My multi-faceted interview! › sol (Leprechaun)!

[img|right]http://www.pedobear.co.uk/files/images/sol.JPG[/img] First of all, I caught up with sol, the love able Irish rogue. This controversial high skill player has come from humble roots to climb to the pinnacle of his ET career by joining Dignitas and playing along side ET legends such as Night and Urtier! With a solid aim and team play skills to boot, sol has forged his way through the ET community on his own merit, creating much controversy and gossip along the way.

sol provides a more neutral opinion in this matter, as I know from talking to him on other occasions that he personally, hasn't really chosen which way he will go in the near future.

Hello sol! You're a pretty common feature on crossfire, so I won't bother with the usual introductions and get right down to business.

With the recent release of many new games and demos, there has been a vast amount of speculation as to what direction people will be taking as their next competitive stepping stone. From Quake Wars to CoD 4, everyone has their own personal opinion on the subject matter in hand, so what are the main attractive features from new and upcoming titles, that would decide for you, whether to play these games competitively or not?

I'm quite cynical about new games, I'm not happy with the way FPS gaming is going. The industry seems to be catering to the 'single player' style gamer as opposed to focusing on balance, innovation and fresh ideas for multilayer.

I don't really blame them, they want to make money as opposed to please a small minority. Just to clarify, when I say 'single player' gamer, I'm referring to the 7.1 surround sound 50" LCD monitor guys. Graphics seem to be the main focus, gameplay and balance seem to take the back seat. That's why I like older games, the graphics are pretty humble but I feel that they have better game play.

As I said, I'm pretty skeptical about new games because most of my experiences with them have been pretty disappointing, game play and balance are crucial, they should be easy to learn but difficult to master.

I think many ex and current ET players have the same, common impressions about new titles and games. Companies like EA games are churning out titles to please the casual gamer and not the hardcore minority to earn money. But even with this in mind, are there no new features that make you think "Hey, that's a great idea" or "Wow, that's original!"?

Honestly, not really. The novelty of PC gaming has totally warn off for me, it's pretty hard to impress me in that regard. The big companies are just recycling the same ideas over and over, what more can you do with FPS gaming? Nothing truly innovative has come out within the past couple of years (in terms of gameplay).

Most of the stuff which is added is either a gimmick or useless junk which disrupts the balance of the gameplay. ET isn't even drastically to RtCW, nor is Q4 to Q3, etc. Just rehashed ideas with a differences.

It's all about graphics, unfortunately, that's what the casual gamer wants.

We want a good game, they want something that makes money, there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground.

Yea, that's true, Quake Wars isn't really anything new when you look at it at "face value". But on the other hand, SD didn't introduce a whole lot of new ideas but even so, Quake Wars has already attracted an impressive competitive community even with no drastically new concepts or innovations in the gaming world.

Do you feel that current games could be "taken forward" enough to make them a viable option, for yourself at least?

I'm just going to play the waiting game, ETPro is probably one of the best competition mods I've seen in any game, and still I feel that there are some issues with ET. It's unlikely that another ETPro is going to come along and ET:QW is a game that I think would need even more work than ET did, I think it'll be hard to get it really good.

Especially with the tug-o-war between ET/BF2 players.

There was a lot of discussion as to what direction ET should go, and in most cases decisions were simply made, like a dictatorship, it had to be that way. If you recall the XP removal thing - you could have a million polls on that and you probably still wouldn't have a clear victor, in the end someone just needed to decide.

I can't imagine how it's going to be in ET:QW, BF2 and ET are very different games and it seems as though most of ET:QW's player base has come from them.

It's hard to mimic in any game what the ETpro team did for competitive ET, their contribution is astounding in that respect. Going back to the idea of "recycling" Team Fortress 2 has come out recently which is obviously heavily influenced by Team Fortress Classic, a game like RTCW that was way ahead of it's time.

It's been received with a semi-decent response by the HL2 community, do you think the same would work for an "RTCW2" or is it going to take something extraordinarily original to be made to get players like yourself, really motivated to play a game competitively again like you did with ET?

Firstly, I wouldn't say that I'm not motivated to play a game competitively, it's just that there isn't much to achieve in my game of choice (ET), the lack of support is pretty disappointing, but it's also understandable, it's all about money money money. Is CoD2 significantly different to CoD? I don't think so, but the graphics are better, that seems to matter.

I'm actually totally out of ideas for RtCW2, and I think that's what the problem is within the industry, most things have already been tried, what can you do other than improve the graphics and throw in a few features?

Personally, I have absolutely no idea what would make RtCW2 a good game, I'm not even looking forward to it because it's likely to be a big steaming turd. I have no idea why people are convinced that it's going to be immense. I just go back to my initial point of 'lather, rinse and repeat', it's pretty hard to come up with something really innovative and fresh, something that actually has good game play. I bet RTCW will have amazing graphics though! ;)

I don't have much faith in the future of FPS gaming, I'd really love to be proved wrong.

Ok, lastly, like you said, there isn't much anyone could do to make RTCW2 the true "messiah" for all the communities wayward players, it's all pretty much been done with WWII style FPS games and we've seen a massive growth in more futuristic titles.
If there was anything you would like to be introduced into a "new" competitive game (Let's call it your dream game) what would it be?

I'm thinking 32v32, minimum of 10 ub3rtanks per team, movement as fluent as a Keith Richard's simulator and last but not least, warp speed netcode. That'd be perfect. Seriously though, I'd just like a good, well-balanced arcade-style FPS with non-campy game play (looking at your CoD/CS) with team play as well - and I'd like it to make it big. Good netcode, good game play, good physics, good player movement, good hit detection! Balanced!

I don't think it will happen though. :P

Nah, me neither, which is sad in a sense. Thanks very much for taking time for the interview, it's been a great insight for me at least.

I enjoyed it!

You aren't getting any shout outs by the way.

I'm too miserable for them anyway. :P