Jagged Alliance: Back in Action demo

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Nice try. That’s exactly the kind of post that we need in his discussion!

(You should insert spelling mistakes to maximize impact.)

What are you even talking about? They sold copies of JA2 for 0,50 Euro, and that was like 6 years ago?
If you can’t find it, you can still get it from GOG.

Some glorious butthurt by Michael if anyone cares:
http://boards.jaggedalliance.com/index.php?/topic/339-summary-of-jagged-alliance-back-in-action/

See guys? It doesn't really matter. They have all the bases covered.
Good thing I still have my JA2 box, the very thought that I might support these idiots with my money...

Oh, and by the way, the true reason we cannot have fog of is thus:

I find it ironic that this "problem" would not exist in turn based.

I have tos top goint to that place. Not sure if the lulz I get are worth the lost sanity.

I loved 7.62 and hold it as an example of the best case of RTwP and what back in action ISN'T.
Shit graphics, no voiceover whatsoever, shit map trips, but otherwise fun combat and some interesting stories (the two contrasting radios are hilarious) and gunfight mechanics/weapon variety to make gun
nuts jizz.

The only thing in BIA superior to 7.62 is graphics.

I never really got into 7.62, I think the extremely short ranges for fire-fights were the main thing that turned me off, with mercs and enemies crouching five meters from each other, shooting until someone runs out of hit points. That's my extremely hazy memory from back then.

In any case, played the demo. The biggest challenge is not the enemy but the shitty camera and the crappy mercenary AI. Your guys will happily absorb hot lead through their ass without reacting even if they are in guard mode. You can't roll grenades along the ground. There's a mysterious built-in lag with the auto-pause. The lack of fog-of-war. The clunky and tricky LoS/FoV. Inability to turn mercs around without moving. Magical medkits and toolkits which heal mercs and repair guns in seconds.

Well, I could go on but the judgement is pretty clear, as others have stated. I followed the development and, sad to say, everything I feared came to happen. Hopefully BitComposer bites the dust and Calypso sells the licence to someone else.

Out of the box and up to the 687 v1.13 the game plays very good to pretty good respectively.

Hey Khor, do you happen know where to get pre-NIV 1.13 builds (or 687, etc.)? Btw, what's so bad about post 687 builds?

Look at Bear's Pit. There was a poster there called Kermi who kept a website of modding tools and older builds. Hopefully he still has it up. Or ask at Bear's Pit. If anyone has it, they will surely point you to it.

I would tell you to get it from me, but such a huge upload is almost always problematic. I remember having it get nerfed a few times when I was sending it to Kermi for instence.

Anyway, the 687 lacks a few of the really cool modding .xmls but doesn't have many of the game killing glitches and ai behavior of post 2085 builds. There was some really REALLY cool stuff happening around the time between 687 and 2085 but it all got lost in the noise and derp of people who just wanted new gameplay features regardless of how the were going to affect balance.

They always said balance would one day be adressed but that was back in - like - 2007 I think. Four + years later and still decline.

Great project gone seriously wrong.

EDIT

I just checked Kermi's link. There is no 687 there. I may have not ever sucessfully upoaded that one. I seriously doubt he would have taken it down.

Anyway, I will try to correct that in the comming days but rl work is going to be a killer this next week so I can't promise anything.

Fixed for realism.

But then who will publish Ice Pick Lodge games?

They didnt even need to use the name if they want to make a squad tactic game.

My registration at Bear's Pit is pending.

Does 687 have crapload of weapons already? Let me explain. I'm looking for a 1.13 with as much of the stuff externalized as possible, but without all the bloat which is present in 2085 and later releases. Release with vanilla item stats would be cool too. I'd like to have vanilla experience with some minor tweaks present in 1.13. Unfortunately, I've found that modding 2085 back to vanilla+ state is pretty much pointless, as I find myself wasting time on actually removing things or trying to go around some 1.13 features than adding new things...

good initiative.

i was still around when we did the massive weapon and item update thing. So it must've been ages ago, but was it before or after 687? Either way, a lot of the bloat has certainly come after 687, as they kept adding useless junk advanced micromanagement possibilities and improved gameplay mechanics at all times.

