f13.net

http://www.alienswarm.com/

It's apparently a mod team they hijacked awhile ago. Looks like a decent co-op top down shmup. Free doesn't suck either.

Looks like fun

Free! Thats exactly what I wanted to pay for this, count me in for trying it.

BAH! I can't play it this weekend. Damn you for tempting me with things that aren't released!  :oh_i_see:

Nice, it comes with the dev kit too; which is more than what you get for 60 dollars these days.

I played a lot of Alien Swarm back when it first came out for UT2k4. It was incredibly, incredibly awesome and a ton of fun, but it never caught on and the community dwindled away, even though it got pretty far along in the Make Something Unreal contest.

I'll be nabbing this as soon as it hits.

Alien Swarm is top-down, right? (High overhead viewpoint, instead of from character's POV).  

Why do developers still make these?

 :oh_i_see:

Now now.  :drill:

Yeah, I used to play pong, now I don't.

I used to play side scrollers, then I didn't.

Then I played a first person shooter, and it occurred to me that no game ever made should ever not use this point of view ever again, except for maybe RTS.

I didn't know the Blackcat games people got picked up by Valve. Thank god, I was so annoyed they lost to the INCREDIBLY mediocre Red Orchestra in the Make Something Unreal contest.

Alien Breed: Impact is a pretty decent single-player/coop knock off of this mod and it's on steam too.

Good to see that someone here shares my sensible point of view.

 :drill:

Yes, Team 17 stole the idea from this and then travelled back in time to 1991 to release Alien Breed on the Amiga.

 :facepalm:

I like your theory sir, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I literally don't care. :)

The price is right and anything with co-op always interests me.

This thread has DEEPLY confused me.

The game looks pretty cool though!   :awesome_for_real:

I can't find a button to start preloading.

This displeases me.

I am displeased.

You people really should have done this routine re: Robotron. Nobody round here is impressed by gaming references that are merely fifteen years old.

Guessing this was supposed to be typed in green?

I read it as "DURR I only play FPS games"

I dunno, in this case, I kind of feel the same way.  Not that all games should be first person, but there are reasons to use different cameras.

Top down works in something like Zelda, because I'm not that worried about enemies who are very far away.  It works in something like Starcraft because I'm controlling fifty guys and I need to be elevated to see over them.  But this game looks like it's a straight up shooter, and I've rarely seen shooters where an overhead camera worked well.  I suppose I'll know one way or another by tomorrow, though.

Overhead view sounds fine if you are in very close quarters and trying to co-ordinate your actions as part of a team. Say, perhaps, in a spaceship corridor with an alien swarm coming in from all directions and lots of powerful but short range weaponry. Strangely enough a situation depicted in all the screen shots for this game.

I remember playing the Amiga games and loving them. There's not enough good co-op games for the PC... especially at this price.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=18219.msg822066#msg822066
See if you can spot the posts that appear in both threads.

I grew up with an Amiga and games like Alien Breed, Chaos Engine, etc, and I love co-op stuff. I'm so downloading this, but I just realised that you guys (and your Monday) are half a day behind me.  :heartbreak:


edit - feck. 12 hours.

It seems to me there's an overload of identical top down Aliens ripoff shooters. Alien Breed, Shadowgrounds and now this. I'm sure there are more but they all blur into an amorphous blob in my mind.

Fancy, looks like a hoot. As long as the controls are good. I have played to many games like this that the controls kill it for me. (Like that dungeon siege space game that i have wiped from memory)

1 hour!

Really? Really? This is the type of game that blurs into an amorphous blob in your mind? None others?




Really?

I'm going to be downloading this as soon as it goes live, look for SnuggleZhenya on the f13 steam group list I'll try to get a game up for f13 folks.

To be honest it's not very common for a subgenre to be directly based on one movie.

Rawr! "2 hours til release" Valve never fails to disappoint in this regard. :mob:

Servers are busy  :angryfist:

I just had to change my download location from Chicago to Detroit and it started downloading. You can change it in Settings under the Download + Cloud tab.

Thanks, downloading now!

