Guns of Icarus Online

[Samwise]

So yeah, I've been playing the SHIT out of this.  I know a few other folks have too.  Figured it deserved a thread.

Basically it's like if the fun multi-person planes in BF1942 got a game all to themselves, except it was a bit more like ship-to-ship combat in PotBS, and with a really heavy emphasis on class-based team play (and hats) like TF2.  Four people to a ship, one to three ships to a team.

If you play this, friend me as Spamwise, I need more people who will tolerate my hilarious attempts at piloting.   

[Der Helm]

This game is super fun with a crew on voice chat.

An Samwise is much better at shooting at air-ships than flying them.

Join us! 

[Samwise]

I'm slooooowly getting better at piloting, but it's agonizing.  One thing I really like about this game is that the different roles provide different tiers of skill on the same team -- any idiot can be a decent engy, but I imagine you could spend years improving your piloting.  Gunning is right in the middle where even a noob can figure out the basics and hit his target at least some of the time, but there's still a noticeable difference between a good gunner and a bad gunner.

[Der Helm]

I also really like the community. Teamwork makes or breaks a crew.

I quickjoined a crew earlier today and there was lots of communication and we dominated the game and won over 10 matches in a row. Against crews/teams with the same clan tag all over.

[Mrbloodworth]

You guys use the in game VOIP?

[Kail]

I also really like the community. Teamwork makes or breaks a crew.

I quickjoined a crew earlier today and there was lots of communication and we dominated the game and won over 10 matches in a row. Against crews/teams with the same clan tag all over.

Heh, that's pretty much the exact opposite of my experience and the reason I uninstalled the game.  Granted, I was playing at like 3:00 AM so maybe it was just the late night weirdos, but waiting around 30 or 40 minutes for a match, getting a pilot who doesn't know what he's doing (understandable given that they were newbie level matches), listening to the crew scream at him (less understandable) as we got destroyed in about ten seconds by a pair of premade ships on the enemy team, and being dumped back to the main menu while the enemy team called us good sports for another 30 minute wait for a game to start was not a fun experience.

It's one of those times where I want to throttle the developers and scream "BOTS YOU ASSHOLES PROGRAM SOME BOTS" because it's yet another interesting game that will die because it's a multiplayer only title with a niche audience.

[Der Helm]

You guys use the in game VOIP?

Yep. It is rather decent I'd say. In game there is Crew chat (on your ship) and Captain to Captain chat (channel for the commanders of your team's ships)
Pre Game you use it to talk to everybody.

BTW, you can usually tell in a few seconds if you are in a game with decent folks or with fucktards by just listening to the banter in voice chat.

And try to avoid ships where the commander is silent all the time. If you are shy about actually talking to strangers on the internet, this is not the game for you.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah, I picked this up quite a while ago, if I see you guys on ill join.

[Samwise]

It's one of those times where I want to throttle the developers and scream "BOTS YOU ASSHOLES PROGRAM SOME BOTS" because it's yet another interesting game that will die because it's a multiplayer only title with a niche audience.

There aren't any bot pilots, but the bot crew members are surprisingly competent (maybe those weren't in yet when you played?).  I'll still take a mediocre human gunner over a bot gunner any day, but I've had some really good games where half the crew was bots (a human pilot and a human gunner with a couple of bots running around doing repairs is really not bad on a small ship).

Short match length helps too -- it's not like LoL where if you get a shitty team or somebody bails halfway through you've just flushed an hour of your life down the toilet.

Overall I think they do a pretty good job at mitigating the problems inherent in teamwork-based games.  Of course you still get best results by playing with people you know.     But I'd say I get a decent crew in pickup games at least half the time, which is a damn good ratio IMO.

[Kail]

There aren't any bot pilots, but the bot crew members are surprisingly competent (maybe those weren't in yet when you played?).  I'll still take a mediocre human gunner over a bot gunner any day, but I've had some really good games where half the crew was bots (a human pilot and a human gunner with a couple of bots running around doing repairs is really not bad on a small ship).

There were bots for the non-pilot positions, but it seemed like the pilot was the one position nobody wanted to fill (it looked like a lightning rod for bitching, to me), so games took forever to start.  I'm more just lamenting the idea that you can't really run bot matches or anything.  The closest you can do is fly around that empty tutorial map shooting at stationary targets, which doesn't really teach you anything about how to play an actual game.  There's been a bunch of promising indie games lately that have gone the multiplayer only route and are really struggling to maintain a playerbase (off topic, but I just checked out the relaunch of Ravaged, and found out that at prime time, there were 35 people online, for a game with a max server size of 24 that's not really looking good) and it's kind of frustrating to see.  Especially for this game, where it's unique enough that you need some practice, but the only way to learn the ropes is to fuck up like nine other people's game.

[Samwise]

Personally, I don't mind hopping in the pilot chair if nobody else is willing to.  I just warn everybody that they're going to be crewing a failboat and if anyone thinks they can do better they're welcome to take the wheel.  People tend to be good sports about it; it's not like they're messing up their all-important ladder ranking or some shit.  And you can play a game with just one other person if you want (do a 1v1 match with all bot crews).

It's definitely not a game for the intensely antisocial, though, I'll give you that.

[Ghambit]

I've already churned out a ton of flight time on this game when it released.  Has anything really changed since then?  Game got repetitive real fast.  That said, I did have fun with my brother for a time - I was unstoppable in the captain's chair of a galleon.

[Engels]

Steam has two games up, one is Guns of Icarus and the other one is Guns of Icarus Online. I presume the latter is the multiplayer version, so doesn't the former fulfill the request for 'bots'?

[Samwise]

Kind of.  I haven't actually played the first version, but my understanding is it's basically a rail shooter; you man the guns against bot ships.  I think the online version was the result of a lot of people saying "this is kind of boring, but wouldn't it be cool if it was multiplayer and people got to FLY the ships?"

[Kail]

Steam has two games up, one is Guns of Icarus and the other one is Guns of Icarus Online. I presume the latter is the multiplayer version, so doesn't the former fulfill the request for 'bots'?

As far as I can tell (after like a half hour of messing with it), Online is better in virtually every way except for the lack of a single player mode.  Online has more ships (vanilla only has one, you can't change it), better graphics, more complexity, better controls and more items/skills.  You don't actually fly the ship in vanilla, and there's no "world" outside the ship (just an infinite plain of clouds) so the gameplay is just jumping on turrets and shooting planes that fly past and repairing your ship when it gets red.  I guess it's at least playable solo, but I'd still go for Online if I had to choose one of the two (not that you really do, since vanilla regularly goes on sale for like a buck).

[Der Helm]

This is 75% off (2,99 €, no idea about $) on steam at the moment, even if you only get in one decent crew the one time you play it, that is money well spent.

[Samwise]

I'm still playing this and I don't even suck at piloting any more.     I still don't win more often than I lose, but at least when I lose it's not because I drove into a mountain or did something else fuckstupid.  The other night I had the two enemy pilots complaining that they could never line up a good shot on me because I was always in their blind spots.  Feels good, man.