Serious Sam 2 Demo Counterpoint

[SALvation]

It seems like Croteam is getting knocked really hard for the latest demo release. A lot of the supporters were left feeling that they were abandoned via the current version. The demo also demonstrates lots of shortcomings of the upcoming game.

All of this is wrong.

The focus of a company has to be for it to make money. People that bought the original game and have played it extensively cannot have any complaints about the new game. Sure, it isn't true to the original. Nobody is going to complain if Will Rock II comes out and it is drastically different from the first. Why? Because the game was ok, but the online play was flawed and wound up being abandoned. There is nobody still around. The fact that Sam still has its fans and an active Deathmatch just goes to show how strong the original game was. But all of that is in the past.
The original Serious Sam was a surprise because of how much fun it was to play, all the waves of mindless enemies, etc. The original game was ported over to the console and now this version has the look and feel that the console version was ported back to the pc.

One of the unique things about Sam was the deathmatch. He starts out with no weapons but a knife and a pistol, but oh what a knife it was. That was a big butcher knife capable of one hit kills. Now the knife is missing.
Now Sam gets some sort of plasma pistol, a circular saw and dual pistols. Unknown what (if anything) will appear in the "Deathmatch" patch.
Serious Sam is not known as a deathmatch game. The developers and publishers have not gotten rich from having the game in the Wal-Mart budget bins. DM works well enough, but it became apparent that the code could not be patched in a fashion that could justify the cost of developing a working patch. Everyone has to eat. Croteam did it by shifting development to the X-box interface.

Deathmatch is really really hard to do right. It was unexpected that it worked as well as it did, but tuning the deathmatch proved impossible to do for the first time around.

This time around, it isn't shipping from the box. That means that what they have is not workable, either regarding content or netcode. Certainly the people making Painkiller found that Deathmatch was hard to implement, the deathmatch fans were very vocal and very irate, and the fanbase fizzled out. Perhaps forever were it not for Painkiller being the main game used for the CPL tournament.

User Interface

The name, death and kills are gone from the top right. I really liked that feature as an instant review of the game, also nice for screenshots. Different from most games, I hope they bring it back.

On the top left is a big goofy Sam character to show the lives remaining. It is not wanted, and should be gone for deathmatch. I would like to see an option to just delete it (instead of it and the entire hud). I prefer the f5/f9 setup, which still works and would be fine if I didn't have to look at the character on the left.

The weapons are now huge and block the bottom of the screen. I would like to see a small weapon option for deathmatch. There is a console command to not display weapons (below).

The crosshair options are now gone. It seems like each weapon has its own crosshair. The crosshair also does not scale according to screen resolution, so it can be hard to see higher resolutions. It does change color according to enemy strength, so that is a nice feature that was maintained.

Also the useless Netricsa is gone. That was a feature that would trigger on double-clicks and could not be unbound. Good riddance to that.
A lot of the prior UI features are gone. Colorful names are gone. Not necessarily a bad think considering the way that the name-editor has been abused. At least a limited amount of colors would be nice.
The chipmunk announcer voice could be totally done away with.
Third person remains, it would be nice to have an option to disable this per server for Deathmatch.

Gameplay

Sam used to be known for it's relentless waves of enemies. Take a break and you would get overrun by multiple waves of enemies. No longer the case. There are some very defined trigger points for small waves of enemies. Disappointing. Serious Sam was my first FPS and it used to take me days (when i had no skills) just to get through some sections. That will not be the case here.

