Ham Express

Socom has been a huge franchise for the Playstation that basically started online gaming for consoles. With the first couple of Socom’s a new community formed of skilled mature gamers that expect simply the best from Socom. The Socom series is best known for its gameplay, being a tacticle game, and its large community. Socom was the first to take advantage of the pressure sensitive buttons on the PS2 controllers introducing a whole new feature to shooters. It used this great new technology to create a very new leaning system where you could actually control how much your Navy Seal leaned to peer or shoot around corners. But proabably the biggest feature Socom was known for was its voice recognition system that was used in single player to command your team through levels. The Socom franchise was started by Zipper Interactive and has been theirs, until now. A fairly new developer, Slant 6, has taken over the Socom series but they have made one big mistake…

Slant 6 did a pretty good job with the game, made it look a whole lot better in graphics arguably compared to Call of Duty 4. But the thing where they messed up was releasing the game on October 14th. No its not because it was on a Tuesday or that we didn’t really get the game until the 15th. The real mistake with their release date was that it came months way to early. The game was missing many features and it just felt like a new patch of the beta, it didn’t feel like I was playing a GOLD version. The box clearly states Trophies as being one of the games features, yet trophies are nowhere to be found in the game. Another huge problem is the statistics not being recorded correctly which was a problem in the beta for awhile also. Now, the box says PlayStation Home, but I’m not going to worry about that because I had already have known that Playstation Home wouldn’t be out for awhile and do not really consider Playstation Home a feature of Socom. Ranked rooms were said by the developers, before release, to have rocket launchers and grenade launchers disabled, yet they are not to this very day. Some will ask why this is a big deal, and the reason is because this is how it has always been in Socom. Rocket and grenade launchers can be abused by some players making it a pain to play against. Anyways, probably the biggest feature that was missing that caused me to lose interest in Socom is Matchmaking. To me this is a huge and very important feature in any online shooter, and to say there will be a matchmaking system and then not including it on release is a huge problem all on its own. I should add that all these features are in the manual also. There are so many other things that are missing from the game that I have to list them below:

1. Other Special Ops Factions
2. There are missing guns (these guns can be found in the strategy guide, yet are not in the game)
3. Tounament Matches (it as said on Socom.com that there would be weekly tournaments)
4. Clan Ladder Matches

Probably the largest thing that turned people away from this game was that the game was pretty much unplayable for awhile because servers were down. The only times the servers were up were during the early morning and after midnight. There were large problems with the game freezing up the PlayStation 3 almost each and every time you play. IGN and many other game review sites have rated Socom Confrontation very low due to all these problems. Here is some of what IGN said in their review:     Click HERE for IGN’s video review.

“While you receive nearly as many disconnects as before, getting rejected from clearly open channels and servers happens way too frequently, and will bounce you back out to the title screen.”

“Connection issues or odd game starts aren’t the only problem here. For instance, the game still has a large amount of lag regardless of what kind of connection that you happen to have.”

“…I’ve also found that the stat tracking (if you could call it that) is blatantly flawed. I’ve played a number of ranked games, but somehow, none of my stats were tracked at all. However, random games were eventually associated to my player hours after I finished playing a game.”

“You can tell that the potential of the game is there in theory, but its current incarnation is completely and tragically flawed. If you can get into a stable game that works, you can have fun, but you have to wade through a myriad of technical issues to find that game. Plus, with a large amount of its features missing without any known date of being added or implemented, Confrontation ultimately is a shell of what the game could have been: an excellent first step for a beloved franchise.”

Because this game was released way to early many people like me have lost their interest in the game. Seth Luisi has said that they plan on patching until the game is stable, and then patch the missing features back into the game little by little. But sorry this should have been done before the game was released, now gamers and game review sites are getting first impressions and walking away from it. There is a chance that some people will return when the game is patched up and fixed, but definatly not as much as the game could have gotten with a good release. Nobody knows whether this game will ever reach its hidden potention or not, or how soon it will happen, but I am sure many are disappointed to see a Socom game turn out this way. If they had waited and extended the beta much longer they could have at least released a decent GOLD version. It is sad to see Socom Confrontation like this after I had so much excitement for this game. So all you Socom players out there, how do feel about the new Socom developer Slant 6? Are you happy with the current Socom Confrontation? What would you have done to make the game better?

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