Hepl: An FPS/Game for 8+ Friends
My group of friends from Colorado is going to institute a fortnightly FPS gaming night. We’re trying to figure out what FPS we should play. We’d have chosen Modern Warfare 2 if they had dedicated servers, but they don’t. Instead, our two top spots are occupied by Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield 2. Any other suggestions for a good FPS we can all play together, preferably against others? Update: This doesn’t have to be an FPS. It can be any game that can handle our numbers, but not something that someone who misses out a couple times will have to catch up after (like an MMO).
Team Fortress 2 and if you need another person, I’d love to join in! I really don’t know of anything other than what you’ve thrown out there.
Play some old school games. SOF2, Q3, etc… Always fun.
Alien vs Predator comes out in February. I’m sure you’ll want something now, but you should check that out when you can and when it comes out. Looks bad ass.
If you don’t mind playing an older one, I recommend Unreal Tournament 2k4. That one always been my favorite.
Killing floor is pretty fun with up to 6 people, it’s co-op.
I’d suggest Left 4 Dead/Left 4 Dead 2, but you specified wanting to play with all 8 people on one team against others. Still, you might toss it in now and then for a switch up of 4v4 action amongst friends.
Has anyone played Savage 2? Is it any good, and how many players can it support?
Seriously Ryan. If you haven’t picked up L4D2 yet, you’re missing out. 4v4 is great fun!
I played Savage 2 a little (only tutorial and a bit online) found it unengaging, but then I was playing without my usual online gaming mates.
I’d recommend Quake Wars, we’ve had lots of fun with 4+ players on that and the opposing bots AI is acceptable to challenging depending upon what settings you give them at server setup. The nice thing I like about Quake Wars over the more standard FPS multiplayer games is the asynchronous sides (Strog and Humans play very differently and while there is some correlation between the classes there differences are enough to influence your play styles) and the varying objectives as the battle/map goes on (generally one side is attacking and the other defending through a series of checkpoints objectives that keep each map interesting and engaging).
The different classes cater to most players styles.
The main downside is that it drifts close to that Ureal Tournament fast furious circle strafe and bunny hop school of play.
Otherwise I’d second Killing Floor.
If you want something a little more hardcore in the FPS field, then give Arma 2 a look – its a military simulator but its very ambitious and models infantry, plane, helicopter, tank and more, all can be on the map at once. There’s a lot of great mods and scenarios for it. It’s got a built in editor that’s easy to use to set up quick and dirty encounters all the way to full campaigns. Needs a high end machine to run though – the latest 1.05 patch gets rid of most of the performance issues and bugs but it’s slow gameplay style, quick kills – bullet hits tend to kill you or leave you rolling on the ground till help comes to patch you up. But if you’re into more thoughtful strategic play that requires you to work with the other players, then this is a lot of fun.
Go oldskool and set up a Freelancer server (check out some of the mods floating around for it) for some space sim multiplayer goodness. For a more modern version check out Evochron Renegades although the ship combat in that is a little less user friendly and requires tactics outside the more standard WWII fighters in space dogfight approach.
If you want something a little more strategy focused then I’d recommend Sins of a Solar empire – RTS like with gameplay taken directly from the 4x (eg: Space Empires and GalCiv). Main downside is long games. A.I. Wars is a great indy RTS that’s set up for up to 8 players vs the A.I. there is now an expansion for it that adds NPC aliens. I’ve been enjoying it solo – has more depth than any other RTS I’ve played (and I generally dislike them on principle)… it can be a little hard to get into, I found it worthwhile to watch the videos on the site for the game as the developer (team of one) talks his way – mistakes and all – through the early stages of gameplay.
If your feeling like longer term asynchronous gameplay then check out Space Empires (IV or V) which is a standard 4x style game but allows play by email. My mates and I had a great game going for a while but we were using an online server to manage turn distribution – not knowing that it was bugged to hell and back and no longer supported – so just when we were getting to the sharp end of the game (ie: removed most of the A.I. aggressors in the galaxy and about to turn on each other – there had been skirmishes but nothing serious so far), the server crashed and we couldn’t get the game back to that point manually. So I’d suggest doing the bit extra effort to manually exchange the email files.
I could go on and on but those are the ones we’ve had the most fun with… I’ll also mention Atlantis which is an open source play by email computer moderated game that we all had great fun mucking about with but it has a high set up requirement, plus we ended up having to pay for a client from a dodgy Russian site to get something that provided the GUI for turns and displaying the map.