Section 8 entered Open Beta recently and I, being the loyal Tribes fan and news enthusiast that I am, started to play it. At first I was upset. No plasma? No explosive spinning discs? Mortars as of yet unlocked? What a load of shit!
As I played it more I began to see Section 8 as more and more of its own game. Its focus on ballistic weapons where Tribes had only one, its curious shield and jump jet mechanics and its impressive passive upgrade system are all its own. And it uses them incredibly well. Section 8 has a strange, military sense of effective weapon ranges, a sense of role decided before the battle. The choices you make as you drop in make as much difference as the choices you make after you hit the ground.
It’s unique. It’s wholly original and startlingly smart, especially in today’s era of cover-obsessed first person shooters. It walks its own path and treats its own ideas very seriously. It does its best to give players an almost overwhelming number of choices, none of which are wrong. And they’re all new choices.
Want to be faster? Tougher? Hit harder? Have an easier time hitting your targets? Be a better defender, drop right next to anti-aircraft turrets? Thanks to the passive modules you can. You choose how you want to interact with the battlefield, what role you want to fill. You can drop behind enemy defenses or fly around neutralizing vehicles.
Section 8 is largely open in terms of how it allows players to work as a team, and, as a game in its nascent stages without a solid community, this shows in the relative chaos that is playing as a team in public game. But the potential is unrecognizable, despite all the balance issues, connectivity and stress issues you’d expect to see in a beta. It’s a very promising, smart FPS.
And, despite its apparent originality it’s soundly rooted in FPS tradition. Every decision made in Section 8 can be traced back to the Quake 2 modding community where, let’s face, it, current generation multiplayer gaming began.
Before Quake 2’s mod community made team CTF games with multiple classes a standard we were locked in a nigh endless cycle of twitch games that came down to inscrutable math between weapons and who had the better reflexes. This is the sort of game play that spawned the like of Jon Romero and Katie Kilcreek, of pandering playboy spreads and Duke Nukem sequels sentenced to death after a decade of limbo. This is the generation of gaming that former the first person shooter, the generation John Carmack has spent the last few years trying to shed and the generation that gifted us with the enormous, humorless douchebag that is “Fatal1ty,” known to his parents as Jonathan Wendel.
Wendel, to the uninitiated, is possibly the worst thing to ever happen to gaming. Regardless of his talent at pointing and clicking in order to eliminate opponents his public appearances, general attitude, and devotion towards marketing low quality products at extreme costs to the most gullible of consumers remain a testament to the adolescent nature of gamers as a community. Even today, each time someone utters the word “fag” on X-Box chat I think of Wendel and grimace. He had a chance to become a mouthpiece for gaming and he turned it into a marketing opportunity which has since seen use in two failed “professional gaming leagues” with narrow focus and little, if any, draw outside of the gaming community. Even within the gaming community, it’s difficult to see a dedicated gamer purchasing one of his products. I consider myself a hardcore gamer and to me, the standard remains the effective, inexpensive Intellimouse.
Many of the negative stereotypes about gamers today can be traced back to Wendel’s behavior in the early television spots netted to him when he was possibly the only recognizable North American competitive gamer. But his star has fallen and one will be hard pressed to even find video of Wendel on Youtube now. And this is the sea change, the remarkable reaction to Raphaelite art, to put it in a fashion only Leigh Alexander might get, that Section 8 indicates.
Section 8 emphasizes team play. It emphasizes controlling ground and holding it, fighting and making important decisions both before, during, and after combat. It’s about assessing objectives, using existing cover and concealment and conserving resources. It’s about choosing how and where to fight and, most of all, it’s about interacting with your fellow players.
It embodies the traits that Quake 2’s modding community drew out of the gaming community, the sense that playing as a team was as important as individual competence, and it has been sustained since in games like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress, as well as their Source based sequels. It is, in a very real way, representative of the best parts of FPS gaming.
Spawning and spawn times are dealt with through a thoroughly original, engaging and tactically significant means wherein the way you spawn and the upgrades you choose beforehand determine how effective you’ll be when you hit the ground. The importance of match persistence is dealt with by allowing players to purchase air dropped gear which allows them to fight their enemies in new and interesting ways.
And it plays in a very straightforward fashion. You circle-strafe your opponents until one of you drops dead. There are variants depending on terrain and decisions made on where and when to fight, but for the most part the game boils down to closing to range, firing your rifle and doing your best to evade enemy fire while still shooting accurately.
It’s something which has generated a notable divide between gamers who are coming of age, people who primarily play TF2’s remarkable, unique and almost entirely divorced from its roots style of specialized play, and older gamers who recognize the first person shooter genre as an elastic thing largely rooted in map control and decision making. I’ve heard a few cries of “TF2 is better” from audience who, when pressed, can’t recall games they played before.
This is both a testament to how much this genre has changed in a decade and the power of Team Fortress as a game, the amazing pull Valve has had towards both gamers and non-gamers alike.
Because while Section 8’s focus on teamwork and cooperation do allow it to be easily compared to Team Fortress 2, it has so many qualities that divorce it entirely from that venerable title. Team Fortress 2, for example, lacks a single assault rifle. Section 8, on the other hand, embraces the assault rifle as the most basic of weapons, the gamer’s general purpose firearm. Like Counter-Strike it demands that you select and skillfully use a midrange firearm in order to be combat effective, even if you try to fill a role outside of that capacity.
Snipers, to their credit, can still be quite frustrating.
And it is this combination of the old and new commandments of first-person shooting, the game play deliberately and intentionally reminiscent of Tribes and the depth applies to every aspect of the game which makes Section 8 the game I am most excited for in the months to come. Time was that the PC release of Red Faction: Guerilla, with its marvelous new physics and equally back to roots game play, promising a focus on rebellion and creation destruction, used to dominate my attention. Section 8 was a footnote, a brief “Pfft,” in conversation which has now become an “Oooh” after I had my time with it.
Because it embraces the best parts of what makes first person shooters great. It’s all about teamwork and reflexes, making big decisions before and during battle and combining elements of older space-sims and role-playing games. It’s a delightfully old school game with a futurist perspective, and when it’s well played it’s simply marvelous. Even when it’s poorly played it’s great. And it’s not a major release from a big studio. It’s a game from Timegate, a company best known for Kohan and the F.E.A.R. expansions. Scratch that, not best known for. Only known for.
Timegate has worked on two games, one of which wasn’t even their own and both of which were critical and commercial flops. But they’ve done something amazing with Section 8. They’ve demonstrated a love for gaming that few veteran game designers have before them. I wince as I say this, but I rank them next to Jon Carmack and Hideo Kojima in their reverence to tradition and their desire to comment upon and improve the bits and pieces that have made gaming great.
So consider this overlong discussion of Section 8 and the first person shooter genre in general a giant pair of thumbs directed skyward. Section 8 is a wonderful game, worthy of the attention of any first person shooter enthusiast and, I’d argue, any strategy game enthusiast as well. It recall many of the great parts of Tribes while blending elements from the Enemy Territory games and offering up its own unique ideas about just how people should play multiplayer first person shooters, and its intelligence and importance in doing so is undeniable. If you’re the sort of gamer who likes fighting other gamers you owe it to yourself to buy Section 8 and let the good people at Timegate know that they’ve made their big hit and that they can rest easy for a few months, until they have to start work on Section 9 at least.
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