[Multiplatform] FRONTLINES: FUEL OF WAR

FRONTLINES: FUEL OF WAR

Credits

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Kaos Studios
Release Date: Q3 2007
Publisher: THQ
Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Origin: US

If there’s one game that does look pretty smoking sweet so far, I’ve got my eye on Frontlines: Fuel of War.

The first project for Kaos Studios (a division of THQ founded by veterans of Trauma Studios, creators of Desert Combat and Battlefield 2 R&D projects), Frontlines: Fuel of War uses the advanced Unreal 3 engine for futuristic, intense fights in an open-world battlefield. In this all-too-bleak future of constant wars over natural resources, two sides compete for global supremacy: the Western Coalition (the United States and the European Union) and the Red Star Alliance (Russian/People's Republic of China). The game's nonlinear single-player campaign has players advancing their side's frontline into enemy territory.

Screenshots

Spoiler:

Holy crap, is that a YF-19 that escaped from the New Edwards test base?

So as this is planed for a quarter 3 – September/October-ish release, what do you guys think so far? :3

Thread to be updated as more information comes this side of the Internet!

How ya doing, buddy?

It looks beautiful O_O.

How ya doing, buddy?

Looks impressive. When i pick up a PS3 i'd probably check this out, but my PS3 won't be coming around until around '08.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Looks like a typical military FPS. Though I certainly wouldn't mind testing it since THQ is publishing it, but I doubt it.

Most amazing jew boots

Bumped like a motherfucker.

This is out on 29th of Feb over here and having downloaded and played the demo, I'm really looking forward to it.

The game plays essentially the same as Battlefield 2 only instead rolling back and forth over the same six objective points, the maps are MASSIVE, with the battles focused on a smaller area, with six or so objectives in, the frontlines of the title.

Like Battlefield, there are different classes of soldier to choose from. In fact the classes are almost exactly the same except that the engineer has no shotgun and there's a new close combat class (With a shotgun). According to the publicity though you are able to customise your class and pick the equipment that suits you best. There are apparently some 60 different equipment items including radio controlled buggys with C4 on and drone attack helicopters (Really fun using the nose camera and chasing people down corridors). I think more weapons become available as you advance in rank but whether this is from offline play or from gay as all fuck medals like Battlefield 2 I couldn't tell you. Also, you can carry six different weapons at once.

There's a funny squad thing whereby you can assign other soldiers on your team to your immediate squad on the fly and issue them standard commands (Attack, defend, regroup). Quite how this will work, if at all in multiplayer remains to be seen. The AI seems pretty decent though, cleverer than Ghost Recon and a better shot than Rainbow Six as far as I can tell.

From playing the demo I noticed a few things. There's no health bar or anything. If you get shot up, your screen starts to flash red and you get a heartbeat sound. Rest up for a bit and you recover and can carry on. I think this suits the idea that this game is all about pressing forward to grab more territory. A soldier hiding getting their health back will probably be little help in big multiplayer games.

Driving vehicles is more Battlefield than Halo. The turret on tanks move independently of the tracks which can take a bit of getting used to and pushing up on the movement control rolls a tank the way it's facing, not upwards into the screen as it would in Halo, I personally find it easiest to use the in-car view.

The airstrikes are hilarious and watching the videos on Live, the bigger airstrikes are even more hilarious, can't wait to use the bigger daisy cutter bomb.

The whole game looks mental though and there's tons going on. Even playing on my SD tv it looks gorgeous, I imagine it's all kinds of special in HD. Also the prospect of the biggest multiplayer games ever on Xbox mean I'll almost certainly be getting this at release. If nothing else, it should fill a gap until the new Battlefield game hits in summer.

I was speaking idiomatically.

For the game system (at least in the beta) you basically have two loadout choices to make. Weapon and Role.

The different weapon kits are assault, sniper, close quarters (shotgun), heavy assault (machinegun), Anti-tank (missile launcher), and spec ops (silenced SMG). This choice also affects what kind of throwable explosive you get. Most get grenades, but Anti-tank gets AT mines, Spec ops gets C4, and I forget but sniper might get claymores.

The roles each have 3 levels. You start with the first, and you unlock the other two in sequence by getting points. Generally, a server runs a map 5 times, after that, the skills reset and everyone is even again. I don't know if they plan to have a continuous stat tracker and character upgrade system like BF2 did.

Anyways, the roles with their 3 skills are:

Ground support: you get a welding torch (wrench from BF2 with more particle effects), and the two unlockable levels are both deployable turrets.

Air support: you start with a precision strike missile, and from there unlock cluster bombs and area effect attacks.

Drone Tech: You start with a recon drone, which displays enemy units on the radar when you look at them. It can also self destruct to blow up infantry. From there both sides wildly diverge. The Western army gets these tracked drones with mounted guns, first a machine gun, then a grenade launcher. The Red Star army gets a Tyco rebound with C4 strapped to it (enough to blow a tank in one hit), and then another RC helicopter, but this one shoots rockets.

ECM: starting skill is that you never appear on the enemies' minimap, unlockables are an EMP rocket launcher that disables vehicles, and then a EMP field device that disables all electronics in a radius. Also prevents air strikes.

This was all from PC beta so they could have totally changed it by now. Should at least give you an idea though.

But yes, this is basically Battlefield 2.1, as after EA hired the desert combat mod to help them develop BF2, but before EA developed 2142, EA did its usual and tried to acquire their studio. So, they all left EA and formed Kaos studio, which is now making Frontlines.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

50 PLAYER IN MULTIPLAYER

Yeah, probably late on this, but still, it sounds pretty freakin sweet. I'll probably pick this up.

