[GDC 2011] Showdown in the Heartland
What a difference an extra year makes. Resistance 3 is coming. It is awesome. Here's the proof.
Published: March 12, 2011
Insomniac Games just plain loves controversy, don't they? After shaking things up for die-hard fans of the first game to deleterious effect with the sequel's single-player campaign while broadening the multiplayer offerings considerably, the studio has flipped things a little and made some major changes to the online while bringing their single-player back into line with the original.
It is, of course, the burden of any game developer to find the right balance between giving their fans what they want and introducing enough new stuff that they didn't know they wanted in the first place, but after spending a few hours with both sides of the Resistance 3 coin, we're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's get that controversial side of things out of the way first. Yes, Resistance 3 is getting scaled back massively in terms of player count over the first game -- 16 players max vs. the first game's 40 and the second's 60. The goal, Insomniac says, is to make the battles a little more intimate, keeping conflicts high on actual gunplay and low on running around in search of crosshair fodder. The studio cites R1 maps Rooftops and Busyard and San Francisco/Bayou House from R2 as example of keeping the fray nice and busy, and in playing the new prison map (located in the Republic of Chad, an aim of the multiplayer to move it away from the US-based locales of the single-player campaign, so no re-using of maps here), that was made abundantly clear.
But the player count isn't the biggest source of controversy here. No, it's the fact that Resistance 3 is putting a hard line focus on class-based roles, customizable (and level-unlocked) perks and per-loadout tweaks. Yes, there's an undeniable Call of Duty influence here, right down to blood spatter on the screen and rewards for killstreaks, but it's not as sacrilegious as it might seem.
Amid the initial feelings that the old days of being able to kick on high-heat effects as a Chimera to see through walls and hulk out for attacks having fallen by the wayside, I saw a familiar glimmer of hope in the creativity of those perks, divided into passive and active buffs. Some of it was indeed standard stuff; faster reload, more ammo, tossing out ammo or health packs to allies, blah blah blah. But Resistance 3 is far from abandoning its sci-fi roots.
A barrier that turns melee strikes into striker-damaging reflects, the ability to create a doppelganger to distract would-be shooters, the familiar loadout of the obstruction-removing Auger, the ability to all but BAMF, Nightcrawler-style, a few feet ahead to get the jump on players, having three leapers burst from your dead body to hunt down enemies for revenge, a spot and mark system that highlights enemies once you've planted the cursor on them. Slamming three enemy players without being taken down yourself (tough, but not impossible) unlocked the ability to cloak (which ended up being a huge benefit, though we couldn't help but think it was the QA folks down in San Diego that we were battling just doing their duty to go easy on us until the last game). Yes, this is a new kind of approach to Resistance, but it's still Resistance through and through.
It is, of course, the burden of any game developer to find the right balance between giving their fans what they want and introducing enough new stuff that they didn't know they wanted in the first place, but after spending a few hours with both sides of the Resistance 3 coin, we're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's get that controversial side of things out of the way first. Yes, Resistance 3 is getting scaled back massively in terms of player count over the first game -- 16 players max vs. the first game's 40 and the second's 60. The goal, Insomniac says, is to make the battles a little more intimate, keeping conflicts high on actual gunplay and low on running around in search of crosshair fodder. The studio cites R1 maps Rooftops and Busyard and San Francisco/Bayou House from R2 as example of keeping the fray nice and busy, and in playing the new prison map (located in the Republic of Chad, an aim of the multiplayer to move it away from the US-based locales of the single-player campaign, so no re-using of maps here), that was made abundantly clear.
But the player count isn't the biggest source of controversy here. No, it's the fact that Resistance 3 is putting a hard line focus on class-based roles, customizable (and level-unlocked) perks and per-loadout tweaks. Yes, there's an undeniable Call of Duty influence here, right down to blood spatter on the screen and rewards for killstreaks, but it's not as sacrilegious as it might seem.
Amid the initial feelings that the old days of being able to kick on high-heat effects as a Chimera to see through walls and hulk out for attacks having fallen by the wayside, I saw a familiar glimmer of hope in the creativity of those perks, divided into passive and active buffs. Some of it was indeed standard stuff; faster reload, more ammo, tossing out ammo or health packs to allies, blah blah blah. But Resistance 3 is far from abandoning its sci-fi roots.
A barrier that turns melee strikes into striker-damaging reflects, the ability to create a doppelganger to distract would-be shooters, the familiar loadout of the obstruction-removing Auger, the ability to all but BAMF, Nightcrawler-style, a few feet ahead to get the jump on players, having three leapers burst from your dead body to hunt down enemies for revenge, a spot and mark system that highlights enemies once you've planted the cursor on them. Slamming three enemy players without being taken down yourself (tough, but not impossible) unlocked the ability to cloak (which ended up being a huge benefit, though we couldn't help but think it was the QA folks down in San Diego that we were battling just doing their duty to go easy on us until the last game). Yes, this is a new kind of approach to Resistance, but it's still Resistance through and through.
