Friday, February 05, 2010

Not A Good Sign For AvP

Last night, I downloaded the PS/3 version of the Aliens vs Predator demo, to see how it differed - if at all - from the XBox 360 one I'd already played. When I had started it up on the Microsoft console yesterday, it had taken anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute to get into a Deathmatch with four to seven opponents. On Sony's platform today, however, I waited more than fifteen minutes for it to "find a game" during which time my controller powered itself off due to inactivity! I realize that it's just a demo, and that it's the middle of the afternoon on a weekday (in this part of the world), but if absolutely no one's interested in it on the day after it became available... that's not good.

This, of course, is just one more problem with releasing a demo that only supports multiplayer: it's painfully apparent when no one else is playing it, and you have no other recourse available to you for trying out the game. I can just imagine how many folks have downloaded it, gotten a long wait time, realized there was nothing else to it, and deleted it off their hard drive. Ouch.

[Update Feb 6: There's a good review of the demo here. It mentions that the Predator starts off w/o any range weapon, making me feel less stupid about the fact that, the one time I played as a Predator, I couldn't figure out how to fire anything! There's also a statement that the finished product has more polish than the demo, coming from someone who's actually played the full game for review purposes. So that's encouraging.]

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