Battlefront's Combat Mission Eastern Front Sneak Peek

[Michael Dorosh]

Interesting comments. I'd never heard the flexibility of the camera described as a deficit before.

There has been criticism of the new breed of CM fans being too wrapped up by pretty graphics and explosions rather than gameplay. It is perhaps unfair in some cases, but there was a certain conceit when the original game came out too, only the opposite. When FPS players scoffed at Combat Mission players and the ugly graphics of the original game engine, the standard response was to laugh at the 'twitch crowd' and take pleasure in the fact that the game required strategy and deep thought rather than hand-eye coordination.

Then BFC went and incorporated a real-time option, and stripped down the order menus, which was as mixed a message as any ever sent by a publisher to its own fanbase.

I'm all for a decent graphical presentation and I can't imagine anyone not being in favour of detailed 3-D models, realistic terrain, etc., with the caveats that they don't slow down system resources to unmanageable degrees and don't interfere with the gameplay.

I'm not sure what I would think about a game if I were to ever think that its own camera controls were considered too flexible.

[MengJiao]

Interesting comments. I'd never heard the flexibility of the camera described as a deficit before.

There has been criticism of the new breed of CM fans being too wrapped up by pretty graphics and explosions rather than gameplay. It is perhaps unfair in some cases, but there was a certain conceit when the original game came out too, only the opposite. When FPS players scoffed at Combat Mission players and the ugly graphics of the original game engine, the standard response was to laugh at the 'twitch crowd' and take pleasure in the fact that the game required strategy and deep thought rather than hand-eye coordination.

Then BFC went and incorporated a real-time option, and stripped down the order menus, which was as mixed a message as any ever sent by a publisher to its own fanbase.

I'm all for a decent graphical presentation and I can't imagine anyone not being in favour of detailed 3-D models, realistic terrain, etc., with the caveats that they don't slow down system resources to unmanageable degrees and don't interfere with the gameplay.

I'm not sure what I would think about a game if I were to ever think that its own camera controls were considered too flexible.

  Perhaps a thing can be problematic without being a deficit or defficiency.  For example, what makes people queasy in the uncanny valley in the robot case is as much that the robot looks human as that it isn't.

   Similarly, with Rome II and CMxx, the fact that the fundamental inteactions of the troops with the terrain work very naturalistically (if not necessarily realistically, or flexibly or authentically) seems to cause a strange "it's bland" reaction which seems to be caused by not seeing what works so well that it looks "natural".   the ARMAs used to cause something like that BUT being an FPS meant that people's eyes had been trained cinematically to actually see what they were seeing on the computer screen and extract its analytic components for reflection rather than saying "It's not the game that it is not" over and over in a kind of state of post-hypnotic decompression.

   Except for the strange case of The Agony and the Ecstacy, there is no cinematic training in battalion level events so Rome II and CMxx probably run into the same uncanny state in the minds of many a disappointed player.

[MengJiao]

My only reaction to the Eastern Front announcement is that for those who enjoy playing the Germans, they really haven't seen much new.

  You mean there's probably not much new German equipment.  I'd heard a rumor that the Germans might get Luftwaffe field divisions, with Luftjagers und luftmenschen.  Also, for those who enjoy playing the Germans, they may see a lot of Russians, which is kind of novel in CMx+1.