Chaotic Dreams

http://modsquad.beyondunreal.com/review.php?id=169

Now I know why everyone loved the original CUT. I am not really sure why this mod didn't make the Finalist cut for the contest. It is much better than quite a few of those mods that are finalists. I'm sure the CUT2 team will keep churning forward and give us all more of this fantastic mod.

I have to say that's one of the few game/mod reviews I've read that didn't seem biased, gave praise where it was do, and made valid and helpful suggestions along the way

the only point I disagree on is the grenade launcher, I have a blast with it, and it's great for putting up walls of hurt in CTF and TDM.

I think the poisen and napalm damage should be a bit higher though.....you can run thru the flaming wall and only lose a small portion of health or armor

I disagree about the ERDW. They reviewer (Bean) said it should have a heat scope, but they would make it too powerful IMO. It would turn into a game of "Find the ERDW and camp behind a few walls in the safely of your home and hope not to get found first". Being able to kill someone from anywhere while the other person might not be able to fight back is a very bad idea IMO and you would not have to go out in the opening where anyone can shoot you from. Sure you can already kill someone from behind a wall, but you won't get much shots and you can't see them. There already is a mutator/mod that has a Railgun that is overpowered to all the other weapons (kill people from the safely of your own "home").

a thermal scope could be balanced so as not to overpower the game.

all you would need to do is limit the range of the scope to 1 wall, or a certain distance (fairly short range) and then it would only be useful up close, and someone on the other team can be doing the same thing, so you'll both see eachother at the same range and have the same options.

but it's much more satisfying to nail someone thru a wall when there's no scope and you know you either got really lucky, or timed it perfectly

I dissagree with crossbow, ripper and Gernade Launcher..their all good!
the Ripper in skilled hands is one of the most powerful guns in the game, and same with the Gernade Launcher.
and The crossbow adds some Zaz to the game! just takes some practice

Yeah, each weapon is absolutely deadly in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And each weapon is also very different, so to master one is to master only one. You don't get good with the ERDW by mastering the sniper. Some people hate the sniper and love the ERDW, and vice versa. That's what I love so much about this mod. Each weapon is so different and plays so differently, and they are all very balanced to each other, so despite how different the weapons are, it all comes down to skill in the end. There is no ultimate weapon that owns all others.

That's the way it should be. The review even shows this, though unintentionally. You can easily see the reviewer's favorite weapons. I'm guessing this guy likes to snipe. Look at any online game and you'll see that different people favor different weapons. Look at the forums and you'll see that every weapon is loved by someone. Though I think everyone loves the proxies (but how can you not?!).

He said many positive things, and overall it comes across as very supportive, and that's great. Thanks to ModSquad for the review.

Though (surprise, surprise! ) of course I agree that some points seemed a bit off. For example, in the beginning, he says that having a lot going on is a turn off. Well, that's kinda what we're going for. Big mods and TCs do have a lot to learn (thank goodness IMO), and the good ones have manuals to back them up. That was an odd comment I thought. And he goes on about this;

ModSquad wrote:
Some just wanna get into it, and not worry about whether his grappling hook was set to a key. He just wants to grapple.

But my question is, how does he "just grapple", w/o 1st knowing what key it's on? Our controls are easily found, are bound just the same as Epics, in the same menu, and therefore should be quite easy to deal with, even w/o a manual. But of course there is one anyway, explaining the key binds and such. To me, this was not a valid comment.

Next, the 'nade launcher and Cutter parts are probably the most in need of a response. The Cutter is quite powerful, and popular from what I have seen online. And to not have covered the napalm and poison effects seems a real shame. That napalm is some beautiful sutff. And the way the poison cloud is affected and moves when players walk thru it. Ok, maybe he can't go into every detail, but those 2 effects in general not being covered is an obvious oversight. Plus, our poison nade effect is a bit tough on the FPS, a golden opportunity for valid critique, missed.

<a href="http://www.planetunreal.com/chaotic/boa ... 1duvet.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.planetunreal.com/chaotic/boa ... duvet_.jpg" align="right" hspace="5"></a>

In response to the nade launcher not being useful, well in this pic Pio2001 shows one of the most obvious useful (and fun!) ways to put poison to work for you. (In Nicks IceValley, which you can play on the Moovin Hoovin server.) Taking the red flag, and carpeting the path behind him on the way out. Again, just one example.
<br>

<a href="http://www.planetunreal.com/chaotic/boa ... lrail1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.planetunreal.com/chaotic/boa ... rail1_.jpg" align="left" hspace="5"></a>

And the ERDW is not so impossible to use thru the walls. The trick of course isn't to blindly find folks behind the walls, but to track them. In this pic, I missed this guy on the 1st shot (with primary fire), but kept moving with him, and fired with alt fire when gun was ready again, and boom. Sorry to have a lowres pic of bot getting railed in the pic, but it's the only one of this example I had handy.





Whether or not the mod needs more balancing is an issue that could probably go on being debated forever. But I do not feel he adequately supported his opinion. The part earlier about the rail gun seeing thru walls I would argue creates less 'balance', not more. We spent quite a lot of time on ROF's, damage, and ammo amounts and so forth to address balance issues (including adjusting weapon/ammo amounts for LMS and Mutant, which was not covered), and examples of where we went wrong would have been preferred, rather than the pretty general statement he made. Again, I understand about not being able to get into every single little detail, but I just wish that if a reviewer is going to say we have balance issues, that more detail of his particular opinion could be provided.

