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Co-op Campaign: APEX PROTOCOL

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How about the whole plot / story etc..?

Is it interesting anyway?

 

If there is one, I haven't seen it. Three missions in and I have still no idea who I am, what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. No cohesion between or narrative purpose of the missions I've encountered so far. I'll give BI the benefit of the doubt here though since I haven't finished it and they stated it's still missing some cutscenes.

 

Not to mention that it's so ridiculously easy. I basically just speed-ran through the missions. General Guba would be spinning in his grave.

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Yeah, I beat the campaign in around 4 hours when it was supposedly intended to be 6 - 8 hours long.

Getting another 2 hour gameplay out of this campaign would mean I'd have to respawn another 360 times.

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Yeah, I beat the campaign in around 4 hours when it was supposedly intended to be 6 - 8 hours long.

Getting another 2 hour gameplay out of this campaign would mean I'd have to respawn another 360 times.

 

 So it stays this way thruout? Nameless soldier fighting unbelievable numbers solo? Its almost like I resfuse to believe this. WTF BI -you could have told us this beforehand. Arma 2 was co-op campaign but we had the squad as Ai if playing SP. And this Respawn bullshit.....i give up :wacko:

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Quick feedback

 

1. Love the style and ambience of the campaign alongside Tanoa, kudos!

2. SP doesn't really work with just one person (average player might get super frustrated) - should have the option to enable AI for the 3 open slots

3. SP needs a save, the respawn system kinda sucks for SP

4. SP needs access to time acceleration - some parts felt like walking simulator after a while

5. You are gonna get a bunch of people whine about the "AI can see through trees!"

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 So it stays this way thruout? Nameless soldier fighting unbelievable numbers solo? Its almost like I resfuse to believe this. WTF BI -you could have told us this beforehand. Arma 2 was co-op campaign but we had the squad as Ai if playing SP. And this Respawn bullshit.....i give up :wacko:

It does, apart from few occasions where you have a very passive friendly invincible AI group moving around slowly.

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It does, apart from few occasions where you have a very passive friendly invincible AI group moving around slowly.

Yup, that's a "funny" issue. I mean, other games in the OFP/Arma series solved it more elegantly but, IMHO that's the last issue.

BTW I agree with Tupolov that the aesthetics are quite nice. I enjoyed the few video-briefs, tho they are not as immersive as in-game briefs like in the A3 vanilla campaign, where you actually attended the brief and could even equip yourself in a nice armoury. 

The more missions I play the more I have the feeling of being in a Doom 2 style game, where you solo everything and the enemies zergs have less intelligence than Resident Evil zombies. It feels really arcadish.  :wacko: 

I would probably cut their amount by half or more, and make them more skillful. Some of them clearly use the function disableAI "PATH".

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thought I'd had to follow these two AI lads. So I ended up somewhere else and had to run all the way back.

 

I had this too, as group leader.  My team was like "Umm.. shouldn't we be heading the other way?  The task marker is back there..." and I said "No way!  We're supposed to follow these guys, they are blue highlighted and they made a big deal about turning on markers so we could track each other.  Clearly we're supposed to follow them!".

 

So we did, till they despawned and I said, "Right, back to the objective marker!  Who's silly idea was this detour anyway?"  Leadership through denial!

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 Lol, thought i was just dumb where as in that first mission thought I was supposed to follow those guys....as they kept saying my team.. Finally realised I was just a loser nobody wanted to be with so made my way to village waiting for some sort of radio option to call in help..

 

 This is a disaster

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I had this too, as group leader.  My team was like "Umm.. shouldn't we be heading the other way?  The task marker is back there..." and I said "No way!  We're supposed to follow these guys, they are blue highlighted and they made a big deal about turning on markers so we could track each other.  Clearly we're supposed to follow them!".

 

So we did, till they despawned and I said, "Right, back to the objective marker!  Who's silly idea was this detour anyway?"  Leadership through denial!

 

I would have told my teammates the same...

 

...if I had any!

