Lost Planet

In my post on Friday, I mentioned that we were going to do some multiplayer testing with Japan.

Well, we did. And yes, it was awesome.

But before the test with Japan, we squeezed in a few multiplayer rounds on the office LAN during the day.

We have been playing the heck out of the multiplayer demo made for the Leipzig convention, which we used at the Dallas Gamestop show and at the Gamespot After Hours event this weekend (pictures and report coming very soon). This version has a single map and supports 4 game types.

Last Friday, after getting some more Xbox 360 test kits into the building, we went crazy with some multiplayer sessions.

My own system was in the back of the building with a few others, where they were set up for the testing with Japan scheduled for later.

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I was sitting at my desk, trying to get some work done, when sometime before lunch I start hearing the delirious cries of an obviously frustrated gamer, emanating from down the hall. I won’t name any names, but apparently this person gets very vocal when he plays loses.

Taking that as my call to arms, first I peeked my head into Mr. Lungs’ office to check in on his battle status, and found that he had his headphones on, meaning he couldn’t hear how loud he was every time he cried out “Nooooooh!” or “Come on!!”
Then I proceeded to the back where we had the rest of the stations set up so I could get in on the action.

Once I got there, we played through a few sessions, maybe about 4 or 5. In the past the most we had hooked up at a time here in the office was 4 systems. But this time I think we were running with 10 people, give or take. Needless to say, wanton carnage ensued. Intense battles were waged in the relatively small close-quarters stage—close-quarters with 10 people running around frantically shooting each other with rockets, machine guns, laser cannons and crazy grenades—which is actually an expanded version of the Snow Pirate fortress stage in the demo available now (except no “arena” area on the other side of the door).

I took this after one of the matches:

You can see the orange box around the player at the top – that’s me with 3x as many “points” as 2nd place, much to the shame and embarrassment of my opponents

Yes, that’s an old Sony CRT. At my desk I have a nice widescreen LCD monitor with VGA (for my computer), DVI, component, etc. (thank you, “Uncle Charlie”!). But this TV was part of our make-shift setup in the back, so I had to slum it for a few rounds. You can see the component cables there to the side of the TV, just sitting there hoping a nice TV with better inputs would come along.

Yours truly emerged victorious for a number of the matches, and I blame all of my losses (2nd or 3rd place) on the shoddy TV I volunteered to use, as a handicap to even the playing field against the others playing on HDTV monitors and TVs. (You’re buying this, right? hehe)

Although we had played that map many a time, it was still a lot of fun playing with 10 friends at once.

That MP session was the perfect appetizer to what followed Friday evening. Once we were connected to the Japanese team, we delved into some of the other crazy multiplayer maps that I had only read about and dreamt of until then.

Woohoo, was it worth the wait. We had 3 stations on our side, hooked in with 13 people back at our HQ in Osaka (they came in on Saturday morning for the test). All 16 of us had headsets plugged in and there was chatter the whole time.

I didn’t play during all of the matches, since I was handing off with a couple other people in the office. But the 2-3 matches I did get to play, I did pretty well. During one of them, I was near the top, and at third place until the very end, when at the last second I dropped to fourth place out of 16.

Again, this was the first time I had gotten to play on these maps, compared to the 13 people on the other end who no doubt have these maps pretty well memorized.

I got to see some of the selectable character models (character design is awesome!), one of which I had seen before in the Leipzig demo, where the models were assigned at random.

And I can’t really go into any great detail about what kinds of maps are in store. But I can say that there were some vast, wide-open stages, some closer-quarter stages with multiple, multiple floors and stairs and tunnels. The visual effects were simply stunning, from the explosions and smoke that ensues (which seem to look even better than the original demo), to some great fire effects in certain areas. But what really blew my mind was the weather effects. Yes, there will be times when the weather changes in a certain stage(s), changing visibility among other things.

All of the weapons, both human and VS, seemed to be in place. There were also all of the VS from the single player game, at random in different stages. Traversing the snowy (or not so snowy?) landscapes at high speeds and running people over (?!), or hopping around trying to get a good shot off at a guy on foot running around beneath you, or firing a barrage of rockets into the cloud of smoke and debris caused by your last few rockets, only to see him running towards you and tossing a grenade in your direction as if to taunt you as the perfect David and Goliath scene… These are all amazing experiences like I’ve never had before in a game, let alone against real human competitors. It really has to be experienced to be believed.

After playing a few stages, I handed off the controller to another guy (who didn’t fare so well against our Japanese counterparts). When that match was over, I was ready to jump back into the action and was putting on the headset, when I was told “Mou owari” (That’s it) by the Japanese tech guy sitting next to me. By this time it was already past 8:30PM, so although I was disappointed the hunger pains I had staved off while playing Lost Planet were suddenly back in full force.

So, that was last Friday. I would have taken some pictures of the new stages, but we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag quite yet on that. And I wish I could talk about some of the amazing stages I saw. But I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Plus, I kind of like my job. Just a little. Don’t worry – the multiplayer stages won’t disappoint. You won’t see multiplayer stages, not to mention weapons or explosions, like these in any other game. Period.

As I’m writing this we are working to get the latest build of the game installed on a few more machines so we can do some networked multiplayer in the office here with some of the new stages. I can’t take any pics of the actual stages, but maybe, just maybe, I can sneak a shot of the post-carnage report. Showing me in first place, of course.

And yes, this is all part of our job. Tough job, I know. But somebody’s gotta do it.

Check back soon for pics and a report from the Gamespot After Hours event in San Francisco last Saturday.



—Brian

PS—We have added a new section to the Lost Planet forums called Brian’s Blog, where you can comment on things written in this blog, ask me direct questions (I also frequent the Ask Capcom area as well), make requests about what you want to see covered in the blog, etc.

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