And of course it would have been more thorough if he had mentioned such things as;

heartbeat sounds
remote admin options
KOTH (well it was barely mentioned)
spectator option ( a feature Sorely missed in UT2003)
talk icons
spray paint (and all the fans logos in the 1st release, not worth a mention either?)
kicking (proxies, players, hiding pickups, the alt fired vortex sphere, etc. Nothing to say at all?)
cut2 shortcut and all it includes
tombstones & chalkoutlines
arrows stuck in players -flaming arrows esp is kinda cool
getting poisoned
getting burned
and more

A couple or a few of those unmentioned features I could imagine getting favorable reviews as smaller, independant mutators, yet they are not mentioned at all.

But, anyway....that is just me offering a 'point-counterpoint' to a public review. In defense of our mod so to speak. Again, overall the review was favorable, and I am grateful for that.

I think what he was referring to with not being able to jump right into the game without worrying about what keys to bind first was that none of the Chaos UT keys are pre-bound like the UT2003 keys are. When you first install UT2003, most of the keys are already bound so people can jump right in and "discover" the keys as they play. I know it sounds ridiculous, but take it from me, a person who's put on public gaming events for several years; people who don't neccessarily own computers or who are new to computers and/or fps gaming expect to just be able to load up a game, hit "play" and bumble thier way around as they learn. For most of them, this is actually fun. I think the reviewer was trying to see things from thier point of view. Though I think he should have said it more clearly.

This was a problem I ran into at Hexacon. People would sit down to play and ask, what's that? all the time. I'd constantly be saying, "oh, it's spraypaint", or "oh, it's the grappling hook" to which they'd respond "how do you do that?" and I'd say "you have to set it to a key in the menu". And they'd go "huh?!" because they are completely computer illiterate. Now granted, this is probably not the ideal audience, but these people DO play our games, and at public events like Hexacon, you want people to sit down and play for a while, so the room looks/is successful. If people can't figure something out and leave, it doesn't look good for me. Most of the people that sat down and played for a long time, however, were people who knew FPS gaming like the backs of thier carpal-tunnel stricken hands, so it really wasn't much of a problem. It's just that it looks better (and thus gives me more political ammunition to use as a bartering chip for more space, money, etc. when negotiating with the convention committee in the future) to have more people playing, even if they are ubernoobs.

Like I said, this isn't really that much of a problem, but I think it's what the reviewer was referring to.

the problem with having "pre-bound" keys with the mod is that those of us that do know how to bind and have spent months tweaking our ini's to have a perfect setup, can be very pissed off if adding a mod changes one of our existing binds by binding over it.

it's a double edged sword

agreed Wulfman

Yeah, that's a problem.

Maybe what I'll do for conventions in the future is make a generic ini for systems with fresh installs of UT2003+Chaos and copy that to all the computers.

Optionally, we could add a line in the installer which asks if you want the installer to pre-bind your chaos keys and tack on a warning that it may overwrite existing binds. Then, people could choose.

I understand that, but saying "hit your esc key, go to settings, and click on the stuff..." is about as basic as it can get. You don't even have to leave the game. Seems much easier than making special ini's even.

Optionally, we could add a line in the installer which asks if you want the installer to pre-bind your chaos keys and tack on a warning that it may overwrite existing binds. Then, people could choose.

I see no need for this, it's more trouble than it's worth. Much easier to simply go to the esc menu and take 1 minute to set a few keys.

No. It stops people jumping in. Creating standard keybinds not only makes it instantly accessible for newbs, it makes it easier for people who know to help them, or for more accurate documentation to be made.

Saying "Hit tab" or "Hit E" is much easier than saying "Hit escape, click settings, click the controls tab, and scroll down all the way down to the chaos keybinds." Especially when you're in the middle of a game and getting shot at while you're describing it. And then there's the poor idiot saps who can't figure out how to use a scrollbar. There was one time when I had to actually get up in the middle of a firefight and walk over to the other computer to do it for him. And I had to be all nice and friendly about it so it would reflect well on me and my management skills. I came back and discovered that my corpse was exploring parts of the map I didn't even know existed.

Besides, some people who aren't computer illiterate don't even know the chaos binds are there. Most of them won't think to look at the bottom of the control configuration screen until someone (or the manual) tells them to.

Also, making things simple in the game is a plus, because at public events, nobody's going to sit down at the computer, only to open up a manual (even a short one) and start reading. It's not a lan party, not everyone who comes in brings thier own computer, and not all of them are familiar with the games beforehand. Some of them can only learn as they play.

Granted, these people are newbies, but it's good for me if I can fill up all the computers at a convention, even if the players think that proxies are some kind of superhealth pickup -- don't ask, it was very messy.

I see what you're saying Shadow, but I can only speak for myself when I say, I'd be seeing red if I got into a firefight in the game and went to hit one of my custom binds only to find it did nothing because CUT2 overwrote my bind with a mod specific command.

now I have to exit the game/server and go into my ini and rewrite a complicated or lengthy bind to fix something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.

Especially since the binds in question aren't needed to play CUT2, they're just handy to have to get the most out of it. (I've only bound the grapple and weapons and ammo switching keys myself)