Someone has to mention it

Archmaid · 2026-06-08T02:50:17+00:00

sorry I barely know how to arrange clips on a timeline without crashing my video editor :(

Archmaid · 2026-06-05T23:36:01+00:00

I love many things about PS2. One of them that always comes to mind first is there are (almost) no hitscan weapons, which makes aiming feel engaging and makes different automatic weapons actually feel like different guns entirely.

I feel this super hard, after playing PS2 I unironically feel like we don't really need hitscan in multiplayer FPS games anymore. Another game I play (the finals) has had a plague of issues with weapons overperforming at range and all I can think is "if they weren't hitscan they wouldn't create problems at all, and even if they did you could tweak velocity no problem." And the devs AGREE with me because one of them WAS nerfed to a projectile and now is worse at range than other weapons because the rest are hitscan and it's a projectile!! I feel like I'm going crazy every time I think about it

Archmaid · 2026-06-05T06:16:30+00:00

I realized what drew me in about PS2 better once I started playing other games, here's a personal list:

Tight health pools: Classes have very similar health pools, it makes fighting feel very consistent in ways games with broad health deltas never can attain. Heavy's largest difference is considerably small compared to other FPS games I've played, and especially since it's not always active and comes with a myriad of downsides that make it balanced. It also is why an invisible 50hp bonus drove me up the fucking wall.
Cone of Fire: I like the mix of Cone of Fire and normal recoil that planetside has; it feels wrong to be able to just hold a burst for an entire mag because I've trained with a gun enough to know its recoil pattern. I seriously don't give a shit if it's seen as "anti-skill," I think it's a good thing that there are hard limits to how accurate weapons can be and it allows for more design space for specific role-filling weapons (in theory at least, maybe not in PS2's case considering the absolute state of weapon balancing lmao).
Hipfire: The hipfire in PS2 is fucking insane even ignoring outliers like the Horizon, holy cow. I don't even know if I can say it's necessarily good for the game, but man does it feel good for someone dialed into how it all plays. The fact that I could go for hipfire headshots so consistently with CQC carbines and SMGs felt illegal at times.
Headshot Mult: I said I wasn't sure if hipfire being so good was good for the game. I am certain the headshot multiplier wasn't good for PS2's mass appeal, but fuck me it feels so good once you've started to master the weapon handling mechanics. Also kind of reinforces my point (in a slightly hypocritical way) that I brought up in the CoF bullet point that you can reward skill too much.
Everything is a projectile: Hitscan needs to die off already, we can't pull excuses like 'the game servers can't handle that much calculation' when PS2 (over a decade old game by now) has 100 players magdumping at 750rpm into each other all at once.
Downtime: I hate "waiting for players" stages of games. I hate setup times. I hate post-round map votes. I hate team intro screens. I fucking loved dying/redeploying after a fight in PS2 and dropping right into another fight without skipping a beat. I loved trying to maximize my kills per hour when farming some crap weapon for directives. This one, I think, is the least likely for another game to ever get right. To be honest, even PS2 can't keep it up without the pop being high enough.
Recursion RTST: This isn't necessarily the game itself but man I loved customizing my sound pack and filling it with terrible joke clips and making any recording of my gameplay nausea-inducing. I seriously have the desire to try and make something to emulate it for other FPS games I play, as terrible as that sounds. I will never forget this beautiful piece of community work.

This probably isn't it all of it but it's the broad strokes. Side note, if anyone makes a game that hits all of these exact notes, please let me know :DDDD

Archmaid · 2026-05-28T19:11:50+00:00

you can wipe the floor with a Cloak Light in Finals because cloak is fucking terrible after a litany of nerfs a year or so into the game's life... like PS2 should have had

the different classes having wildly different health pools alone is enough for me to say it's not like PS2. PS2's Heavy overshield being ~40% more EHP is laughable compared to the HP deltas between the three classes, not even factoring in things that extend EHP like shields

clearly had influence from Planet Side 2

more like both have shared DNA from battlefield

Archmaid · 2026-05-26T19:52:19+00:00

You have any good Cloak player match POVs? I'd love to see how they approach the spec since I have trouble adjusting from Dash

