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@PoisonedAl The medic crossbow is pretty awesome. Remember, it heals friendlies just as well as it kills enemies. Support from a distance, then rush with your team with the healing taunt in tow.

The healing-saw is honestly the biggest medic change to come for a long time. It has impact outside of the holiday mode.

@ch3burashka I'm not against character development, but Max Payne as a series is *all* about the noir. You simply cannot make a MP game set in the colorful jungles of South America and maintain the soul of the series.

I wouldn't mind so much if Max is a beer-bellied drunken loser after the events of MP2, but without New York, without the noir styling, it simply *isn't* Max Payne. It's another game (good or bad) shamelessly cashing off the name.

So look basically exactly like Uncharted 2?

Not that I'm complaining. Sign me up.

@Jovrick Did we play the same Deus Ex 1? I played it just last week and it was as grey/blue drab as ever.

@BananaBoat You missed the PlanetSide heyday. The HARTs were a backup form of transportation to catch up with your squad, they weren't actually meant to get you to the battlefield.

When PS actually had enough players, you'd walk outside sanctuary and see an army of players forming squads, setting plans, grabbing vehicles... it was glorious. Nobody used the HART, you just recruited a decent pilot for your squad, outfit yourself, and went on your way.

@Ovy Try reading my post again - the community, particularly the die-hard NS1-ers expected the Alpha to be more like a tech preview than an actual playable game of any sort.

The problem is that now we're moving into beta - and none of the really major stability, lag, and client-side prediction problems have been resolved. NS2 in its current state is *not* ready for beta, not by a VERY long shot.

A beta needs to be an at least marginally playable game - and that is not at all what NS2 is like right now.

Hell, I'm a programmer by trade, I know what my alphas and betas look like, and NS2 in its current state is a PRE alpha. It's a technology demo. An alpha at least implies your core technology works - and without the ability to, well, walk around and shoot stuff, that's not a whole lot of core tech working. NS2's graphics engine is alpha-ready - the core tech works, lots of performance problems, but overall it *works*. The same cannot be said for NS2's netcode.

@kronikwisdom Also, I was always under the impression that the alpha was for die-hard long-time supporters to whet their appetites. This is also why I haven't really complained about the alpha till now - it's dangerously not ready for prime-time, but that's not the point.

But now they're moving to beta? No, god no. This game is *not* ready for mass consumption. Not in the least.

@kronikwisdom I hate to pile on the hate for NS2, but I have to agree. I was Constellation back in NS1 and I'd love to see this game do well, but that's just now how it's looking right now.

The alpha at this stage is *unplayable*, but these issues remain unaddressed in recent updates. In fact, the dev team has been making updates about gameplay, weapon balance, etc etc without seemingly knowing or caring that the game is *unplayable* outside of a LAN.

Before we get ahead of ourselves with adding weapons and new buildings, can we make sure that players can, like, move around and shoot stuff? Seems pretty basic, but we don't even have that. The lag problems surrounding this game are *immense*, and IMHO nothing on the code should be done until this is completely resolved.

I can have a ping of 50 and still be unable to hit squat, and in fact my shots don't seem to place until a good half second after I fire. Player movement is also incredibly jerky, which combined with the laggy hit detection means you just *can't* shoot anything.

This is *not* beta-ready, it's not even really alpha-ready IMHO. It would seem to me that switching away from Source was a colossally bad idea - UW just doesn't seem to be able to get their netcode right.

@HaloisthemostOverratedGameEver The balance issues I'm not so worried about, but yes, the stupid scripting bugs are annoying.

Particularly, when I'm really trouncing an empire and they offer their surrender in the form of 15 cities, it would be really nice to be able to continue the game past that point.

Balance-wise, there are a LOT of mods that rebalance the game (e.g., the one that boosts production in Marathon mode so that you can actually build things before they get obsoleted by tech.)

@Ezio Auditore da Firenze You will LOVE this update then - was playing last night, teamed-up engineers are freakishly powerful.

One engineer uses the wrangler to control the sentry (effectively triples the HP of the gun, and fires twice as fast, but you must manually target) while another one refuels the gun. Epic.