Lagumbay.com Reflections on Love, Rage, and Fear

“You stand in the line just to hit a new low
You’re faking a smile with the coffee to go
You tell me your life’s been way off line
You’re falling to pieces every time
And I don’t need no carryin’ on”

– Daniel Powter, “Bad Day”

The Killzone 3 experience truly shines in its multiplayer offering.  Campaign mode, while interesting, was definitely not the most memorable component of the game.  The real “war stories” are to be found from various skirmishes against real players: from holding a bridge to demolishing a structure and anywhere in between.  The stories are found in harnessing and relishing human psychology — the frustrations of defeat, the fatally flawed determination for vengeance, creating mistrust as well as predicting where an opposing player hides and greeting him there when he arrives.  These are your stories — the Tactician capturing a crucial spawn point, a Marksman taking out a machine gun, an Infiltrator planting explosives after methodically neutralizing three defenders, a Medic reviving himself to complete an objective when enemies have left him for dead.  I don’t have Engineer stories, I use one mainly to repair ammo boxes in order to benefit the other classes I favor.

That said, the multiplayer mode’s instability has weighed down on what otherwise would have been a lot of fun.  Too often, I found myself pleading with the game — “no, please don’t freeze, I was doing well!”  Why my gaming depends on a Session Host’s relationship status, I don’t really know.  So he’s no longer available, I’m happy for him, now let’s keep playing.  The game also completely freezes on occasion, requiring a hard reset, which is still inconvenient and annoying.  There may be additional issues with lag and hit-boxes but that might just actually be my horrible aim.  When I go Dick Cheney on someone from point blank, I don’t expect my opponent to be merely tickled, which seems to happen more often than I care for it to.

While I await the coming of various patches to improve stability and gameplay, I am left with a horrible sense of disappointment.  I liked Killzone 2 and I had many stories from its multiplayer mode.  I want to like Killzone 3 and I do like the game when I am able to play.  The instability, however, seems to overpower the positives.  So until those network errors go away, “please don’t freeze, Killzone 3.  You were doing so well!”

“And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can’t deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars”

– Guns N’ Roses, “Civil War”

Since the multiplayer was being a bit challenging, I decided to see how far I could go with campaign mode.  Apparently, far enough to finish the game.  SPOILER ALERT!  Shoot helghast, fly around shooting things, get big gun on the floor and shoot some cooling vents.  I admit it took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do since this gigantic monstrosity was shooting at me.  Get in vehicle, shoot it some more, go into space, kill more enemies.  Zero gravity was a nice touch.  Kill more things, eventual spaceship rails shooter, figure out how to shoot things, somehow succeed.  Bad dude tries to get away, pursue, shoot down incoming missiles, release nuke.  Yeah, release nuke.  Unstable Helghan planet goes dark.  I’m all for overkill and all, but going after just one dude with a nuclear bomb?  Worse yet, one of the ending cutscenes shows he survived!  How does that make you feel, Sevchenko?  I mean Rico took out Visari and that was bad.

I guess it’s up to Killzone 4 to tell me what happens next.  I’m guessing Helghan joins the ISA and we all end up laughing about the whole nuke thing.  Sev marries Visari’s daughter, and cake is served.  Yay!

Now if only the multiplayer gets more stable, I may be able to slog out a few more unlock points.

I haven’t touched Campaign mode in a day. From my last post, Sev got to do his stealth mission thing only to find out that the Helghast were going to invade and that any sort of surrender wouldn’t mean much. Higs show up and stealth be damned, it’s a shootout again. Kill enemies, move along, kill enemy machine, move along, kill another enemy machine, move along. Regroup with Narville, kill more things. I guess after trying to hold out, the position is overcome and both Sev and Narville surrender.

Six months after that, while Sev is being transported with memorable dialoge about Visari’s death, Rico comes in with a group of “Rogue” ISA to rescue him. They then try to spring Narville. Jetpack bit, big launcher type gun bit, long story short, Narville got moved or something. The story circles back to the initial “training mission” where Rico and Sev are Higs With Attitude. Spring Narville, fight through bad guys using bigger weapons (which I was always reluctant to use since I’m a stickler for ammo), chase Stahl in a snowmobile meets chainsaw vehicle.

Something else happens with Narville’s crew stuck in a “Don’t anybody move” moment which meant Sev and Rico (I think Rico was there) had to commandeer this Heeeuge vehicle. Kill enemies, move on, kill enemies, move on, get to control room, then cutscene. I think that’s as far as I’ve gone.

Next I would have written about how the REAL story of Killzone is the multiplayer and all the little skirmishes I’ve gone through.  The story would have been how for the past couple of days, playing the Field Medic, Marksman, and Infiltrator classes have been a lot of fun.  That fun seems to have stopped today with network-related issues ruining every other match.  No exaggeration, EVERY-OTHER-MATCH.  The multiplayer beta was unstable, but it was just beta so I cut them some slack.  This kind of stuff happened in Killzone 2 early on and the dev team managed to fix it and made the game run nicely.  Maybe KZ3 will get things done eventually, too, but  I was really hoping they had learned from the previous experience, or maybe even pinned things down after the beta.

I’m lame enough at the game as it is, I really don’t like losing what XP I had accumulated in a match to some “Session Master Not Available” error.