Seems that at least one of the achievements awards a hat for TF2

Downloading.

So help me god if it's a facehugger...

There is a bit more involved in this than I thought, looks pretty decent actually.  I hope the missions don't get stale.

Plenty of games in this subgenre (top down shooters) have been not based on Aliens. But, I mean, you may as well say the same about FPS games.

Finally manged to cnnect for download! Hope I can just migrate the files afterwards to install on other PCs!  :grin:

My download speed has crashed through the floor, it's slower than dial-up now... I'm guessing Valve's servers are getting hammered right now, or do you think switching download location again (now that I have it started) could help?

Mine is set to Chicago and I got a good speed on it, but I did get it just about as soon as it went up.  I have that problem with downloads a lot though, I usually just grit my teeth and do something else until it finishes. 

Connecting to multiplayer games is.. terrible. NAT issues per usual, but no way to filter games you try to join. One bad NAT host in the pool, and goodbye matchmaking.

I wonder why they didn't allow pre-loading?

Or unlock it at a time when people on the East coast aren't just now getting out of work.

Looks like a top down Left 4 Dead game with unlocks. I tried to download it but the servers are getting skullfucked right now. My buddy at work managed to get it downloaded and played it for a few with me looking over his shoulder. Looks interesting.

FWIW, I'm getting good speeds on the Detroit servers (Chicago ones are pretty hammered now as I couldn't even start the download there).


Who has the invite privledges for the F13 steam group? Posting in the community ID thread didn't get an invite and I'd like to join in the F13 games if a spot's open. Steam = Segoris.

Schild does.

Thanks

There's a lot of awesome implementations in here. From the usage of welding doors to keep more from coming behind to the way you unlock/hack items. Ammo is a rarity though. I did a game of offline practice and ran out on two characters (the first one I was a tech with a turret so no secondary weapon, the other was out of ammo on his main gun when I switched to him and only had his secondary to use). Second game was much better, I brought along an ammo deploy and knew that reloading loses any ammo you had when you reloaded saved me quite a bit as well. Overall, lots of fun to be had. It's pretty damn awesome that it's free too.

Fun game, played a round with Aez and some other guy.

Then I tried to restart to get my mic working.

Now I can't even log back into steam.


Sorry Aez.

Gonna call it a night, its 3am over here.

I'll be firing this up tonight for the TF2 hat.   :grin:

Yep, was fun.  I'm not sure but it seems they're not scaling the difficulty.  We were fine with 3 but it was almost impossible with 2.

Played a random game, wasn;t great because most of the people spent the whole time running in different directions and dying. Then hooked up with Malakii and a grue and had fun sticking together and dying, although we were playing on hard, as a three.  :awesome_for_real:

The game is definitely fun, and hectic. I think it will definitely improve as people get the hang of aiming and what different unlocks do, and also learn the levels. I'm looking forward to playing some more sophisticated loadouts, currently just running with the heavy armour seems like the best equipment, but in a practise game I know the damage amp and sentry gun were really cool. I'm also looking forward to some more tactical play. I'll be looking for some more games tomorrow I'm sure.

PS: The tech default weapon seems pretty crap, and the leader shotgun, while powerful, is an arse to aim wel; the healgun on the other hand seemed to be doing a great job in our last gamel. Also I have no clue what half the stats do, I'm sure it will come out in time.

You can hover over them...

Played some with Nix, then Morfiend, and with a Grue the whole time.  This game is quite awesome when playing with a group that is at least trying to work together (though we must've failed on that one level a good 5-6 times!).  Hard mode is thrilling but...,hard as you might expect.

I thought I would have some fun with this, but its even better than I expected, by a fairly wide margin.  Very polished, and with the dev tools included, I think we can expect more maps, which should help it stay fresh.  Definitely going to play some of this nightly for a while, hopefully with f13 folks.

See you in game.

I like the default tech autogun. It's just the normal autogun + a bit of autoaim. Crappy on big things, great for wasting facehuggers and whatnot small swarmers.

If anyone is looking for this I'm getting 1.5MB/s from Sacramento cloud servers.