 

I know, this gets a bit too snarky but I had a really good laugh in the third mission. Command be like: "Alright lads, Rader-1 and its eight men team will take position south of the depot and do absolutely nothing while we send in Special-Master-Captain-Super-Sergeant Gunnery McWreckEmAll to deal with the Syndikat supply caches." Brilliant plan. And the way all AI troops were conveniently placed to look away from the player's approach vector, right into the opposite direction - I felt like I was in some sort of really weird Arma satire.

 

And even the bloody Autorifleman carries demo charges so the player just cannot fail. My goodness, this is probably the most un-Armarish campaign the franchise has ever seen.

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 Lol, thought i was just dumb where as in that first mission thought I was supposed to follow those guys....as they kept saying my team.. Finally realised I was just a loser nobody wanted to be with so made my way to village waiting for some sort of radio option to call in help..

 

 This is a disaster

I thought the same  :D

I guess no player expects to neutralise enemy outposts by himself. 

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Here is some story spoilery:

 

I haven't played all of it yet, but so far it seems like CSAT really turned out to be the really obvious bad guy. As far as I understood, they are trying to destabilize the pacific area, which they kind of did / do on Tanoa with the earthquake machine. They did the same on Altis, so I'd reason they wanted to destabilize the region as well. Also apparently Miller is a good guy from the start, he just behaved a bit like an arse before on Altis. Basically West = Good, East = Bad. Hoped for a little bit more neutrality here. Could have turned Miller rogue or something, I don't know... after all, he already got established as a douchebag. I mean, I don't need NATO and CSAT to be friends, but right now it's kind of painting a picture of CSAT being the picture book bad guy for me.

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i liked playing the first mission but seriously it needs a SP version with AI squad mates. Please cater for both. Me personally I'm an sp person so please make an sp version as this is really an MP set of missions. Don't like respawning please make an sp mission. Besides that mission 1 was pretty cool. 

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Okay. I'm taking a break after I broke mission 3 - hoping final release has a workable SP experience. Tanoa looks and sounds great but in honesty was already disappointed with the new assets/weapons and the "campaign" has tipped me over. I always have and will support BIS but this really isn't what I'd hoped we'd get. I know it's an expansion etc... but feels "thin" on all fronts so far when compared the the same price for original ARMA3.

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If there is one, I haven't seen it. Three missions in and I have still no idea who I am, what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. No cohesion between or narrative purpose of the missions I've encountered so far. I'll give BI the benefit of the doubt here though since I haven't finished it and they stated it's still missing some cutscenes.

 

Not to mention that it's so ridiculously easy. I basically just speed-ran through the missions. General Guba would be spinning in his grave.

General Guba!! Lol I miss that guy! I use to make my missions with him as the HVT back in OFP resistance days!

Good call!

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Viper in the last mission are headshot-kings. Peak around the corner only a tiny bit and you can wait 30 seconds for respawn. The thick fog doesn't really help it either.

 

I am posting this while the respawn timer is ticking in the background.

 

/Edit: Yup, CSAT is the picture book evil now. Why do games always have to be so black and white? Come on, is it that hard to write a good story that doesn't fall back to the same Good vs. Evil cliché? It's really tiresome by now... I've really hoped this won't happen, but yeah, here we are again.

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/Edit: Yup, CSAT is the picture book evil now. Why do games always have to be so black and white?

That's easier for writers tho , in reality everything is just shades of gray

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Yeah, and that's exactly what I wanted to see. A story with shades of gray, more down to earth and not the same "we are so good special people, saving the world from the evil overlords" propaganda again. This is what really disappoints me now.

 

 

/Edit: just had to think about Spec Ops: The Line again. Sure that game felt forced here and there, and was heavily scripted, but at least from a narrative point of view it tried to do something different. Apex could have done similar, but didn't even tried.

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I could have sworn they said we'd have AI fill the remaining slots.

Either I misunderstood or maybe (hopefully) it somehow didn't make it into the pre-release.

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this is from the steam page.

 

 

Co-op Campaign & End Game Multiplayer
The co-op campaign consists of highly replayable missions, featuring a drop-in/drop-out multiplayer structure, and the difficulty scales up or down based on the number of players.