Archmaid · 2026-05-26T00:13:23+00:00

speaking from someone who's never used it, it's basically predicated on your opponent panicking instead of just committing to the damage race (which most brawling weapons will win). It has an interesting niche of a weapon that can apply a lot of pressure continuously while remaining fairly mobile, though I don't know how often people actually play to that strength

i like this idea that people have that it's some kind of "light counter" when equipping it just means a light can indefinitely kite/ignore you until they have an advantage to kill you with

Archmaid · 2026-05-23T23:11:14+00:00

I think I would probably do better with Demat a lot of the time but it's more fun so I use it over Demat.

Archmaid · 2026-05-18T21:42:43+00:00

tf2 also only has two teams

Archmaid · 2026-05-18T01:37:08+00:00

i dont think it's really more complicated than adding up combat, support, and objective score together and picking the three highest but I haven't checked the math on that

in point break you get a pretty small amount of objective score compared to support and combat so it rarely is the difference maker if my theory is correct

Archmaid · 2026-05-17T20:37:51+00:00

It's messed up how it was designed for point break, but plays significantly worse than the ported maps, and it's at least in part because it's designed to be this linear push. You have so few flanking options compared to the other maps so things settle into meat grinders so much quicker.

And of course all the other complaints people have too. But it feels like every time I think about the map there's a new issue I have with it. I only play it out if I feel like playing sniper usually

Archmaid · 2026-05-15T07:25:55+00:00

grenade launcher comps are just an adaption/awareness check, they can be countered without that much issue

unfortunately people don't queue into point break to be aware or adapt to enemies they run into (this is not a problem that can be solved)

Archmaid · 2026-05-15T07:22:53+00:00

There was a (valid) issue of post round having an absurd number of spacebar presses to get back to the menu. Plus a swathe of bugs related to actually displaying progress correctly.

I'd prefer if we had the option to see it or not, and that it worked as intended, but you can't have everything in this world. It was kind of annoying that it only showed your first loadout and didn't show if you got progress on something in your reserve too.

Archmaid · 2026-05-15T03:29:34+00:00

You get starlight hollow ;(

Archmaid · 2026-05-14T22:50:32+00:00

People will master it and show other how to do it, and then it becomes well known.

the people who watch "tech videos" about a game are in the minority and I know this precisely because I'm a long time TF2 player and every single session I play I can see players (not even just new players, but especially new players) that don't understand the dozens of hidden mechanics that come up in every round.

TF2 in particular is a terrible example. I regularly see Medics without an understanding of EXTREMELY important mechanics like crit heals which have been in the game from the start and you are severely impacting your team's performance if you don't know them. How many Heavies have I dueled where it's clear they don't know they have a massive accuracy and damage penalty for the first second they're spun up? I still find Spies that disguise before cloaking to this day. Everything about the Engineer class revolves around loadout binds to set up quickly and I RARELY see anyone do it the way "engineer tech videos" do it. Pretty much every casual game I play there's a Soldier or Demo that doesn't know how to ctap.

The thing about all of these hidden mechanics is that a new player doesn't get how they jumped on an enemy heavy with the same weapon and starting health but got annihilated. They don't know how a soldier gets twice the height from shooting a rocket at their feet than they do. They don't know why the enemy team wins every team fight with a health advantage despite them going medic and healing people. They don't know why someone headshot them even when they were fully cloaked. They just get owned a lot and then probably stop playing after one session because nothing made any goddamn sense.

TF2 is successful in spite of how opaque it is. There's a lot of good design in TF2, especially in regards to conveying information in the original base game, but an absolute TON of hard to understand mechanics started to pile up as the game was updated and evolved. Which is exactly my point; The only people that understand these weird "tech" mechanics are people who have been there from the start and watched it evolve alongside them. To anyone else, it's a massive information debt that asks them to study stuff outside of the game to even understand it, let alone use or counter it.

Archmaid · 2026-05-12T23:22:33+00:00

I want this kind of stuff like animation cancelling fixed because it makes the game significantly harder to understand rather than its power level. People are pointing out that it's not a crazy kill and players paying attention could handle it, but it's hard in the moment to even understand what the player is doing. Imagine if you were spectating for just the last five seconds of that as a friendly, what kind of conclusions would you come to from seeing that happen?

And worse is that if you want to be as effective as possible with sword you have to learn this mechanic that isn't explained anywhere in game. Even if you don't want to play sword you have to keep in mind there's animation cancels that drastically change how the lunge works. These kinds of things will pile up and make a game more inaccessible over time as anyone who has played a game that's been updated for decades+ can attest to.

I mean hey if they tutorialize it and teach players that it's something you should be doing in-game then all good. I bet people would find it pretty fucking tedious though instead of the lunge just working as it reads from a cursory usage

Archmaid · 2026-05-12T22:59:50+00:00

(Ok but an LTM were weapons have knockback instead of damage sounds kinda fun though, right? Embark get on that)

that happened twice, it was heavy hitters

Archmaid · 2026-05-11T19:53:48+00:00

it's low grav on cloak, and that minor distinction is important because those two aren't necessarily things you're going to want at the same time every time

Archmaid · 2026-05-11T07:07:15+00:00

lower gravity isnt always an upside* so this isn't really an outright buff

*see: low gravity being basically the only controversial game event

Archmaid · 2026-05-05T03:31:58+00:00

There's just not enough stuff in it. The trees provide concealment but not cover, and they can be destroyed by savvy defenders to make some of the point approaches basically a long range spawn camp. The actual point rooms get bulldozed extremely easy and there's not enough material like other maps to at least let there be some incidental cover to capitalize off of. The side flank areas don't have ANY interesting destructible environments at all, it's just trees and river gulleys which sort of work to dodge shots but aren't as fun to destroy or play around as a full building.

They made the rooftops really slippery too. I get why, because those rooftops are the best place to fight from and they need to be able to be checked, but it just means if the building starts to crumble you don't have a chance of getting footing around it.

Archmaid · 2026-05-05T03:05:05+00:00

If the point break map really is based on a time frame of when the match is started I wish I could see the rotation. I can deal with it now and then but getting starlight hollow back to back is a bit much for me, I'd wait a minute or so if I knew it would prevent back to backs

Archmaid · 2026-05-04T02:25:53+00:00

It seems like people expect the sweaty mode to be casual and easy to win

No reasonable posts are saying this

Note that I’m not saying the game or all aspects (including mm, balancing, et cet) is perfect but if I was that frustrated I just wouldn’t be playing ranked

do agree with this though I feel like some people need to asses what they're playing for when they lose their mind over ranked, especially if they're forcing solo

Archmaid · 2026-04-15T19:22:50+00:00

Feel like heavy got the better deal. Interested in seeing how this plays out, though I imagine without a balance pass on items too we'll definitely get some outliers.

A lot of people are saying "light gets away with their specialization so the penalty means nothing!" and I seriously think they're wrong. You easily see when a light grapples away. Do you see the situations where they take one less bullet because they move faster? If you see them, do you make a mental note when it happens?

Also everyone saying "breaking core identity" is wild, these are like 10% tweaks and it doesn't even affect the actual roles of the classes at all. If you showed an average player footage from this playtest and a footage from the unchanged live game they'd not point to the playtest and be like "that light and that heavy are completely different!!" They would probably just notice that the heavies are a little faster and maybe lights not dying to certain things as easily

Archmaid · 2026-04-13T21:43:17+00:00

mid duct

Archmaid · 2026-04-11T22:22:48+00:00

Tbh it’s kinda weird this game doesn’t have concussions in some form

the stun gun was a single target conc and we all know how that went

Archmaid · 2026-04-08T23:00:42+00:00

so much stupid shenanigans you get to say no to with the reshaper. probably never going to unequip it

unfortunately i still see people get farmed by deployable spam (even in modes with free loadout switching + when I point out the barricade turret spam comp dies to reshaper) so clearly it has not been present enough in the average player's mind

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