There aren't as many new weapons and items as there are today but way more than in the original release. And it isn't at all completely glitch free but it has little or none of the really retarded pathing and general ai behavior of the latest releases. It is the best version of the 1.13 for modding in my opinion and I guess it's even better for gaming in a big way because of the lack of some really annoying new 'features' that are actually a backstep from vanilla in terms of playability.

Just out of curiosity, what specific new features do you guys (I'm including The Scorpion in this question) consider to be a step backward, in terms of gameplay? I find the current release version's militia AI to be really annoying. What else do you guys feel was better in earlier versions?

Scorpion would give a much better answer here since I lost patience with the newer releases way before he did. But other than the pathing I found the plethora of features available to the player but unusable by the ai make the game pathetically easy and annoying at the same time. I was making a mod with much longer range weapons a lot earlier in the game and this sort of evened out the balance a little but not enough to make it more fun than even the vanilla version.

And I am a big fan of the 1.13's early changes and have been from the start. They just took off with a bunch of ill advised ideas and treated any criticism as if you were just complaining to hear your own voice. So the 302 version or the 687 is all I ever really use and that is a crying shame because there are some really cool mapping xmls first introduced in the 1085 release if I'm not mistaken.

Oh, another thing they totally screwed up was moddability. Many times in quest related modifacations I'd find something broken not because I did something wrong but because the pathing was changed and the quest would not work no matter what I did. Another really stupid thing was them removing the headers from the xmls and making them all a continuous stream of words instead of separated line by line. This meant that unless you used the limited and often broken xml editor modding xmls manually was a real pain in the ass. This was another thing that forced you to do it their way which was a worse method than you had in the days that Kaiden and Madd Mugsey were making the 1.13.

I could go on but this is all ancient history by now. It is glaringly obvious the current group of premadonnas have no desire to redress these problems.

There are definitely serious balance problems in the current version, but I found that it can still be challenging and fun (for me anyway) if you tweak the weapon progression and play it on the "Insane" difficulty level. Otherwise I'd get really bored about 2-3 cities in.

Anyway, JA2:BIA sucks, which is simultaneously predictable and sad.

Khor is mostly bitching about the aimed burst fire. The AI uses it all the time, as it's a fucking useful thing, but it fucks up many of the old tactics. Apparently it also "killed" his personal mod or something.

Wrong. I mainly don't like the pathing but there are many other things that are problematic. I never complain about features the ai can use. There are many they cannot.

I'm comparing 1.13 mostly to 1.12, though you can see vast changes even between new releases and 2085.

AI's reluctance to fire at you from afar. In JA2 red shirts tended to open fire as soon as they catched a glimpse of you. Nowadays, they either seek cover or need to get pretty close in order to fire a shot. It's a critical, game-breaking problem imo.

Scopes and their ability to extend your sight. With AI unable to use them properly, they border on cheats. I always set all their vision bonuses to 0 if I play any 1.13 release.

Equipment. In comparison to JA2, 1.13 has shit-ton of weapons, which are pretty much no different from themselves apart from names and pictures.

Chance to hit system. I don't understand why 1.13 team keeps tweaking it. It worked fine in JA2. Its newest incarnation is just ugly and disgusting.

New Inventory system. Good in theory, but gameplay-wise it's a cluserfuck. Overly complicated with too many different pocket types. I'd prefer to see standard JA2 inventory enlarged instead.

Limited FOV. I'm not sure whether it's a good idea, as it probably makes it harder for the AI to do stuff and spot your mercs.

Gonzo stuff like HAM's facilities.