 

 i haven't played any of it yet but it seems the complaints about SP with saves missing are more like a mismatch of expectations rather than BI delivering something else than what they announced. the above quote pretty clearly describes what you guys described from your playthroughs. drop in drop out MP design.

 

seems to me like expectations overall were way too high for some reason. i could easily apply the COD comparison to the arma 3 campaign. i haven't played it fully because i got tired of rushing from A to B shooting a bunch of dudes on the way and not being allowed to flank even 100m when i was supposed to defend a crash site. also pretty sure one would classifiy as a mass murderer after few missions in that too.

 

but i gotta say it overall sounds way more simplistic than i thought the way you describe it. shooting a lot of stuff is awesome but i was expecting some more GTA-like making use of the large map recovering vehicles while others cover from a helo or something. seems like the only use they made of it being COOP is revive.

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seems to me like expectations overall were way too high for some reason. i could easily apply the COD comparison to the arma 3 campaign. i haven't played it fully because i got tired of rushing from A to B shooting a bunch of dudes on the way and not being allowed to flank even 100m when i was supposed to defend a crash site. also pretty sure one would classifiy as a mass murderer after few missions in that too.

Not really.

In the A3 vanilla campaign the most enemy kills I get were like 10-15 in a long mission (meaning like 3 hours gameplay, Bingo Fuel), and that was with an AI squad assisting me. Here in a mission I killed on my own 34 fools in 1 hour (as you can see in my score). 

In the crash site mission you said, you can first add mines. And of course you can flank. I did it few times when I played. So you have margin for tactics, hence nothing compared to CoD. 

IMHO you should play the APEX protocol before commenting anything more about it.

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definitely needs ai team mates on first mission. I kept looking for them but none.  who on eearth inserts on a mission like that on there own?

 

also, when approaching the 2nd target village in the 1st mission (heading staright there from the 1st area you clear)  you pass a car with its lights on. The light on the grass looks very bad and overly bright. Lighting and cast shadow system is one of arma 3's weakness which unnecessarily detracts from a beautiful terrain.  and my settings are as high as they can go.

 

really fun so far. great 'vibe'. and mistakes are fatal which is nice.

 

oh, switching adaptive crosshairs off didnt actually switch the crosshairs off.

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 i haven't played any of it yet but it seems the complaints about SP with saves missing are more like a mismatch of expectations rather than BI delivering something else than what they announced. the above quote pretty clearly describes what you guys described from your playthroughs. drop in drop out MP design.

 

I guess expecting a game that you can lose in is too much in 2016.

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I'm yet to have completed the campaign but I'm at the second to last mission and think I can have a good opinion of the campaign so far. I won't cover any story specific content, just the how it was delivered and the gameplay. 

 

Content

First off, I'm perfectly fine playing without AI in my group. In my opinion, Arma is at it's worst when you have a group of unresponsive and annoying AI to control, so I'm happy they're just gone completely. I don't think there is a need to cater to singleplayer needs as the campaign is easy enough that you can play it without any additional help, but I'll go over this further later on.
 
Moving on to a bit of the story presentation, I like the cutscenes when they work. It's nice to see something that looks like it's taken quite a bit of effort than previous measures (such as just watching a unit stand in front of you and talk) but it would have been nice to see these mixed in the to actual gameplay a bit. The few times you see characters interacting is either when they're moving or completely stopped, and it's only done over dialog. Personally the most interesting moments were when the cutscenes were tied quickly in and out of the gameplay.
 
On to missions/gameplay, and this is where I thought the campaign fell short. Every mission I have played so far has been the same thing, excluding the second mission which was the only time it deviated from the formula. All it's been so far is "Go to location, eliminate enemies, defend location / move to next location, eliminate enemies" so on and so on. There is so little variation that it was beginning to feel extremely samey. (From what I've played) you never visit any major towns or villages, and your stuck just walking through the forest from one farmhouse to the next. There haven't been any interesting variations on the combat either; we've just been given the same weapons and the same equipment each mission. Occasionally given explosives when they're needed, no vehicles, no unique objectives. This is coming from the Arma 3 East Wind campaign which I would have thoroughly enjoyed was it not for the AI controlling sections in the middle and last chapters. Stuff like having to hide from enemies while you have very limited equipment in order to find a map and getting the chance to control drones or other vehicles in order to support your team. I feel like there is very little content actually there, as the missions feel extremely short and unrewarding. Something similar to the first chapter of the East Wind campaign would have been nice, i.e. being given the choice of several side missions (or going on patrol) and then having to move to a major story mission after playing them.
 