I played a training game. Looks like it could be pretty fun, and that I will be the shittiest player on earth.

Guess I should join the f13 steam community at some point...

I am supremely bad at this game.  Fun though.

Basically, I feel like this is what Left 4 Dead should have been.  It has that survival/horror feel, and I think does a better job encouraging team work (though the reliance on team work my be bad if you don't have a good group :oh_i_see:).  I think the lack of vs. mode will make the game better, I alway sthought co-op was the best part of L4D but people were so enthralled with playing zombies that it turned into a lulzy PvP game with lame crap like closet camping.  I know some of those issues were fixed in L4D2 but I think game just does co-op really well, and I am a total sucker for a fun co-op game.

Holy crap, this is fantastic fun, and it's free on Steam.

http://www.alienswarm.com/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/

Get it installed, grab three friends, and do some bug hunting.


(http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/apps/630/ss_18f754afc528d82d9c91c52227a3acb215505f34.600x338.jpg)

(http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/apps/630/ss_dcb8eb8382e5a93b98107d8c5bc8a03458394da9.600x338.jpg)

Doh!  Of course this is where there'd be a post...  thanks for sorting that out, Trippy...

Love this.  I'm not great at it, but I just spent a hour and a half bug hunting with friends and it was a total blast.


From the SA Thread on this:

See also: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Swarm_TileGen

Does anyone else get random fps drops while playing? Also, i'm on now, so if anyone wants a go send me a message on steam.

Random observations:

 - To do a quick reload, you need to hit R while the little line is inside the light grey area of the reload bar. You can do this if you auto reload or manually reload
 - You only loose ammo if you switch weapons while reloading, or reload a weapon with more than 50% of its ammo remaining (I think)
 - The tesla cannon will not hit friends and stuns enemies and is very ammo-efficient. It's a good early weapon

Thanks for this. :heart:

When I went down the elevator on the single player training my FPS plummeted and I'm well above recomended specs I'm sure.

Yea, i think that one probably happens to most players. I was just also occasionally having fps drops.

Are you sure it was an FPS drop, I think every so often the game goes into slow-motion during a dramatic moment, and the beginning of the elevator ride is one of those times.

I thought it was a slow-motion effect as well, not an fps drop. The game responded as normal only with everything slowed down. Additionally, you got that little window from another perspective on the left side of the screen during the elevator which was pretty cool and another reason I figured it was slow motion.

Just played a few rounds of this game, and I dig it. I'm glad that my leveling up applies to all classes, too.

So far I think I enjoy being the medic above the others, closely followed by the heavy.

Can we set up some F13 game times? I'm in there as [f13] rldmoto.

I know what you mean, but my issue isn't that. It's actual choppy fps in what must be the low 10s. Anyway, it's not a major issue.

I played a bit last night. Got invited to a game by Nix, then there didnt seem to be any Nix in the game. a guru was there and someone else, Malachai maybe? I probably should have played the single player a bit first, as I had no idea there was friendly fire and ended up killing my team with shotgun blasts, then I crashed.

So, if a guru is here, sorry for disappearing.

I then played some more with a friend, and had a good time, although he didnt like it. Anyone wanting to play, I should be on later.

It is!

It was a little choppy for me, but setting everything to medium made it smooth as silk and it still looks great.

You can spam out invites to anyone on your list when you make a game. Can't tell how well it works yet, also if you have a chat window up with someone it will leave the soso has joined alien swarm - click here to join same as TF2 does.

Is there any way to sort the games in the matchmaking lobby?

I'm on fire oh god put me out put me out

Oh god I'm infected get it off get it off


Megrim, Vaiti, Gets and I went halfway through a campaign. Matchmaking was simple and effortless, fun was had by all. This is one free game I'd probably have payed a bit of money for.

(tries to hide the flamethrower)

More like scalphugger.

This is fun as hell.

Made it about 1/2 way through the campaign last night (stupid facehuggers shut us down cold).
This game is excellent.  I want pay DLC just to reward them for being awesome.

The charts at the end are easily one of the best features of the game.

