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GameSpotting


 Sam Parker
Hardware Editor






Recent Favorites: MechCommander 2, Conquest: Frontier Wars
Most Wanted: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Warcraft III, Europa Universalis II, Master of Orion III


Countdown to D-Day

Saturday, September 15, was the day when the gaming sites brave enough to host the Wolfenstein multiplayer test were brought to their knees. Many commercial sites know that when it comes to site traffic, there can be too much of a good thing. And when we're talking about a large game demo, the problem is a hundred times worse. The terrible events of the previous Tuesday showed just how the big news sites could be overwhelmed with people trying to refresh a 100KB news page--so it's no surprise that a 60MB file could wreak proportionately more havoc per user. Judging from how many people spoke out in our forums wondering exactly at what point during the day the file would go up (3:30pm PT, at the time GameSpot publishes every day), it's no mystery that there was a lot of anticipation over the test.

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You can't loll about on the beach for long with snipers out in force.
Those who had trouble downloading the file were naturally frustrated--there's only so much time in a weekend. But the problem with releasing a major file on the Web at one well-known time is that bandwidth demand peaks way beyond what any site can afford to maintain. It would certainly help if publishers would provide robust hosting for their own files. But once you finally manage to have the Wolfenstein multiplayer test safely downloaded and installed, there's little wonder what the fuss was about.

Wolfenstein's multiplayer is fast, addicting, and varied. The beach assault map in the test demo plays best with 10 or more players per side since there's just so much to do. It's incredible to see all the machine gun emplacements manned and firing down onto the beach. It's suitably intimidating from the perspective of the Allied forces pouring out of the amphibious landing vehicles, seeing a stream of heavy machine gun fire rain down and heavy artillery shells fall randomly across the beach. But it's still a lot of fun to be on the offensive. Shooting a panzerfaust rocket right into one of the distant pillboxes is deadly satisfying, and there are a couple good spots for an Allied sniper to take up position out of the machine gun fire zones.

 
 Have you liked what you've seen of Wolfenstein's multiplayer?

Yes
No
Haven't tried it

 
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There are plenty of good firefights to be had in these twisting corridors.
Once you breach the Axis fortress, you'll need your best skills and a few buddies to wind through the narrow corridors, grab the docs, and win the map. When you're far away from a spawn point, you suddenly realize just how important the team emphasis is in the game. There's no health or ammo pickups on the map, so you'll need to rely on the medic and lieutenant classes for help. Ideally, a mix of soldiers could run in with a medic and lieutenant in tow, but in the random teams on public servers, I really haven't seen that happen. In fact, I'm just happy when one of my kindly teammates doesn't intentionally spray me with his Thompson's .45 cal rounds as soon as I spawn in. The game may be balanced for friendly fire on (the flamethrower and air attacks are a real menace to your own teammates), but it's a real pain to waste time waiting in limbo because of some random jerk.

Wolfenstein's multiplayer can't please everyone. It doesn't attempt to be highly realistic with the ballistics or damage model. It also doesn't include some of the high-powered weapons from the single-player game. But it looks like the final game will give multiplayer shooter fans fresh material to play with. By the way, if you've had problems getting the in-game server browser to work or just want more filtering options, I'd recommend downloading the latest version of All Seeing Eye or GameSpy Arcade. It should let you get into a game nice and fast.
 

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