Expanding on the mission length, I played the missions up the Extraction with 2 other players, as we could not find a 3rd. We absolutely steamrolled through each mission, only being slowed down by ourselves purposely moving slower and taking a unneededly long time to search for stragglers. We never found any real difficulty with any of the missions. Even with the reasonably large amounts of AI at each objectives and the few patrols between, we never had any issue fighting them due to them being mainly comprised of under-trained and under-armed infantry. When infantry did manage to kill us, it meant literally nothing because we could always just respawn. I'm fine with respawns as they are definitely needed to keep all players interested but I would have expected once our entire team was down or dead for the mission to fail and for us to have to move to a previous checkpoint. But no, we just had infinite lives. And without this risk of failure floating above our heads, we naturally decided to play more recklessly, and generally spent way less time on each mission than was reasonable. We are going to have to massively up the difficulty from before whenever we next play but I'm worried this will just result in the old "bullshit AI" situation with instant headshots on sight (guess we will keep the precision low).
 
Bugs

 

There were plenty of them. I get it's a dev build; it's going to be buggy, but this is what we came across:

  • Multiple random crashes for one player
  • Cutscenes often not playing or playing out of sync for each player.
  • Cutscene audio was extremely loud
  • AI units would play their speech lines several times at random after they had already said them previously. 
  • Multitude of bugs surrounding respawn. On initial spawn, players getting stuck on black screens for long times or until respawning again, players missing from the respawn list.
  • On most of the missions we played, an AI version of one of our players would spawn along with our group with the default unit gear, and would respawn no matter how many times we killed him. 
  • Several extremely annoying occurrences of being suddenly teleported back to the original spawn and having our simulation disabled, requiring us to respawn and hope it wouldn't happen again. This seemed to happen occasionally at random, and sometime just as units said or did something.
  • A few script errors with revive causing us to lose progress on the revive.
  • On some missions different players were not showing correctly to others. Seemed to be tied in the respawn problem, and also meant they didn't show any indicators when they were down.  

Conclusion

 

Overall, I'm quite disappointed with the campaign so far. I'm happy that I haven't had to wrangle any AI squad members so far, but honestly I was expecting a lot more after the East Wind campaign. So far Tanoa and the rest of the Apex content is my favourite part of the expansion and unless much is going to change in the last two missions the campaign is a downer on the expansion for me overall. 

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Yeah, and that's exactly what I wanted to see. A story with shades of gray, more down to earth and not the same "we are so good special people, saving the world from the evil overlords" propaganda again. This is what really disappoints me now.

 

 

/Edit: just had to think about Spec Ops: The Line again. Sure that game felt forced here and there, and was heavily scripted, but at least from a narrative point of view it tried to do something different. Apex could have done similar, but didn't even tried.

 

The more I recap about what I experienced so far, the more (deeply burried) memories about Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and its campaign come up. No characters, no story, no narrative - just random dudes fragging other random dudes, accompanied by some far-away commander voice spitting generic military-ish sentences over the radio. I mean, Arma has never been great at building characters or pretty story archs but this is a new low. Not a single face to remember; and the existing dialogue is either mission-related and quite generic ("go there and investigate", "go there and neutralise all enemies") or it is artificial bantering from "characters" I don't know and thus really don't care for. I can barely remember my own callsign. Was it Riker or Raider or something? I last played it three hours ago and already forgot. And this time they're not even trying to convey some background information through the (pretty sparse) briefings or small details like the ORBAT markers East Wind had. A great opportunity wasted.

 

Apparently there was some catastrophe? A hurricane, I believe? None of the otherwise beautiful settings carried any form of hint in that regard.

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