SOCOM: Confrontation Patch 1.50 Update
After a day of playing with the patch(off and on because of PSN issues), we have a preliminary list of the goods and bads of the patch. These were take from HTK’s thread from the official SOCOM forums:
IMPROVEMENTS
- No Roll & Jump
- Snipers Rifles 1 Shot Kill
- D.E. like in previous SOCOMs.
- Quick Select – Assign your weapons for quick select.
- Medium Scope is Awesome
- Reloading (No Interuptions)
- 60% G^ to launch. No waste of time.
- Gameplay is faster and smoother.
- No Black Fog
- Automatic Pop-Up Messages
- Game Details (Day or Night)
- Voting, People getting voted cant see the votes.
- Headsets are louder and through TV Speakers
- Frostfire, you can shoot through the netting.
- Footsteps can be heard if enemy is close.
- Ladder Climbing sound is low.
- Hostages Run/Follow smoothly.
- Hit Detection has improved, kinda S1 style.
- Planting Bomb in prone position.
- FAMAS dumbed down but it needs more tweeking.
- Glitchers die if they break into a glitch area.
- Claymores, Kill. You can plant them individually by switching to detonator with “O” Circle.
- Lag, There has been minimal lag if any. Impressive compared to amount of people on and downloadings.
- Prone and Plant, pretty usefull.
- Grenades follow the arc more.
- Grenades, while the arc is out you can push L1 and switch to Grenades.
PET PEEVES
- Loading into the game is long.
- Room dosn’t start sometimes if the host dosn’t leave.
- Quick Select is not permanent, you have to set it up for each map.
- Switching Sides has become difficult.
- Demolition has become useless.
- When you’re dead, you cant push/hold select to view scoreboard. Its just push/push.
NEEDED IMPROVEMENTS
- UCRR.
- No ODD Rounds.
- Prone is still slow.
- Cannot lean in prone.
- Cannot shoot over railings.
- Run button still gets stuck.
- Invisible fence in UW still there.
- Grenades still inconsistant.
- Join friends is broken.
- Mics go in and out, sometimes choppy.
MAP CHANGES
- Quarantine (Escort) no water in the middle.
- Kasbah – Terrorist bomb plant window has been lowered you can shoot out and in.
Most of these are changes that were not listed in the “highlights” post that was post on SOCOM’s Blog.
It sucks that the Join Friends feature is broken. That was one of the main features of this patch along with the Tournaments, Clan Ladders, and Calendar. The Join Friends does work, but when it encounters a problem like the game is full, sometimes it doesn’t exit gracefully and you are stuck. This will require you to restart the game.
It also seems that the biggest problem is that there are still no tie-breaker rounds. For those that may not know, each “match” in SOCOM is comprised of a set number of “rounds”. For ranked games, this is 8 rounds. Why Slant Six has allowed ranked matches to end in ties is beyond me. Would it not be simple enough to make ranked matches have 9 rounds to have a clear winner?
You may also notice in the list about demolitions have become useless. This has to do with the even number of rounds. It’s possible for one team to plant/diffuse more bombs than the other team, but still end up being 4-4 in the 8 rounds. So how does the game determine the winner? Not by the number of bomb plants or bomb diffuses, nope, the winner is determined by the team with the most kills. So in an objective-based that ends in a tie, the objectives don’t count. So now, the demolition game type(which is my favorite) is going to turn into Team Deathmatch because we now know that the number of kills will determine the winner.
Now I know that software will always have bugs, but damn, this patch was in QA for 4 months and it still has issues.