Some complain about Sam is slow in the demo. Actually the movement it about the Same speed as the original Serious Sam, the weapons appear to fire be somewhat faster. Serious Sam deathmatch was different. Weapons shoot and reload faster, the character moved faster, he could move faster still with a knife, jumping was faster still, and because of wacky physics jumping up inclines gave tremendous height. It remains to be seen how much of this (if any) will be added to the deathmatch addon.
For weapons, there is a variable strength plasma handgun and also a plasma rifle. The handgun has target seeking infinite ammo but it is a bit slow. These appear to be copied over from Halo or something similar. The grenade launcher is certainly nice, similar to the prior one, but the grenades are much more visible, and maybe not quite as bouncy. The cannon is still there but it looks like a big black blob with my video card, unless I can move it to an angle where the lighting highlights the textures. Most weapons now include grenades on secondary fire. These are a bit slower and cannot really be used for spamming. Nothing like dropping a few grenades in the midst of a gun battle. The sniper will now zoom and fire much faster. Because of the tremendous number of weapons it is difficult to pick the desired one using a mouse wheel, so bindings will be necessary. A bigger problem that I see is that changing weapons is slow, and often after it happens I find myself in a different location/orientation. Rocket jumps are gone. Unsure if this was an oversight or something that will be brought back for DM.

It has already been said that the key binding setup interface menus are horrible. The default configuration appears to be for a joystick. Using a mouse for the setup or really any of the menus is a pain. Additionally the game still does not support bindings for the 3rd and 4th mouse button. The is horrible. It may work better with a joystick, but there again is the console port thingy.

The demo level was small, constrained with invisible walls. Not to be unexpected, but maybe falling to ones death and better level design would have been a better option. The level was too small, but the fact there are vehicles in different levels implies that many levels are not small, indeed the Ape city shown in the graphics demo looked really huge.

Coop play is supposed to be the highlight of the game. Unfortunately it is broken in the demo. That is very concerning, especially since the demo was made on 9/4 and the game went gold just 16 days later. With the last two weeks the focus is likely to be on correcting install process and not on correcting game bugs. That indicates another patch may be necessary to correct this.

Graphics mode

It's very sad to see have a beautiful new 3D graphics engine that most video cards are not going to be able to run very well. For those that do, instead of using models and textures that showcase the graphics, there are a bunch of cartoony looking characters. It is hard to see much detail in the enemies, at a distance they look much like different blobs of color thrown together. Most older cards are just not going to display the graphics well, older meaning technology more than a year old. The will certainly play the game, but at lower resolutions without all of the eye candy. For best results, there is an autodetect setting that will tune the graphics according to the card capabilities. For best viewing it may be a good idea to further decrease resolution and increase the graphics effects.

Console commands

The full weapon set can be tested by enabling cheats in the demo. To do this, bring up the console (`) and type the following command, with no / in the front. If that does not work, the ini file can be directly edited in "Serious Sam 2 Demo\Content\SeriousSam2" - Sam2.ini.
For regular cheats (god mode, all weapons, etc) Sam_iEnableCheats = 1
For developer cheats (noclip, etc) Sam_iEnableCheats = 2
Now if you press ESC, there should be a Cheat menu where you can choose the desired cheat.

While in the ini file, you can also make the following changes:
change gfx_iAPI = 2 to gfx_iAPI = 1 (restart to test openGL for nvidia for faster framerates)
prf_bShowFPS = 1 : show framerate on screen
Sam_bEnableRagdollDeaths = 1 : use ragdoll animation instead of gibbing
hud_bShowWeapon = 0 : hide your weapon
hud_bShowInfo = 0: hide hud info
hud_bShowPing = 1: ping
hud_iShowBandwidth = 1 : untested
hud_bShowTime = 1: game clock
inp_bMouseSmoothing = 0: turn off mouse smoothing
inp_fMouseSensitivity = 1: use 0.1 - 0.9 for more precision

Conclusion

The new game engine appears to have a lot of potential, but lots of questions remain. A lot of fans are wondering if by purchasing this game they will be stuck in an endless cycle of "Waiting for the patch". At $29.95, it is reasonably priced, but if deathmatch is your thing, you will want to pass on it for now. It would be really nice to see a good deathmatch offering. The speed and fun factor of the original Serious Sam is lacking in todays deathmatches. Unfortunatly that may be asking for too much. Only time will tell what "goodies" Croteam is able to produce with the upcoming patch.