I could drag the little time slider all day to watch the dots. Way more entertaining than it has any right to be. Make sure to checkout out the pages they have on the Steam community site. They track and display and impressive number of stats.

This game should not be free.  :awesome_for_real:

Played 3 games at lunch with some random guys who didn't seem that bad. Died twice to infection both times, and put a lot of friendly fire up. Don't run through the fire, you will go up in flames. Also, don't run in front of me, I WILL shoot you. Going to take some getting used to, but once I get aim down, I think this will be way too fun. They really should take advantage of the DLC channel to make some money off of this, because it's too good a game not to.

About the only thing I don't like about the game is the auto aim on certain weapons, and the fact that if your tech(s) die; FiSSION MAILED START OVER.

It reminds me a bit of my early days of online gaming with Infantry Online.

Eh, the tech thing doesn't bother me. It creates scenarios of "COVER HIS ASS OR FAIL!" Which, from what I experienced, are intense.

Ah I was wondering why some missions kept ending even though not everybody was dead.

Does anyone know if its better practice to constantly push forward and fight as you move, or to try and completely kill the waves of aliens before moving forward?

Depends on the mission.  Some of them pretty much continuously spawn behind you, I think, in which case turtling up may be a losing strategy.  Of course rushing ahead faster than you can safely clear a path has risks too.

Netcode needs a lot of work.

Also, what's the order of maps in the campaign? Landing Bay, Cargo Elevator, ... ?

I haven't seen a lot of people taking time to deliberately weld doors shut behind them yet, I'd like to see more of that, especially on hard difficulty.  You can really cut down the amount of enemies that you have to fight.

I only had time for a couple of offline practices (hoping to get in some regular games today) but I found welding doors to be fast and well worth it. It only takes 1 person to do it and the benefits of delaying enemies was worth it. Of course that may be different in coop, but I can't see it being much different.

I also welded a door in my offline practice, was amused to see that they will eventually beat the door down (not quickly on the practice map though).

I think part of the issue is that if you are playing with randoms people don't like to wait, and if you get left behind you can easily be killed if you are separated.   People are impatient, and while its worth it, it does require the group to pause for 10-15 seconds, which isn't always possible with an team of ADDs.

Yeah, if it's 10-15 seconds then that is pretty different from offline mode which takes 3-5 seconds or so, iirc.

How do you throw a grenade? :oh_i_see:

This game really needs a manual...took me a while to figure out how to hack the bomb, I was looking at the lights on the right side (just ignore them).

Default is middle mouse.

If your weapon has a grenade alt-fire, it's mouse3 to use it.  I had to figure that one out by trial and error.

Press 1 to use the thing in your alternate inventory slot or whatever that's called.  I dunno if you can put grenades in there.

Cool thanks I'll give it a try next game.

Out of the two techs, Vegas is the fastest. Everyone else is painfully slow at welding.

yeah, In my limited experience so far, I have found that changing up teammates from mission to mission can really improve your odds.  Having someone with Faith as teh medic really helps with infestors in the last  couple of missions for example.

Oooh the Vindicator (shotgun) grenades are fun :awesome_for_real:

The rail gun is fun

Hard seems doable even with uncoordinated rushing. I haven't tried Insane yet. Getting levelled up so people have access to some of the more interesting unlocks makes for some nice combos. Turret + Freeze Turret + Damage Amp makes for a nice camp. So far though I do think adrenaline is the most useful addon, particularly for dealing with infestors in the tunnels.

Also, joining random games at the start and doing random missions was far inferior to doing a (mostly) complete campaign with some competent people. The story is actually pretty fun, and the commentary from the dropship guy is actually quite funny at times. It offers a lot of promise for future campaigns I think.

I've only played on Insane (which is what all the Penny-Arcade forum group people play on, which is kinda frustrating), and welding doors shut on Insane is pretty much the difference between beating a mission with a comfortable wiggle room of health and ammo and beating a mission with two marines dead, two critically injured, and one guy reduced to smashing bugs over the head with a medkit.

Maybe my pc is dying but I can play tons of other games fine but this one constantly stutters on me and will freeze up.  Any ideas/suggestions?

