Multiplayer

So close, and yet so far

The concept of multiplayer Renegade is good. The CnC mode features two teams and two bases with buildings that give you money, vehicles, and infantry upgrades. You buy vehicles and infantry upgrades with money that you get when your automated Harvester brings back Tiberium. You get bonus money for killing enemies and their vehicles. There are many different player classes as well as vehicle types. These ideas have been around for a while – the close-to-vaporware (I still have faith!) Team Fortress 2 has been touting multiplayer games like this for years and many mods have similar ideas. Renegade promotes teamwork by making everything difficult to do on your own. Engineers can heal teammates and expensive vehicles, enemy buildings are very hard to destroy on your own, and everyone tries to protect the team’s Harvester since everyone gets the cash it brings back.

Money shot

An Apache in a cave?

Ass grabber

Unfortunately, an idea is nothing without execution. The net code in Renegade is atrocious. Even when connected to servers that reported less than an 80ms ping it felt like I was playing with a 250+. Lag is made worse when most of the weapons in the game are hitscan. How do you aim hitscan weapons when it takes half a second for the server to recognize that you pulled the trigger?

Balancing act

Westwood needs to balance the weapons in multiplayer. At first I thought that it was just hard to kill people, but it’s actually that a lot of weapons don’t do much damage, while the rest do way too much damage. For example the Volt Auto Rifle can kill very quickly – a few passes from this Lightning Gun wannabe and you’re dead. On the other hand the Auto Rifle can take forever; it’s like trying to kill someone in a pillow fight. These discrepancies unbalance the Vehicle vs. Infantry battles as well. It is hard to take out a vehicle as any infantry unit. Now I know it’s more “realistic” this way, but it’s not much fun. Why bother being an infantry unit when they’re almost useless against vehicles?

Along the same lines there’s a problem with a snowball effect. The team that gets ahead tends to stay ahead. Why? The economics forces it. Say the NOD team destroys the GDI Harvester. The GDI team is out a shipment of Tiberium, and the money. While the NOD team keeps its money rolling, the GDI team needs to wait – if the NOD team is smart they’ll control the Tiberium fields for the rest of the match, shutting down the GDI money flow. If you cut off the money, it’s very hard to get your team back on its feet due to the difficulty in destroying vehicles as infantry. This is just another balance problem that needs to be fixed.

He’s camouflaged

Skeleton

Deadeye

Another big problem with multiplayer games is that the automated defenses are too good. The GDI Advanced Guard Tower and the NOD Obelisk never miss, and shoot you automatically if you get in their range. You’re hosed if you try to enter an enemy base. The only way to get by these defensive structures is to use a vehicle with your teammates and try to destroy them (or the power station). This means that infantry are next to useless in assaulting bases – the irony being that you spawn as infantry and the point of multiplayer is the destroy the enemy base.