2142 Gripes

Ok, I've played enough hours to start making a list of complaints about the platform and the gameplay.

Titan mode
The big selling point in differentiating 2142 from its predecessors is almost unplayably laggy when the action shifts from battling over the missile silos to attacking or defending the titans themselves. And it's much, much worse if a commander moves the titan around after the shields are down and combat is raging.

Word is the 1.5 patch will fix titans in place once their shields go down, which is all well and good...but how hard is it to figure this stuff out before release? You think it would be clear after one round of playtesting, and the fix doesn't seem that hard to impliment.

Oh, and then there are the various ways to grossly inflate your point totals in titan mode, also fairly obvious and seemingly easy to fix.

Minimize to Desktop
Very annoying randomly occuring bug where the game minimizes itself during mapchanges and you have to ctrl-alt-delete, quit out and restart to get back in the mix.
There is also a variation of this that afflicts me, where the game just flat-out DISAPPEARS after you click the 'join' button. This usually happens once a session, sometimes more. Annoying in the extreme.


Crappy hit detection
Only occurs when trying to shoot someone who's hopping around like a bunny rabbit, which is a popular form of defense once players figure out it largely immunizes you from bullets. Although I'd prefer my futuristic combat minus the side order of aerobics, it's not game breaking because turn about is fair play. They hop, you hop, it evens out. Stupid looking, yah, lame, yah....but not game breaking.

Rudimentary collision detection
Snowy pointed this out to me, and now I see it everywhere.
Not a problem with vehicles, but individuals basically just run through each other. This gets really annoying on those maps where a bunch of guys are trying to get their knife badge and running around in close quarters, it's like fighting ghosts.
Vehicles are obviously a big focus here, but it would have been nice if they spent more than 20 minutes on collision detection for the infantry.

Sticky Textures
Probably once a night I'll get "stuck" on something and killed, either a box, or the edge of a building, or some rubble. I've had this problem in some other games, but never to this extent. Annoying.

Still, overall it's fantastically enjoyable. Buggy as a beehive, but great fun in spite of it all. Here's hoping the 1.5 patch adresses more problems than just the titan lag.