Multiplayer Concerns-- No traffic, easy difficulty

[copy paper]

I wanted to take a second to address the pretty ghastly state of Emergency 5's multiplayer.

 

I have sunk countless hours into both stock EM4 and the LA mod's multiplayer with my friends. Even without mods, EM4 stock is so much fun in co-op. Unfortunately, even when the game is working as intended, EM5 seems to lack much of what made EM4 such a great multiplayer title. I think there are two serious design issues that have caused this.

 

First, there's no traffic / ambient pedestrians. I was sort of stunned to see this when I started my first co-op match. If there's some way to turn this on that I'm missing please, please tell me, because without map traffic and pedestrians the game's multiplayer is dead and lifeless. I loved EM4's multi in part because it constantly presented what I would call emergent gameplay events-- for example, a traffic jam might happen from your response and cause a railroad accident, a run amok shooter might blow up a car and cause a fire several city blocks big, or a decon event might spread out of control because a fire prevented you from getting to the source building. These moments are what made EM4 multi so fun. Unfortunately, they cannot happen in EM5, because the world is static and dead. There are no random pedestrians. There is no ambient traffic. The world is no longer alive, and so we are left merely dealing with the static events the game presents, with no concern that they might spread or evolve.

 

Second, and again I really hope I'm missing something here, but as far as I can tell the game's multiplayer is boringly easy. And yes, this is compared to EM4 stock, not LA Mod. Fires never spread out of control. They are very, very slow to jump buildings. There is no concept of money, so you might as well throw everything at any problem at hand. There are never more than two events at once, so you're rarely spread very thin. The only motivation you have is to beat your previous high score-- because honestly, you could keep the city from going out of control with a quarter of the vehicles you have at your disposal.

 

I bought EM5 for the multiplayer. Unfortunately, Sixteen Tons could fix all of EM5's performance and bugs and I would still be very disappointed with my purchase. I know there are a lot of people saying wait for the mods, but I have to say I am skeptical that this is a game worth modding. I hope I am wrong!

[salamander34]

I agree with you 110 percent, I'm glad I'm not the only person to notice these problems. My friend and i were also having an issue where his vehicles were transparent on my screen and vice versa. Not having traffic completely nullifies the use of police to divert traffic, even if the traffic diverting is a bit broken. Same goes for rerouting pedestrians. I do however disagree with the amount of emergencies. I like a small amount of emergencies that i need to deal with, this allows me to set up roadblocks and whatnots. Some say thats RPing and it might well be. Either way in EM4 i was able to modify the amount of emergencies myself so i don't see that as a problem.

 

Having a predefined amount of units is ridiculous, the system in Emergency 4 worked perfectly and made it very easy to mod. In this game im not able to choose who i want in my vehicles to as much of an extent in emergency 4 and i cannot save points to buy vehicles i feel im going to need.

 

I fully agree with you on basically everything but minor things that can be personalized, i hope that in a few weeks time these issue are addressed as well as the performance issues.