person shooters*, although I have played quite a lot of them and enjoyed a select few immensely. If you were to rifle through my little black book of past hook-ups, you’d find the likes of Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Heretic, Quake, Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, Unreal, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, Battlefield: Bad Company, and, of course, Resistance: Fall of Man.
Look, I am not bragging. I mean, the list is embarrassing. Can you imagine what I could have accomplished with my life if I hadn’t devoted so many hours to completing missions that helped no one and bringing aid to people that never existed? You know, like, what if I’d actually gone outside my house and helped real people? Or devoted those hours to projects that would bring to fruition wonders the likes of which the world has never seen? I could have made a difference! I could have changed everything!
I am but a helpless sinner, awash in my own filth.
So, the first couple of hours playing the demo left me with an unpleasant aftertaste. I picked competitive play, of course, and it really is nothing special. I’ve seen it before. Many times before. Pick a gun, spawn, shoot, kill or die, repeat. I imagine it would really be something in a land where Halo or Call of Duty had failed to penetrate the public consciousness. But that place? It is a desolate wasteland overrun by giant, malevolent sandworms and ruled by a young, pouty Kyle MacLachlan.
Things changed a bit when cooperative play was selected. None of us expected much from it, our preconceived notions of what cooperative play means having tempered our enthusiasm. Lo, we were wrong.
Something new appears to be happening here, although I admit the possibility of it all having done before. I am not an encyclopedia. Nor do I do research. If I am unduly enthusiastic about things that have been done better elsewhere, you have my permission to laugh at me. I am only try to help, in my own meager way.
The beta only appears to have one cooperative level. But it’s not just a level from the single player game like one usually expects from cooperative play. Instead, the level has been designed as a series of pens. Like on a farm. And gates connect all of the various pens together, each pen connecting to multiple other pens. The sum effect being that each time the level is played, the experience is different. When the game loads, the server decides in which pen one’s party will begin the level and which series of pens will need to be conquered in order to beat it, keeping the experience fresh each time. Even better, there are enough pens so that they will not all be visited each play through.
To bolster the experience, three types of classes are available to the player: soldier, special ops and medic. Like Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Team Fortress, the idea is to foster cooperative play by creating a balanced, symbiotic relationship between the character classes. A soldier can deal a great deal of damage, but he must rely on special ops for ammunition. Special Ops will never run out of ammo, but has a better chance of survival standing behind a soldier’s energy shield. If either gets damaged, only a medic can heal them… sort of. It all kind of breaks down in practice, actually.
The first really fun match I played was as a soldier. Let me tell you, I shot those aliens fucking dead. It was great. I didn’t really know what I was doing at first, but what made it work was that someone playing special ops started following me around, fed me ammo, and stood behind my shield while carving aliens into little chunky bits. I needed his ammo, he needed my shield. It wouldn’t have worked if I had run around the level like an ungrateful jerk, but I intentionally moved slowly and tried to hold a position for as long as possible so that my shield would actually be of use to anyone who wanted to stand behind it. This gave him incentive to stick around.
After that experience, I tried special ops. What I learned? It’s hard to be a good soldier. I was really nice when I was a soldier. Most soldiers? Very selfish. They want your ammo but they don’t get that you have needs of your own. They hardly stand, making standing behind their shields nigh impossible. It’s a very one-sided, dysfunctional relationship. I didn’t enjoy the experience much, but I do now feel a lot more empathetic towards my ex-girlfriend. So there is that.
The problem, I think, is that soldiers don’t earn experience points for sharing their shields. I’m not sure how this could be measured, but doing so would really make it to the soldier’s advantage to, you know, cooperate.
Anyway, I then found myself in a game where everyone decided to be special ops. I don’t know if this was just because the server had randomly assigned them all to special ops and they didn’t know how to change their class, or if it was just the best way to be a lone wolf and essentially negate the whole point of cooperative play, but I decided to try medic.
Medics are weirdly powerful. Shooting aliens as a medic will restore hit points. Shooting teammates will restore their health. As a medic, friendly fire is impossible. The downside? There isn’t one. All of these activities will generate experience points for the player, making it easy to get through as the top player in the match. Medics may not do as much damage as a soldier, but they do enough. Combined with the ability for a medic to self-heal, it’s very easy for one to run around on the battlefield without the need to stick with the group.
Balance is obviously needed, but I could see cooperative play as the compelling feature of Resistance 2. I certainly have little interest in the competitive offerings, whose mechanics are so antiquated as to be infused with old man smell. I can see little reason for their inclusion, other than the fact that new shipments of fourteen-year-old boys seem to be deployed on an annual basis, fresh reinforcements ready to replace retiring, older models who have moved onto more sophisticated gaming fare less reliant upon repetition and reflex. You know, like Cooking Mama 2.
