A Few Quick Questions on the Expansion

[Gerbah]

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to answer my questions. I figured this would be the "go-to" place. Anyways.

I'm considering picking up the expansion. I've played through the original PSU and played a bit online, but before I decide to I just have a few questions.

1) I like playing offline quite a bit, so is the offline mode improved from the "Extra Mode"? I realize it's not hard to improve from that, but the things that bothered me specifically was that there were so few missions, weapons, and it didn't seem very difficult or lengthy. The story mode I really didn't care for, but I hear now you make your own character to play with on the story mode?

2) How is online nowadays? I played early on when getting a class level up took hours of running the same mission, and after all the time I played I think I only made it to 20 or less. So, is leveling a bit easier (how long would it take to get to an "advanced class" and so-forth)? Are the missions funner? More diverse? Etc.?

3) Do the "cut-ins" (displays with your face thing) still lag the game like no ones business (I played on the PS2)? I liked the concept of them, but the slow-down it caused was horrible. Alternatively, does the game run better on the PC? And would I need to buy the original PSU for the PC or just the expansion?

Thanks again for anyone who would take the time, I truly appreciate it.

[JAFO22000]

On 2008-04-02 15:32, Gerbah wrote:
Thank you to anyone who takes the time to answer my questions. I figured this would be the "go-to" place. Anyways.

I'm considering picking up the expansion. I've played through the original PSU and played a bit online, but before I decide to I just have a few questions.

1) I like playing offline quite a bit, so is the offline mode improved from the "Extra Mode"? I realize it's not hard to improve from that, but the things that bothered me specifically was that there were so few missions, weapons, and it didn't seem very difficult or lengthy. The story mode I really didn't care for, but I hear now you make your own character to play with on the story mode?

2) How is online nowadays? I played early on when getting a class level up took hours of running the same mission, and after all the time I played I think I only made it to 20 or less. So, is leveling a bit easier (how long would it take to get to an "advanced class" and so-forth)? Are the missions funner? More diverse? Etc.?

3) Do the "cut-ins" (displays with your face thing) still lag the game like no ones business (I played on the PS2)? I liked the concept of them, but the slow-down it caused was horrible. Alternatively, does the game run better on the PC? And would I need to buy the original PSU for the PC or just the expansion?

Thanks again for anyone who would take the time, I truly appreciate it.




1) I can't answer this question as I am on the 360 version. In case you didn't know, the 360 version does NOT have access to the offline features of AoI; only the PC/PS2 version can play offline.

2) ST heard the complaints and leveling your class AND your character levels have been made easier. Also, pretty soon leveling PAs, bullets and techs will be made easier. There are plenty of missions which give you a good amount of class points and exp, so leveling is not as much of a grind as it used to be. Unless you go acrofighter or acrotecher and want to get from level 10 to 11! As for the new missions, they are just new. There is nothing terribly diverse or new about them. For example, one mission has traps which are activated depending upon where you step, but the main point of most missions is still: kill badguys, get key, open door, repeat.

3)Again, I'm on 360 so I can't comment about the lag (or lack thereof) on the PS2. I have heard that the PC version runs the best as long as you have a halfway decent rig.

[Ahkaskar]

3) Regarding how the game runs on PC, it'll run well if you've got a setup that's at least four years old and you don't mind making a sacrifice or two. I can get the game running on my laptop which has a GeForce 4 Go, at 2 frameskip. Not that I'd play it like that when I've got a much more powerful desktop (that doesn't display glitchy models), but it'll run.

The important thing that people seem to miss is that the game is designed for the PS2 (which is ironic considering how badly it runs there) so its framerate is setup as such that the rendering framerate is tied differently to the computational framerate.

The game assigns instructions for each computational framerate much like any other PC game--lets go with Half-Life 2 as an example. PSU's rendering framerate tries to stay fixed to the computational framerate, so you don't end up with a backlog of events to process. They often do it this way for consoles as it's a pretty easy way to match the rendering environment (25/50 or 30/60 Hz, depending on your locale).

In Half Life 2, the rendering framerate is run separately, lending towards those high numbers you often hear about. (120 FPS or more, numbers like that) In truth, the CPU is performing a completely different framerate, potentially over 300 FPS in the case of servers, and the renderer is more or less just dumping frames out as it finishes them, which is the framerate you actually see. Because of this, the renderer can go as low as 30 FPS or as high as 200 FPS and you're only going to see that 60/70/72/75/etc framerate your video card is sending to your monitor.

So, the tl;dr you should take away from this is that for some people, there is a massive misconception about the way the PC version runs. If you physically run slower in the game than other people, it's because your system sucks (believe it or not, it's the damn truth!) and you need to implement frame skip or turn down the resolution. If it runs smoothly, the PC version is absolutely the best, especially for image clarity.

Other than that, there's issues with GameGuard and most of those have resolutions out there.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ahkaskar on 2008-04-02 18:01 ]</font>

[Yuneiko]

1) The offline mode for the expansion, AoI, is basically similar to playing PSU online, as there are free missions and story missions at the guardian's counter. However, the story missions only go through episode 2, while episode 3 is online only. And as an offline clone of online, you make your own character akin to extra mode. You can even import your old V1 extra mode characters if you want. There are pretty much the same weapons offline as there are online, except for a sizeable number of exceptions, such as online event only stuff, but I guess that's to be expected. Offline does have many things we don't have online on the flipside.

2) Online on the PC/PS2 servers is much more sparse than it was at launch. Leveling goes much quicker with the expansion, as the new missions reward you a helluva lot better than V1 did. Class leveling goes much quicker as well with increased MP rewards. As for if missions are more enjoyable, they're pretty much the same ol' kill these baddies and what not, but there are a few missions that attempt to derive from that formula that are pretty interesting and pretty challenging, so the majority of the populace plays them for a week then ditches them for empty (I'm looking at you, party missions).

3) I play on the PC, so I truely have no idea about the cut-in chat lag for PS2. As for PC vs PS2, if you have a half decent PC, I imagine you won't lag nearly as much as a PS2 does. Of course, you may have to fiddle with the graphics settings and settle for lower to get the framerate you desire. My personal settings require me to set my frameskip at 1, but I don't graphically lag much, if at all. It all depends on how powerful your video card and computer are.