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October 20, 2008 - Last week, Sony and Slant 6 released the latest chapter in the SOCOM franchise on the PS3. The highly anticipated SOCOM: Confrontation hit stores as both a standalone title and bundled with a headset, and it was also available for download from the PSN. However, shortly after the release, the problems with the game started, with numerous reports of server outages, game issues and other problems that made the retail game feel much more like an "open open beta" than a fully complete title. This was a problem for media and consumers alike, and I spent the last week trying to fully understand what was going on with this game by playing as much as I could to give some early impressions.
First off, the good news -- the official Sony headset appears to be an incredible piece of machinery, with clear, crisp sound that comes through when you're trying to communicate to your teammates. It's comfortable, easy to configure, and works well. It's also relatively easy to tell who's got the headset and who doesn't, because the drop off in volume when someone talks is rather noticeable. On the other hand, you can tell that some people don't fully expect the headset to work as well as it does, because you can get into matches and suddenly have to force your volume down because someone is screaming in your ear. The other piece of good news is that when the game is up and it works, it can be fun to play: maps are large and the environments feature plenty of pathways and areas to snipe or ambush from.
This, however, is a double-edged sword, because the game doesn't fully work all of the time. I'm not solely talking about bugs or glitches (though I will get to those later); I'm talking about the servers not working whatsoever. Downloading the mandatory patch on the first day, regardless of the office connection or my home connection, was completely impossible, and there have been numerous instances where the game's servers are fully shut down. This isn't during set hours for maintenance either: I've seen blackout periods that have been for an hour or so during the middle of the day and even longer at night. On top of that comes a large number of connection error messages that pop up. Using our dedicated gaming LAN in our office, I managed to get three separate network issues in two minutes, including being told that the network wasn't found or that the connection to the servers was lost, even though I was still logged into the PSN.
The connection issues also seem to have a certain amount of impact on selecting channels and servers, because I attempted to join servers that were at least one hundred players below the limit and was told that I failed to join the channel entirely. On the other hand, I would be in the middle of attempting to join a game and find myself kicked back out to the title screen, where the game would then fail to connect to any servers or even have servers completely removed from my channel list. At other times, the game would freeze or completely glitch on entry into a game, forcing a hard reset of the system. But perhaps the oddest connection issue was doing a search for available games and discovering, say, a suppression match on Fallen with unlimited respawns that was open, only to leap into the game and find that it was a demolition match on Crossroads with three spawns and you're out.
The connection also seems to affect gameplay regardless of the speed of the connection. Working on our dedicated gaming LAN, I found a ton of hitches that would make the game stutter, or cause guys on either side to teleport or get frozen for a few seconds before the action would catch up. This might be understandable if a firefight was breaking out in one location with everyone firing RPGs and their weapons at each other, but if you're just walking and the game hitches on you, there's a problem. Another problem came from watching render and texture pop in occur as I moved from one area to another, along with lots of tearing; some of these issues seemed to help the game hesitate or flicker and drag the framerate down.
Apart from that, a large amount of the game appears to be completely missing. Trophies are clearly listed on the back of the box, yet aren't available in the game. The same can be said about matchmaking, which is advertised but missing. Stats and rankings are a key feature, as are the leaderboards, but the game won't track stats regardless of the number of games that you play; one game, I was recognized as the game's MVP, and while it took another three matches before I was bounced off the server, the game didn't recognize any of my kills, deaths or playing time.
While I'm still trying to make my way through the game, a large amount of my final opinion of the title can't help but rest undone right now. This is particularly true since Slant Six has publicized that it's working on patching the game to include many of the features that were missing, as well as improve the stability of the servers themselves. But I do admit that I'm extremely surprised that there would be so many technical issues with one of the larger franchises for Sony, especially with such a rabid SOCOM community still active in the world. But, until the servers have been fixed, reviewing the game isn't even possible right now
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Users browsing this forum: Ralphie and 51 guests
ill get it soon