BTW, I've found a linky with 687 release of 1.13, if anyone is interested in trying it:
http://www.vossey.com/telechargement/Fichier-jeu/JA2-1-13-Mod-Release-687-full--i1104.htm

Yeah, I'm getting tired of my current game since all my mercs have weapons that can easily out range the red shirt enemies. I find that they tend to advance, then get to a certain point and waste the rest of their AP on crouching, walking a few steps, etc. Frustrating. The last few battles I won against dozens of enemies without any of them firing a shot. I really wish this could be resolved. It seems like it's been like this for a long time.

I've also found that the counter attacks are very iffy. I have it turned on for all cities and I recall only Chitzena getting counter attacked. I have unlimited enemy supplies turned on. Really sucks.

I'm beginning to think that the 10x scopes should be taken out. They basically make it so you can hit anything on the map with a clear line of sight and, as you said, the enemy can't use them. I try to avoid using them, but it even seems like the 7x is too much.

I don't mind this. It's just gun porn. It doesn't seem to break anything as far as I can tell other than by introducing overly powerful weapons the enemy can't utilize properly.

Yeah, I've noticed some strange stuff with the new aiming system. Some of it I kind of see making sense, such as the tunnel vision. From what I can tell, I'm making some pretty difficult shots with pistols that used to be hopeless. I mean, shots that are way out of range. Doesn't seem right.

Heh. I also like this, but again from a porn stand point. I think it makes sense for the most part and there's only a few items that I don't understand why they don't stack well or won't fit in a particular pocket type. Ideally, I'd love to see this sort of inventory in a fantasy RPG. I'm a micro manager at heart.

I don't know why I come to the Codex anymore, it's always the same crap. The gaming generations of 21-45 year olds are the biggest whiners, and have this unsightly sense of entitlement. A game comes out loosely based on whatever. Said generation comes out of the woodwork. "Zomg, so and so is making Said Game and it's gonna be like This Other Game" "Awesome! Let's take all our past videogaming experiences and pile them on top of this developer's plate! They will *never* be able to reach our expectations!" "What a brilliant idea, so what do ya say we troll this forums all the way up to the games release, then throw a tantrum because we didn't get a game designed to for each of us" No one cares besides you guys and the developers, and they are the people you hurt. Sinking thousands of hours and sleepless nights into these games. To which you spit on when they are shown to the world. I wouldn't be surprised if every developer only cares about money now because you've killed the heart they used to pour into this industry.

That's why games aren't like Jagged Alliance, X-Com, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Doom and Wolfenstein anymore... because you've killed any chance of such inspiration ever again. Want to know why those games were so great? Because the interenet wasn't big. The developers didnt have to walk into work every morning and find 16,000 pounds of puke on their doorstep. Instead they loved their job, and creating a wonderful game for people to enjoy. How could anyone in the gaming industry feel so inspired nowadays with such garbarge flung around it's forums? And I know I've got the right audience. The Die-hard Elitist Old-school Gamers, at least that's what they will tell anyone who asks. What they really are is the generation of the Gimmee-Gimmees and they've killed the heart in the gaming industry. Here's hoping the younger generation will go back to enjoying games just because they were fun, and anytime a game happened to be flatout fantastic it was a bonus.

DarkUnderlord, I am sorry for this outburst, I just feel my fellow Codexers need to wake up and some strong coffee might do just the trick. I have JABIA pre-ordered and I look forward to playing it thursday afternoon.

Oh, come on. Most of our complaints are with the rather arrogant way the developers of this game butchered Jagged Alliance. "Nobody uses turn based anymore, it's a broken system blah blah" to "fog of war is a relic of the past, blah blah" it's insulting to hear. I don't think anyone would have a problem if they simply said "Look, we want to sell this to as many people as possible, so we're going real time" instead of coming up with crazy rationale.