I wound up doing a mission on insane where my medic took only medical supplies (okay, I can see that..), and the other tech took two turrets he never put down.

So basically, insane with only two armed marines involved. >< It was messy, especially since the unarmed people insisted on charging ahead and gumming up the line of fire.

Game is sweet. Do want to find folks to play with.

I've just spammed invites out to people on my friendslist, right now EVERYONE is playing this game so I haven't had a problem finding games w/out random net dwellers.

On the Pyro it actually is like a face hugger (except turned around). On the rest it is more like a top of head hugger.

Finished my first Hard campaign. Moving fast and using the flame throwers and telsa cannons seemed to be the best strategy for our group. Both weapons seem somewhat overpowered given their "AoE control" abilities.

I ran as a pure support medic (heal gun + heal beacon) for all of the missions. I find it difficult to actually heal teammates with the heal gun especially if they are moving at all. Flame thrower/tesla cannon + electric armor helps cut down on infections which made my life easier. We actually had more infections on our Normal run through (same group).

People are already hard at work creating engaging new levels for this game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwtFuQ_gA1E

So my little group got to the "kill the eggs and biomass" level on hard last night. We had an amazing good time, but that level just shut us down. I was playing as my male medic, and infestation just destroyed us. I could basically heal one, maybe two before being totally out of juice with the heal gun.

We had a good time.

If anyone wants to play, just add me to your friends, I am in the f13 group as Morfiend.

Yeah, taking the female medic on that level is key, she heals infestation better than the male medic,.

To be cheezy, try 3 tesla 3 medic 1 tech w/ tesla.

There is a bug right now; If there is an alien nearby, the tesla will arc to and kill any infestor even if he's on a person.

Alternatively have one person take flamethrower + flashlight and let him deal with every egg area while you stay the fuck away from them.

I made it a good chunk of the way through last night on hard. I hope Valve makes more maps and does some bug fixing on this. It's a great way to spend an hour.

eh, you can't do 3 of the same class  :headscratch:

Why are you being pedantic, clearly he means 1.5 tesla, 1.5 medic and 1 tech, which gives the maximum 4 people.    :grin:

I did the OFFLINE PRACTICE and uh. It seems fun! I like punching the aliens to death though, that's probably bad.

No actually that's good, especially if you decide to be a medic*. On the easier difficulties I'm disappointed if I don't punch/kick 30 - 40 aliens each mission.

Edit: that's punch/kick *to death* :drill: ... there's even an achievement for 20 melee kills

Edit 2: * to clarify one way to setup a medic is with two heal items in your "weapon" slots (2x heal beacons, 2x heal guns, or one of each) and so you have no gun to shoot aliens with.

Just trying this out, seems like something I might not be terrible at once I'm used to it. An invite for ezrast to the f13 group would be nice.

I'm working on getting admin rights to our f13 Steam group (<poke>schild</poke>) and then I'll invite people.

They really do need a "request invite" option for groups in Steam, that would be handy for private groups.

Anyways, I'm on as Segoris. I'll be sending out  friend invites to people with this game to get some games going as I'm not in the f13 group as of now.

Did anyone else have the game flip out on them tonight? I was in a PUG tearing through one of the tougher early missions (the one where you have to stay in the gunship's spotlights) and my connection dies. Get in another game and it's lagged to fuck and the camera just spins and spins around at the worst times. Decided that was a time to leave.

Yes I've had that before with the freaked out camera and you "move" by jumping around on the screen. That's what precipitated my "netcode needs work" comment above.

I roll my medic with a gun, but mostly because most of my teammates can't shoot or protect a medic to save their lives. So hug my beacons or die, bastards.

My usual way to deal with infectors would be a flamer or a smartgun. Or if you see the nests, put a rifle grenade in them.

Also: Freeze Grenades are hi-larious, as is the mini tesla sentry.

