Resistance 2
Preview
Hale continues the fight against Chimera where he left off.
by Zkylon
previewed on PS3
Direct continuation
The last time we saw Hale he had frustrated the Chimera's nasty (and I mean nasty) attempts to overtake England. Then, a couple of Black Ops soldiers take him with them on a chopper ride to who-knows-where. This is how Resistance: Fall of Man ended and how Resistance 2 (tentative name) begins. Not that Resistance 2 will be a copycat of its predecessor. The Insomniac Games crowd plans to make more than a few changes and add many many features.
The 4 Cs
The main principle behind Resistance 2 is unifying what Ted Price calls the four Cs. What it means is that the four main elements of the game, the single player Campaign, Co-op, Competitive multiplayer and the Online Community are all connected and work together. How this thing works out isn’t very clear but apparently myresistance.net will have a strong presence (with huge focus on stat tracking, profiles, clans and more) and there will be will numbers of players in both Co-op and Multiplayer.
Resistance 2 will not only feature up to 8 player cooperative play (2 player split screen, the rest online) but also a full separate campaign that runs parallel to Hale’s main story. It’ll circle around fun gameplay situations over story-driven scenarios - which is wise considering that Co-op is often only played in order to have fun, ignoring the storyline. It’ll also feature three classes for the players too choose from: Heavy, Special Ops and Medic. Heavy comes packed with a chaingun and a mobile shield that gets charged as the Heavy’s kill count rises. The Special Ops serves as a sniper and wields an upgraded Bullseye equipped with a scope for extra range and accuracy and improved stopping power. The whole team relies on the Medic’s Medicator, a special weapon that damages foes and heals friendlies (like real doctors do). Those are the three templates so far and no word has been given on further classes or the ability to customize your own.
Multiplayer rises to new levels
Multiplayer is supposed to be even more impressive, featuring up to 60 players online and a new objective-driven squad-based gameplay. You can probably imagine that 60 players online simultaneously can produce one big mess, so Insomniac plans on introducing a system that strongly favours team play by creating squads, composed from 4 to 8 men. All these squads will be given small objectives and all members of the squad will have to work together in order to accomplish them. In this kind of gameplay, it is highly important that a player doesn’t get lost and thereby drag his team down, so attention is given to make the objectives as clear and understandable as possible.
Instead of having one big epic battle, squads of both sides will battle it out in small skirmishes, giving the core of the attention to squad fire fights instead of battlefield randomness. Also in order to support team play, the squads will be arranged into lobbies where they can chat with each other, encouraging camaraderie. For the moment, it’s still unclear if the above-mentioned classes will carry on to Multiplayer but it would be something great to see. Additional information on vehicles etc. is yet to be disclosed but all the information that we've received makes us eager for a chance to sign in.
