GigaBowserX;n2333981 said:As far as I could tell in the little I played of KF1, there are still servers up and running and people who play on them, but I'm sure it's not nearly as many as currently play KF2. I did like some aspects of KF1 - starting out with just the pistol instead of a perk weapon was a nice touch, I feel. But yes, having only one type of boss, very dated graphics, and stiff gameplay just gets to be pretty grating after a while. I wonder what it was like to play KF1 in its heyday? Must've been pretty fun.
KF1 was a good time(currently have 1041 hours according to steam), but its difficulty simply works differently than KF2's. In KF2 you generally have to deal with fast zeds that are easy to kill and deal little damage. In KF1 they're generally slower but the hitbox mechanics make them tougher(head hitbox isn't necessarily where their visible head is) and their damage was higher. On top of all that KF1 had harsher movement speed penalties for having lower health, so one gorefast swing of 60+ damage is nearly a death sentence. In KF2 your team slowly dies as they get body-blocked or chipped down without any external healing one by one but in KF1 you're probably done for if one person makes a significant enough mistake on higher difficulties.
Nevertheless a series of discoveries allowed players to solo kill 6p HoE Scrakes and Fleshpounds if you gave them the time, space, and trust to pull it off. These techniques enabled valid camping strategies where no zed could ever break the line as long as everyone played skillfully enough and had the stamina to keep it up through the entire game. If camping wasn't your style, kiting was even more effective. Since zeds never teleport after spawning you can leg it while keeping them in your six until you have grouped all of them behind you and whittle their numbers down slowly but safely(new spawns could appear in front of you so don't let too many spawn at once!). Problem was kiting was limited to zerk/medic and the two strategies did not mesh well together so if the kiting players brought their mob to the camping players the influx of zeds would wipe them out.
Overall KF1 required you to learn a ton of small tricks to perform with the best players but if you managed to amass enough skill you could bring the worst pub teams back from the brink as the last player standing of their dreams. After 1036 hours in KF2 I have yet to amass enough skill to reliably overcome one or two bad players in a match- carrying a bad team is much harder now despite the game being overall easier. Being able to sprint away from everything forever really breaks any threat the zeds could have, unlike in KF1 where a raging scrake was guaranteed to reach you in under 10 seconds and you had to know what to do about it or die like a scrub. Learning to shoot the air above a gorefast's left shoulder to get the headshot was not intuitive and took a long time to discover but once you did you'd blow people's minds with how easily you could dispatch of a dozen of them and it felt good to master skills that people valued that much and could make a real difference at the same time.
Granted KF2 has a lot of improvements but the devs stated they were not making KF1 HD with it and that caused a lot of people to leave when it turned out to be true. KF2 doesn't feel like a good sequel to KF1 because it doesn't improve on the first game in all areas, only some of them. That said KF2 has grown to be larger than KF1 so they must've done something right, even if it did piss off a lot of the old schoolers.
Gee whiz I really ranted like an old man on this one.
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