News : 18

2.1 analysis posted by [Elrond] | 5/10/2002 10:08:21 AM

I posted this on The DoD.Jolt site and it is of course relevant to us here!

First up - Cherbourg

Cherbourg has always been a favourite of mine, and I've had many a ferocious battle resulting in total carnage on the old beta 1 playing field. Cherbourg was a fairly well balanced map, and quite the looker too. The greatest thing about Cherbourg was its' playability; it just never got tiring to play on.

Well, you can rest easy in your beds, safe in the knowledge that Arcturus has taken the very sensible approach of … "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

"I say old bean, that's a rather fetching rug …"

First impressions lead me to believe that little has changed on the map. As you can see from the pictures above and below (click on the thumbnail to see the full screenie) however, Arc has made two new entries to the courtyard area near the underpass. Very sensible, if you ask me. The one thing Cherbourg suffered from was bottlenecks, and the battle was usually fought in the underpass.

Next stop .. Café Corner!

If you take a careful look at the screenies you'll notice that the access to the courtyard along the new routes goes through from the bombed out house opposite the Axis spawn flag, and the small garden behind the Café Corner buildings respectively. I was unable to test this theory out, but I THINK that you could possibly get your team mate to give you a boost up to the bottom of the two ladders that run down into courtyard, and be up and out the other side in a jiffy!

To summarise then, minimal but eminently player friendly changes to this already excellent map.

Personal fave … Koln

The new Axis spawn area

It's still the same map we know and love (or hate) from beta 1. Personally I could never understand why it was disliked by some; often when Koln was rotated on the server, people would disconnect in droves … but I always found it to be a most enjoyable close quarters map with plenty of alternative routes. Waldo was initially experimenting with different anti-spawncamping measures, with not entirely satisfactory results.

A familiar view …

The main strip is still very similar to what you know, there's no major change here. nevertheless, the small and intricate routes to all sorts of areas now require a lot more thought, given the new stamina and jump constraints of 2.1. getting to the top of the ruined building near the sniper loft is no longer a laughing matter, if you can't use the main ladder route!

A new area - outside factory

Here we can see a whole new section of the map, near the Allied spawn, referred to as "outside factory". There's a flag near to the picture and some nice little tie-in routes that feed to the three-tank and conveyor belt areas. This section of the map is now a lot more convoluted, as it should be. Previously this was all one large impenetrable building.

The Allied spawn area

A nice shot of the Allied spawn, which is the same as the Koln version that Jolt beta-tested for Waldo back last year. The Allies spawn in the archway to the right of the picture, well away from any potential axis grenade spam near the spawn exit.

The map has certainly been "ironed out" - I was unable to find any of the "stickies" that were familiar to me from V1 Koln, and I was rather pleased about that. It's a lot more accessible in some areas, but some others, notably access to the Allied and Axis spawn exits, are not changed, and for good reason.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Koln played on the servers, I expect this to be one of the more lively maps, fast paced like Anzio but not over so quickly.

Other changes in general

Firstly recoil seems to have been toned down. I only had a chance to check out the Garand, MP44 and the Kar98K this morning, but the Garand is definitely more of a useful weapon, and I see myself returning to this weapon, which I haven't really taken an interest in since 2.0 came out. The MP44 seems toned down a little too, but it is only a little I feel - there's not a very noticeable difference.

Some of the other maps have been touched up; the upgrade file installed new versions of Caen, Anzio and a few of the other normal maps, the only really noticeable change though was on Anzio where the bridge and plaza flags now require two players to cap. I'll do a little rooting around this afternoon, see if I can find the changes in Caen and the others. No new player models or animations that I noticed.

Most importantly though, we should have the much awaited netcode fix for DoD, reducing the bandwidth hogging that has plagued DoD servers since 2.0 came online. This is critically important, because the correction of this will lead to a much more enjoyable online experience for all, particularly for 56k users. It's been a long time coming but I hope that we've now got this nailed, and this should allow us to take forward the Jolt DoD League with minimal fuss.

I'll post the links as soon as I'm given permission. In the mean time, warm up your fingers, Jolt's servers will be upgraded by this afternoon, and there will be a LOT of people keen to check out the next phase of the most enjoyable multiplayer mod on the planet!