Yeah, this is one of the main things. I often wondered what the game would be like with 'realistic' gun ranges so early on made a mini weapon mod to test this. I thought the conclusions I reached about why Vanilla Ja2 had such short ranged weapons was the universal conclusion. If fact, I remember some of the 1.13 developers agreeing that extending the ranges was not going to improve gameplay overall so anyone who wanted this should make the rather easy tweaks to weapons themselves.
But they had a guy dedicated to weapons and items and by and large this guy was very knowledgable and made fairly sound decisions concerning excess. My only guess is that at some point he got bored and wanted to play around with the new possibilities the 1.13 weapons offered.

There is a real problem here. Ja2 is a 2d isometric environment that means there are no hills or other obstructions for mappers to use to make tactical situations that don't resemble a turkey shoot on a flat mostly opened plain. Yes, I know there are things like buildings and other things to shield advances but unless you use maps specifically designed to maximize a '3d' type level of cover you are going to find that you can simply climb onto a rooftop and pick off any amount of enemies almost at will.

That's not very exciting gameplay to me. I guess people who like this sort of thing also are fans of movies where the good guys run through hails of bullets and manage to take out multiple targets while doing backflips down flights of stairs.

To each his own I guess. I think the gameplay in vanilla was way better than newer versions of the 1.13 (by newer I mean everything passed the 687) and gameplay in older versions of the 1.13 is absolutely brilliant. Again, I'm not trying to say it is without glitches but neither is the current version and the glitches in these newer versions are meant as intentional features sometimes.

Yeah, the original developers had the ability to make superpowered weapons. I'd bet money they tweaked around with the best ranges to produce fun balanced gameplay. Now in a 3d environment or even in maps where scopes are somewhat limited in tactical superiority these things might be ok but I don't think anyone wants every map to be so cluttered it takes away from other aspects.

Yeah, lots of weapons (even if they have little or no functional difference) is very cool. I like it a lot. Mugsy setting the limit to 5000 way back was one of the cooler things about the 1.13 because it offered modders a lot of room to get creative. Also, if you really look at some stats like reliability and such that aren't normally considered you might see more of a difference than you previously thought.

On that note, I always wanted them to expand the uses of reliability so we could accurately depict things like zip guns but also so we could make greater functional differences between various weapons. It might really make something like an AK47 shine where it does in reality. But like a lot of ideas they might have implemented this one was seen as less than instant gratifacation so largely ignored or even resisted.

Oh God, what an abomination. They started out screwing it up a little bit, gave players unprecedented advantage by adding the cursor (which I really don't have a problem with but wish they would have even considered how to countermeasure this in the ai because the ai knowing it's chance to hit and you not was one of the few advantages it actually had) and then 'rethought' the whole system into utter retardation. I couldn't believe how shitty the game played the last few times I gave it a go. I can only guess that it has been so long since any of the developers played vanilla that they forgot how fun it was compared to this shit.

I absolutely loved the idea and was an ardent supporter of it before it was implemented. I actually was in conversations with the developers during the time they were fleshing this out and I offered critique that ultimately had one or two of them saying 'you aren't providing anything constructive' I wasn't aware of it at the time but now am acutely aware that translated this meant 'you're either for all of our decisions or you are with the terrists'.

I think I'll remain with the terrists.

Uh, no. That's not why developers don't make great games anymore. They don't make great games because they're not allowed. Gaming is big business now, with millions of cash on the line for every title.

Investors want a return on their investment, expecting the game to sell as much as humanly possible. That means appealing to the largest possible crowd, which means letting market analysts decide what the game should and shouldn't have, which means dumbing down and streamlining and no risk-taking, which means shitty game where everything's already been done countless times before and often with a better result. Try to appeal to everyone and you'll end up pleasing no one.

The amazing thing is that people still think developers have much to say about anything. Personally I loved the Titan Quest developer's reveals(http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?p=37225) where they weren't allowed to design siege camps since that would make the enemy appear too intelligent( which could offend people!!) and weren't allowed to put snow on a summit since people might not realize it snowed in Greece.