Man I was looking forward to this release... so disappointing. Hitbox size is decreased from .17's crazy big ones, the purpose is to decrease the luck factor (as the devs put it) and make people actually aim (I always did aim but you still miss like 1/3 of your shots anyway, felt like a good balance to me). The problem is that accuracy was not increased to compensate for a smaller target, so now 1/3 or possibly even 1/4 of your fired shots will actually hit. This isn't at long ranges either, close up shots are now as difficult as medium to long range shots were in .17. I have sat still and fired at a 2-3 meter away target advancing on me (just coming straight at me, not strafing at all) and miss. I truly hope this is a fixable registration issue and not DOD: S size cones of fire that the dev team will stick with.
Melee's "increased range" is basically 2 extra inches of range for bayonets and 1 or none for knives/swords, both still need to be increased along with the "slash zone" (it acts like the blades only attack a 2x2 pixel area in the center of your screen). While this is somewhat better than before, there are now strange registration issues with melee too. I have had a few strange occasions where a enemy was encirled by 3 or more of my teammates and we just kept stabbing him for like 15 seconds until the he finally dies (the most you can possibly take is 3 hits), after taking about 11 or more hits. Though that doesn't happen very often. Knives are still practically useless (they shouldn't be all powerful but it should be a viable defensive weapon that requires more skill than any other melee weapon and not some nerfed up POS), though swords seem to be slightly better thanks to the range increase.
Also, I don't know what is up with the dynamic crosshair but it is dead wrong. There is no way on Earth the COF gets that small when you stand still. In fact I have seen bullets land outside of the circle several times.
I love the new models, animations, and sounds. Also, the new "near miss" sound as a bullet goes by your head is great (same for the new firing sounds, though I didn't see anything wrong with the older ones). The size of the new server side blood puffs (if you see blood come off a player it is a hit no matter what, the injury sound is not always correct though) should be increased a little bit along with bullet hit puffs, but a welcome addition nonetheless. While I love these changes the first 3 paragraphs is what a negative gameplay experience I had in about 5 hours of playing (I know I mostly refer to combat, but if the combat system in your mod is broke you got to worry about that before anything else, this is a first person
shooter, not a first person objective capping). I had barely any fun at all during that time, I hoped it was going to become fun the longer I played, be better on a different server, or I'm just not used to it. Sadly none were the case, this 1.0b release is a step back from .17's gameplay. In fact by so much I'm not even going to try to play it again till they patch it. .17's graphics looked rough and was kind of buggy, but at least it was fun (and your damn guns could hit things).
My favorite feature however, is that you can only make 1 battle cry per 10 seconds
Yes the unfortunately large ammount of spammers made that limitation necessary.