FELIPE NO

So the powering up works more like that Star Wars game where after a certain number of kills or whatever you can access better character types? That's sweet as fuck, meaning more casual players won't get continually dicked just because they've not spent 100 hours online boosting their levels. Given the size of the maps in the single player demo, I'd be surprised if they play each 5 times, that'd take forever as if I understand right, the winning team is the first to push the frontline right to the opponent's side.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

UPDATE:

I played the multiplayer demo last night, got into a few decent 32 player matches.

At first the map annoyed me (Oil fields it's called). It's basically a big open space with a cluster of buildings around each objective point. Compared to most of Battlefield 2's maps it seemed pretty empty. Actually though, this suits the big tanks and huge explosions style of the game pretty well. Once you capture an objective you can hole up and have pretty good fields of fire to defend yourself.

The weapon advancement works well. Every time you score points (Get a kill or capture an objective) you get points towards your current skill set (Air strikes, EMPS, Engineer or Drone) and after a certain number of points that skill levels up. You keep skill points when you change class and when you get killed, also between matches. This means that by the fifth round of a rotation most people have the level three skills. The only downside to this is if your team takes a beating and the enemy pick up a bunch of points, you're likely to keep taking a beating in the subsequent rounds. Knowing how much Americans hate to play on the losing team I can see this leading to a lot of in game drop outs if the tide turns against a team.

The various skills weapon sets seem pretty well balanced. I particularly like that the rocket guy's rockets won't fly straight without a lock-on making him very vulnerable to assault types. I think each class will get more weapons in the finished version, mines especially would be a bonus.

The tanks are pretty well balanced but the helicopters are way over-powered. They come with flares to distract missiles and there's no laser target thing to bring them down with like in Battlefield. With a concerted effort you can shoot them down but I can't see that level of teamwork happening at the demo stage sadly. Also, the full game will include fighter jets so that should keep the helicopters honest.

All in all, it's a good game and I think the full vesion will be well worth getting. I did notice though that Amazon are listing the release date for Battlefield Bad company as the end of march now though so I don't know whether to wait for that...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Shin

The tanks are pretty well balanced but the helicopters are way over-powered. They come with flares to distract missiles and there's no laser target thing to bring them down with like in Battlefield. With a concerted effort you can shoot them down but I can't see that level of teamwork happening at the demo stage sadly. Also, the full game will include fighter jets so that should keep the helicopters honest.

The full game will also include dedicated triple-A vehicles (whose cannons also happen to excel at shredding infantry), and the host can choose to have certain vehicle categories not spawn if so desired.
In the interim, though, EMP rockets (which are not homing, so it's up to the ol' Mark One eyeball to spot them coming) are perhaps the most amusing solution to your whirlybird woes. Note, too, that aside from flares, the WC's helo can enter stealth mode by closing its weapons bay - sacrificing, I believe, ease of control and the ability to use anything other than its gun in exchange for being unacquirable.
And speaking of teamwork-not-evident... it's frustrating to see someone grab your team's helo and lone-wolf with it. That said, there've been a couple of occasions where I was able to play gunner for someone who had a clue. Sadly, there seem to be no 'intercom' channels for the vehicles (as distinct from the squad channels that can be created).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Shin

The tanks are pretty well balanced but the helicopters are way over-powered. They come with flares to distract missiles and there's no laser target thing to bring them down with like in Battlefield. With a concerted effort you can shoot them down but I can't see that level of teamwork happening at the demo stage sadly.

By "laser target thing" do you mean the way you could slightly guide rockets in BF2? 'cause that didn't really do much for shooting down helis anyway.

Frontlines AT rockets (at least in beta) would get a tracking lock on any enemy vehicle, including the helis, so it was like using a stinger emplacement in BF2. Actually, pretty much exactly like it. You just have to wait for them to drop flares, then fire a locked missile before their next flare reloads.

Oh, and I agree, using EMP rockets on helis is hilarious, especially if you run up and plant an EMP field generator right next to it after it lands.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I played about five hours of the demo last night and I swear this game just gets better. On Oilfields I'm mainly playing as an anti-vehicle type with ground support. The wide open areas are perfect for mass slaughter of infantry by minigun and sentry gun. Choppers are a lot more killable with a few people shooting at them too. The sentry guns are pretty helpful on the Streets level too but the drones are pretty funny too. I can't wait to get my hands on the full game now.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Is there any word of a PC demo for this, or, for that matter, the minimum requirements? I'm liking the look of it...

I was speaking idiomatically.

Nope, just 360 now. The PC beta servers closed down a few days ago. Wish I'd known they were going to, I might have actually played.

As for requirements:

Originally Posted by MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista
Processor: 2.8 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB (1GB Windows Vista)
Hard Drive: 15 GB of uncompressed free hard drive space
Video Card: NVidia GeForce 7300 or ATI RAdeon X850 or equivalent
Drive: DVD-ROM

Originally Posted by RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows Vista
Processor: 3.2 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
RAM: 1 GB (2GB Windows Vista)
Video Card: 256 MB NVidia GeForce 7800GTX series or better

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I just pre-ordered this from Amazon. The PAL 360 special edition version comes with an art book, t-shirt, soundtrack album and poster and oddly, was three pounds cheaper than the standard edition. Can't see me getting to bed on friday night...

FELIPE NO

New Map – Hindsight
New Map – Sunder
New Map – Wide-Awake
New Map – Infiltration
New Air Vehicles (for both Western Coalition and Red Star)
New Weapon – Anti-Air Rocket Launcher

Here's trailers of Hindsight and Sunder new maps:

Hindsight DLC Trailer - YouTube - Frontlines Fuel Of War Hindsight DLC Trailer

Sunder DLC Trailer - YouTube - Frontlines Fuel Of War Sunder DLC Trailer

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I really like Frontlines but I'm not sure I play it enough any more to warrant spending £8 on new maps.

How ya doing, buddy?