Ham Express

I can remember the days during the summer when all I could think about was Socom. I was really excited for this game because Call of Duty 4 was getting annoying. I was ready for a game that required real tacticle stretegy and a super realistic game. The Socom series has always delivered before, generating a large dedicated community that just kept growing. Then the PS3 came out and nobody was sure of Socom’s future. Then news comes out about Socom: Confrontation. Their wasn’t much hype for this game except in the large Socom Community. There was just one thing that made us unsure of whether Socom was going to continue to be the great game that it was. That one thing was Slant 6. Slant 6 is a fairly new developer that nobody really knew much about except that they developed the Socom for the PSP. Naturally there were many doubts about this new developer taking over the famous Socom series. Screenshots and short gameplay videos made the game look great, until the Public beta started.

I was one of the many lucky people to get to participate in the Socom: Confrontation Public Beta. This was my first time participating in a beta ever, so I really didn’t know what to expect. So the first day was full of server’s crashing, and extremely long loading times. But it really turned out to continue throughout the entire beta. Throughout the beta you had the infamous “It’s a beta” arguement on the forums. Many people were saying this game was going to suck because of the problems in the beta. Then there was the other more logical side saying that it was only a beta and that most of the bugs should be fixed in the Gold version. Well the logical side was wrong, we forgot to add in the fact that Slant 6 was new at this. I do not think a Gold version to this very day exists.

On the day of the release everyone was expecting a Gold version. Instead the game was pretty much a newer version of the beta, and was unplayable for the first week. There were server crashes during the primetime hours, there were random feezes, there were insanely (and I mean insanely) long loading times. For everyone who has played Socom Confrontation, they probably remember the little spinning icon. Some called this the spinning ring of death and many other nicknames, because you’d spend a lot of time staring at this icon spinning.

So it’s been about 3 months now, so the game’s gotta be totally good now right? Wrong. Sadly the game still has flaws, and server problems. This game was definitely released way too early. They lost players right of the bat with the problem filled first week. Then they continued losing players after each update because with each update came more problems. The updates just seemed like they were doing more harm than any good to the game. Gamers were getting tired of it and were losing hope.

Then there was patch 1.3, and wow this one was a huge one. The developers had talked about this patch for a little over a month on the Official Socom Blog. They kept delaying it more and more, trying to fill this patch with as many bug fixes and missing features as they could to try and redeem the game. Yes, there were missing features. There were features of the game that were promised by the developers before release that were not in the game. There were also features in the manual and on the box that were not in the game. Many people had felt ripped off after relizing that the release was just the beta with a small patch. They had already lost many peoples interest and mine even before 1.2. But after seeing some of the new features missing features that they were going to put into patch 1.3, I started to consider playing once again. Well patch 1.3 was released Friday, January 9th and it turns out there were already some problems right at the beginning. The new patch is creating community/stat errors and an increase in lag. Everyone has been waiting way too long for Slant 6 to fix their mistake and it still has not happened.

So I officially am saying that I am done with Socom, well at least Socom: Confrontation. Socom: Confrontation has to be the worst Socom in the entire Socom series. It is too late now for Slant 6 to even redeem themselves on Socom: Confrontation. Killzone 2’s release is just around the corner and Killzone is looking to take over the shooter genre on the PlayStation 3. It’s obvious that this game is going to be good, Guerrilla already finished Killzone 2 and has a Gold version ready to go. In fact, if you pre-order Killzone 2 at Gamestop you actually get access to an exclusive demo instead of a beta like Socom had. So yes, this article is going to end with, “I’m officially done with Socom.”