Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 preview

I love sniping in games. It can be a lot of crawling around in dirt and peering through foliage that was never meant to be viewed up close, but the payoff is worth the effort. It feels great to watch a bullet perfectly arc into a target, and intuiting that path taps into bits of instinctual spatial intelligence which always surprises me. Basing an entire FPS campaign around that feeling, however, is tough.
The first Sniper: Ghost Warrior had some problems. Players complained that the AI could magically detect you from a mile away, and that there were too many action sequences muddling things up. In Ghost Warrior 2, those problems are addressed with a rebuilt AI and a greater focus on sneaking around and silently slitting throats.


There’s still a danger, however, that too much of the game will involve a spotter bark-whispering commands like “wait for the patrol to leave” and “take the guy on the right.” It reduces the sniper experience to crawling when told to crawl, and clicking on someone’s head when told to make him die. A Ghost Warrior 2 jungle segment I saw played out just like that: go here, wait for those guys to leave, kill that guy, move forward. But that was only a brief segment. The opening scenes in Sarajevo looked much more promising: urban rubble, a bolt-action rifle, and vicious counter-sniping.
The campaign begins with a daring escape from gaunt Serbian captors. After sneaking out of captivity with a pistol and knife, the protagonist retreats to a library where he’s suppressed (you know, the screen gets all blurry) by snipers entrenched in a building across the alley. He skulks around behind bookcases searching for glints of light, picking off the enemy marksmen one at a time. It was a linear mission, but the tactics–when and where to sneak, hide, and attack–were up to the player, not the script. That’s more like it.

But don’t expect “FarCry for snipers.” I enjoy the entire sniping experience, including the long, quiet trek to the perfect vantage point, and the tense wait for the perfect shot. I’d happily play a game which made me spend an hour traversing an open environment to assassinate one guy. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 doesn’t go that far. It’s a linear stealth action game in which you’re a sniper, not a sniping simulation, and that’s understandable.
What’s really important to me is the test of spatial intelligence–factoring timing, gravity, and wind into each shot. Since Ghost Warrior 2 is meant to be accessible, you aren’t required to deal with that stuff, but the difficulty is customizable, with gravity and wind options for those of us with marksman aspirations.

It’s a tough challenge for developer City Interactive: how do you make a sniping game which appeals to both Call of Duty fans and people like me, who care if a SIG-Sauer SSG 3000 doesn’t make the right noise? The custom difficulty setting is just part of the solution. Another compromise is a move from semi-auto rifles in Ghost Warrior to primarily bolt-action rifles in Ghost Warrior 2, but with in-scope reloading. It isn’t realistic, but it strikes a balance between continuous action and methodical sniping. Other ease-of-use additions include the ability to permanently “tag” enemies by observing them through binoculars so that you can track their movement, and thermal goggles which allow you to target enemies through smoke and light cover.
Ghost Warrior 2 clearly won’t let you run around in the open shooting guys with your eye magically glued to a perfectly steady scope, but it also won’t make you wait too long to topple a dude who’s standing too close to a ledge. And you’ll be rewarded for your good aim with what has become a sniping game staple: slow-mo bullet cams. They really never get old.

What has me most excited about Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, even though I didn’t see it, is the multiplayer. It’ll mark opponents on your radar when they make noise by moving too quickly or taking a shot. With a couple other players in ghillie suits crawling around in a beautiful, overgrown CryEngine 3 jungle…I can imagine some great duels. It could be a big draw for me, and help the game stand out from the more simulation-oriented Sniper Elite V2, which currently promises cooperative, but not competitive multiplayer.

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Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter sails past $2 million, new stretch goal revealed

When Torment: Tides of Numenera, inXile’s spiritual continuation of Planescape: Torment, crushed its initial $900,000 goal and became the fastest Kickstarter campaign to hit the $1 million mark in just under six hours, you could practically hear the collective “welp” from the floored studio. Eager backers are still tossing money through their monitors and into the game’s coffers, and earlier today, funding reached $2 million. With two lore-centric stretch goals already ensured, inXile now adds a third milestone that bestows more backstory, characters, and areas.
If total donations reach $2.5 million—it’s currently sitting at nearly $2.2 million, so that’s a pretty certain “if”—inXile will cast a summoning spell upon George Ziets, the former Creative Lead for Neverwinter Nights 2′s Mask of the Betrayer expansion. Ziets spearheaded Betrayer’s character and story design, and he’d join Numenera’s already capable writing team.
Monte Cook, tabletop RPG legend and creator of the Numenera universe, will pen another novella setting up the game’s events after he was brought aboard from a previous stretch goal. At this point, it seems like the only thing missing from the project’s super-powered writing group is matching uniforms and a Headquarters of Justice.

Another companion will accompany your tormentings, bringing the total available party members to six. InXile is keeping the lid on who or what it is after the last companion’s descriptive bio of “a changing ball of goo”—though if a literal slimeball factors into the studio’s character design, the sky is the limit on what we’ll see next.
We’ll also get a new area, the Castoff’s Labyrinth, a mysterious “labyrinth of the mind” centered around Numenera’s yet-unknown death mechanics. I have a hunch it won’t be something as simple as a reload after keeling over into the dirt.
Lastly, we’ll finally get Planescape: Torment writer Colin McComb’s apology over his Complete Book of Elves for the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Why? As inXile explains it: “You AD&D players may remember how dreadful this work was, making elves so incredibly powerful and unbalanced that all of our AD&D games were henceforth ruined until 3rd Edition D&D came to save us.” Hitting the stretch goal will cause McComb to record a +2 Video of Forgiveness.
Head over to Numenera’s Kickstarter page for more info on the stretch goals and funding tiers, or if you just want to boggle at the giant funding number steadily increasing in size.

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Maxis address SimCity launch, offer free EA game to get “back in your good graces”

Following a leaked internal memo that said much the same thing, Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw has released a statement addressing the Titanic-esque launch of their latest city-building title, SimError. The blog post stops just short of apologising for the whole mess, but Bradshaw does own up to the game’s connection problems, stating that “we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.” To try and mollify the outraged, Maxis are also offering SimCity players a free game. A free, um, EA game of course – but one you’ll (probably) be able to actually play.
Bradshaw outlines what went wrong. “The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent.”
You’ll be glad to hear that “SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets”, especially if you can’t play it, but you may be more enamored of the complimentary game, unless it turns out to be Army of Two or something.
“To get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio,” Bradshaw reveals. “On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.
“I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.”
Do you think you can still be friends with Maxis or EA after this, or have you uninvited them from future birthday parties? If you’re wondering whether SimCity is any good or not, perhaps you should read our review.

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