I don't have the medigun unlocked yet and I didn't want to ONLY be able to punch, so my medic had a gun/heal beacons. We failed that biomass/egg mission. I blame myself. :(

I got the "punch aliens to death" achievement though!  :drillf:

That mission is a problem because it's not as linear as some of the others so it's very easy for the team to get split up. Even if people stay together curing infections takes some practice since you need to be able to judge very quickly how many beacons you need to drop to keep somebody from dying from an infection. If it's just a single parasite and you, as Faith, are nearby, then only a single beacon is needed if they started at or near full health. If they have more than one, however, you'll need at least 2 beacons and you have to do it really quickly cause their health will drop like a rock. That's why pre-heal gun I would "double-fist" heal beacons on the egg levels just to be on the safe side.

Couple things I noticed:

No lag/fps drop, but I do bounce around a bit as described above. That got annoying but was rare enough to not be a bother.

The heal gun switches targets a little too fast when someone comes next to the person you're healing, otherwise playing a medic is a good time. I had 3 teammate deaths tonight, the first was when we found out aliens can knock you off edges/cliffs, the second was due to people being infested while split up and made it impossible to save both (argh, pugs ><), the third was at the end of the last level (I wish I was kidding here) as the last person was walking onto the ship he got killed.

I used the charged armor while I was infested and it didn't remove it, so either something was messed up and it's supposed to, or it's only supposed to be a preemptive prevention of stuns/infestation.

For the welding door shut topic from before, I finally got around to testing that out in online play and it's 5 seconds for Crash, 3 for Vegas, and about 10 for anyone else. So having a tech have their accessory as a torch is worth it, anyone else....not so much.

Also, duo'ing is good fun and makes for a nice challenge. Special weapons + tech and we were able to do the first 4 missions before time became an issue. 2 of those levels came down to one of us being less then 20% health and on our last clip of ammo when we finished.

I had that problem the first time i tried it too. You have to activate it with "1" and there are limited number of charges.

Insane is insane :ye_gods:

Something was definitely screwy tonight, I couldn't get anything to run for a while for some reason.

(http://www.kerao.net/external/Temp/Steam1.jpg)

Play Alien Swarm in first person (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1373592)

Seems like it could be fairly awesome.

In console, asw_camera_shake 0 or something.

Also, read stuff here (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1371124).

Shock armour takes about three ticks to knock a facehugger off you. So if you start on 10% health, lolno.

I did a few missions with the flashlight last night. I expected it to be useless, but it proved very useful in a few situations where spotting infestors quickly is useful (Residential and Timor Station in particular).

I did activate it, didn't seem like it worked at all though. I'll try again tonight.


I'll watch for this as well when I try it out.

Seems like a decent enough game. I didn't care for the controls and then the game crashed on me in offline practice. It was a diverting 0.2 hours.

Nice link, thanks for that. Some really useful ones imo (that aren't directly effecting gameplay):

Move the reload bar under the marine:

Change color of flares:

Bind emotes/calls for help to different keys:

Edit: Game Bug List (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1369607) that is pretty helpful. Some of it may have been fixed in the last patch, but otherwise there some helpful info here.

Can't wait for resources to pop up on creating maps. I suck with Hammer, but I'd try again for this.

Similar to this thread (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1370462) that contains guides for each step?

Edit - there's even a guide for working with Hammer (I haven't checked it out and don't know how detailed/good it is, I just see that it is one of the parts of that thread).

I don't think I'm a fan of this shooting system. With all the stuff flying everywhere, I seem to end up killing my team mates a lot.

Perhaps I need to play with other players.

EDIT: Why does it keep making me do the same level over and over?

Practice mode is just the first two missions combined -- you can't do the full campaign that way.

Howevercomma you can use these console variables to run the full campaign with bots or solo online:

asw_ignore_need_two_player_requirement 1
asw_show_all_singleplayer_maps 1

Is there a way to change the difficulty too?

When you set up the "create game".

Sorry MrB, Steam decided I wasn't connected to the internet any more halfway through that game and wouldn't reconnect.

Same here.

I thought it was just me. I spawned in, and just sat there making perdy fireballs, had to open the task manager to quit :/

Hit me up for round 2, its growing on me.

Feel free to toss an invite if you guys want a 3rd.

