Delilah Judge-Slayer
Kameira Lodge
Amarr Empire
19
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Posted - 2014.02.07 07:09:00 -
[1] - Quote
Ever have one of those days where the acid just sits at the base of your throat and just burns like a mother and no matter how much goddamned pepto bismol you suck down it just won't go the **** away?
Yeah that's what it feels like to play DUST as a newbie.
I write for themittani.com and I picked up DUST last summer and started playing it ironman style. No boosters, aurum PTW gear or anything like that. I didn't even afford myself the luxury of a mouse and keyboard. Nope, totally hardcore. My goal was to write a piece on what it was like to play the game from the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar with Eve Online or New Eden. I couldn't do it. Not without writing several pages of bileous ire on how CCP hyped DUST as some groundbreaking game that was going to fuse and grow CCP's franchise and deliver on a unified game universe. What we ******* got is a lobby shooter that could have been pulled from the late 90's. It's all too clear now that CCP was too damned eager to get their fingers into the microtransaction pie that they forgot that the reason why you make games is to provide entertainment... and dare I say it .... fun.
So instead, I'm gonna vent that sintering rage here so I can put together something that my editor won't slap down like a misbehaving child in church.
I started playing this terrible game back when a guy in a heavy suit and a HMG was a scary ******* proposition and LAV's died in droves to his ridiculous Blapcannon while Dropship pilots made like Mario and crushed your ******* skull in like you were one of those ******** turtles that walked back and forth on that one little platform.... you know the one. All the while I was screaming "YOLO!' at my monitor while dumb-firing my swarm launcher point-blank into some jack-booted Caldari fascists face.
And it was FUN!
Yes I actually had fun with it back in beta. It was accessible and everyone was pretty much on an even keel. You could join pubmatches by yourself in a ****** scrubsuit and you didn't know how the match was going to end.
Now. It's just a cesspit of FPS wanna-bes, has-beens, and forum warriors who think the solution to this game's woes is to tell newbros to HTFU and spoon feed them platters full of that tired, fetid, self-congratulatory, and miserably ****** "Get Good" attitude in broken grammar. Pretenders and internet tough guys behaving like they're some kind of Rainman idiot-savant of FPS video games, and then placing themselves on a pedestal as they shine up the old Good-Guy badge by writing "newbie guides" while exploiting the most broken mechanics of the game to pad their Kill/Death ratios. Pudknockers.
You cannot call yourself a "good" FPS player until you have played Quake 2 hook and rail insta-gib or mastered the art of grav-nading people in the face in HL2DM. CoD, BF3, or whatever subliminal military recruitment tool is being foisted upon gamers these days is garbage compared to Novalogic's Deltaforce series. You want to talk about needing skill? One-shot, one-hit, one kill, and assholes were running around with M249 SAW's giggling and murdering the innocent like a five year old with a magnifying glass and an anthill on a sunny day.
And you know what?
Napalm sticks to kids and DUST is a terrible game. Both are horrible and saddening truths.
CCP's old philosophy of "Hey lets make a brutally hard game and throw the players into the deep end and see how many we can keep around for ten years!" strategy is NOT going to work in the heavily competitive FPS genre. Punishing newbies by throwing them into matches where they have literally no chance of winning, much less killing ANYONE on the opposing team is an awful business model.
So you know what? They go play something fun. Like Borderlands. They don't stick around, they aren't giving you money. And what's even worse is that pilots in New Eden are totally ambivalent about DUST.
Christ on a cripple-crutch... you know it's bad when your diehard fanboys that are well-established in Eve Online are telling you that DUST is frustrating as hell.
Think about that for a second. An Eve Online... PLAYER... a guy that plays one of the most complicated, harsh, and consequence filled MMO's out there is telling you that your run of the mill lobby-driven FPS is ... too frustrating.
WAKE UP.
There is one fundamental difference between Eve Online and DUST that is truly breaking the experience.
A newbro in Eve is a coveted asset that is useful from DAY ONE.
A newbro on your team in DUST 514 is a LIABILITY for a couple of months until he's skilled enough to stand on his own.
You gotta follow his ass around, tell him not to come out from beyond the redline, wipe his ass for him... maybe even cup his balls a little bit while you and your team carry him through pubmatch after pubmatch after pubmatch in a one-sided slaughter that can only be compared to a fisherman smashing minnows in the head with a rubber mallet to make bait for bigger fish.
This game doesn't have ten years. It's got ten months.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled forum surfing while I write something about DUST that isn't nearly as laced with profanity. |