» Thu Dec 31, 2009 1:27 am
So I went ahead and just bought the DLC. Well, last night I did. I played for a while and it was quite good. Not as many problems getting into games as usual, lots of people around. I do really like the Retaliation Onslaught Playlist, since it combines CTR, CS and Xtrac and people can just vote for the Map and play type (I just wish not everybody would always want to play Crash Site...). I was playing with people from around Europe, which, being in Germany, meant mostly good connections.
I took a break, went on a little later, and got into several games with mostly Americans, and the connections suffered accordingly. It was by no means terrible, but in a shootout my enemies just had that half second more to make a deadly difference.
It was terrible, however, in the one game I was the host. My movement was sluggish and unresponsive, I had about a quarter second delay between pressing buttons and the actions on screen, and enemies moved in jumps like under strobe lighting. It was the worst lag I ever had in any game of C2, and it only happened this once. Tell the truth I was really surprised to even get into a game with non-Europeans, and getting no worse than two-yellow-bars connections, but apparently being the host for my overseas-gamemates presented the game with more problems than it could deal with.
As for the maps, they're actually pretty good. And huge. The only map that even comes close to that size was Liberty Island (that's Statue and Evac Zone combined), but you could only play that in CS, CTR and Xtrac. The level design is great, although I wish they would do something about the glare on the Compound Map... it starts to hurt my eyes after a while.
Anyway, I'm still hoping for a patch to improve the connections, but I'm still having fun as it is and don't regret the buy at all.