Also, I'm trying asw_fast_reload_under_marine 1 but does anyone know how to increase the size of the hud? When it is moved under the marine it is tiny.

OIC those are switches for an online game. I thought those were hacks to practice mode.

Huh, I didn't catch that when I went looking. Time to get my learn on!

As for the Hammer tutorial, if it's the same one I went through with TF2, it can be a bit overwhelming.

Hmm, major lag issues today - really needs a ping count when you are picking a game.

You can start the normal server browser from the console ("openserverbrowser") to see the ping just like TF2, but that one doesn't display the difficulty of the game you are joining. So you can measure either the ping or the difficulty of a server but not both at the same time... Sounds like they hired Dr. Heisenberg as a coder.

Telsa cannon got nerfed :oh_i_see:

I was in one game where everything had unlimited ammo.
Cargo Elevator + Inferno Mines, seemed OK to me in theory, till you realize its unlimited inferno mines, and you can't resist dropping more and more... and more.
It proved successful.

...

Until our entire team was engulfed in a wave of flames when they were almost all tripped at once. :grin:

Is there any reason at all not to run every mission with 2 medics and 2 techs?

er, nm.

I got into a game with 2 idiots and one guy who was already level 25 the night after the game was released. He destroyed almost every area by himself with the chainsaw. Since I was the tech me and him basically duo-ed the entire campaign while the two idiots kept killing themselves.

Anyone doing this in First Person? Was gonna post that link and console commands, but saw someone already did a page back that I hadn't read.

FPS mode actually looks like an improvement to me.

Yeah I played a game with that sort of person too. He was max level (as in 27 + max promotions) and played tech with flamethower and chainsaw. It was work just trying to keep up with him.

As usual this game proves why I think forced coop is stupid and why I'm playing fewer and fewer games anymore.  I want to play and learn the game while enjoying myself.  Not spend 45 mins looking for a game where I don't get shot in the back by random_mouthbreather, votekicked because I chose Healer instead of DPS or votekicked because the 3 other idiots in the game say "Dude you stole our friends spot" because they're too stupid to create a private game.

 :oh_i_see:  I love the public.

Normally I'm right there with you in this opinion, but that's honestly very different than my experience with this game so far (not to say I don't believe you, I was actually wondering where the scumbags were). Even when I first started people were pretty nice about it, and I've only had two assholes. My plans changed this weekend so I've played quite a bit too with the free time I've gained as a result, and still only two people that I wouldn't play with again.

If you want, look me up and I'll gladly play with you while you learn.

Try it on insane.

My experience is similar to Segoris's so far. I've played with one griefer (wielded doors, trapping us behind) so far and a couple of "bossy" leaders telling people to get this or switch to that. One guy in particular irked me cause he didn't want me to take a telsa cannon or flamer on an egg level cause other people had them and they "didn't stack" (this was pre-telsa cannon nerf) :facepalm: I heeded his wishes and of course we all died cause the other two people weren't using the AoE weapons as their primary weapons.

If you want to play by yourself and don't care about exp you can use the "asw_show_all_singleplayer_maps 1" console command lesion posted to play practice games on any map and any difficulty:


I would recommend leveling up to at least 13 so you have the flamethrower unlocked when playing practice games with the AI on the "egg" levels (the last 3 maps).


If you want to play online games by yourself use the "asw_ignore_need_two_player_requirement 1" command:
Note that it's pretty challenging playing by yourself. You can level up this way but it's really slow compared to playing with others.

The only annoying trend I've encountered is fuckers who host games and then quit if they get killed early in a mission, dropping everyone else as well. If you can't cope with having to watch your teammates play through then either don't host or make sure you don't die. The last one was especially annoying because the fucker killed himself flinging a grenade while surrounded by swarm. Mostly though people have been pretty nice, not many griefers just a few idiots.

Should we start a "Bad Groups" thread for Alien Swarm ala the thread in WoW?  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I got this a couple of times.  Retarded.

Oh good, I was beginning to think it was just me.  Now I know they just hate those of of UK ancestry.  :awesome_for_real: