Calamity Fuse Open Beta Released

[AciD]

Folks from Matrieya Studios have released a public beta for their Half-Life 2 mod - Calamity Fuse. This mod sounds very interesting and it's free - it would be a shame to not download it.

Calamity Fuse a new multiplayer game that defies boundaries. Play it as an FPS, as an RPG, or as a fighting game, or all three at once. This amalgamation of genres combines the action of first person shooters with a customizable spell-building system and fighting game mechanics. Fight with firearms or hold epic aerial melee battles. Calamity Fuse gives the player innovative customizable gameplay: manage stats like Strength, Defense and Speed, build up defense and become a sword swinging demolisher, create devastating elemental attacks to decimate the opposing team from a distance, or powerful defenses to nullify magic and even absorb it to regain health, have the ability to inflict strategic status effects on your foes such as damage over time, loss of stamina and inhibited movement, or compound your healing abilities to play support.
[br]Features:
[*] Buildable inventory with choice of multiple weapons and armors
[*] Fully customizable spell-building system
[*] Fighting game style melee combat
[*] "Wall latching" allows mobility over vertical surfaces
[*] Automatic target system allows teammates to communicate non-verbally

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[br]If you are interested in participating head over to their website.

 

[Dr.Freeman]

Not bad, not baaaaaaaaad.

 

[Pesmerga]

Open beta mod.

wat

 

[FoxFire]

Open beta mod.

wat

They eventually want to charge for it, and they're marketing it as a retail game on the Source engine. Same page as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Postal III, Vampire: The Masquerade ? Bloodlines, etc...

Nowhere on their website do they ever call Calamity Fuse a mod, so I think it's a little misdirecting to call it one.

 

[Pesmerga]

Folks from Matrieya Studios have released a public beta for their Half-Life 2 mod

Blame Acid.

Also, charging for mods = lulz

 

[TychoCelchuuu]

Blame Acid.

Also, charging for mods = lulz

They're not charging for a mod, they're charging for a game. If every game on the Source engine was a mod, Zeno Clash, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, SiN Episodes, The Ship, Postal 3, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and other games would all be mods.

 

[Pesmerga]

I'm not saying they're not allowed to- certainly it's within their rights (I uhh... think). But seems hard to fathom anyone spending a cent on something that looks as terrible as it does.

 

[FoxFire]

I'm not saying they're not allowed to- certainly it's within their rights (I uhh... think). But seems hard to fathom anyone spending a cent on something that looks as terrible as it does.

I'm not saying it will get a whole lot of sales as is (looks pretty unpolished). Just pointing out how it's not being marketed as a mod. ?_?

 

[Reflex]

downloading now

 

[Dekstar]

I'm not saying they're not allowed to- certainly it's within their rights (I uhh... think). But seems hard to fathom anyone spending a cent on something that looks as terrible as it does.

That's not the point of a beta, Pes. It's not meant to look good.

 

[AciD]

Blame Acid.

As long as it requires Source SDK base it is classified as a mod.

 

[CookieCuttah]

Why am I not seeing any servers?

 

[Pesmerga]

That's not the point of a beta, Pes. It's not meant to look good.

Look, you can go ahead and give the damn thing as much benefit of the doubt as you want but it still looks like shit. Don't judge a book by a cover, you say. Fine, I'm going to install this pile of garbage and come back to you in an hour.

Also, a video one of the devs made.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub1d81JIHb8

 

[Dekstar]

Also, a video one of the devs made.

Ok yeah that does look like shit. But as long as the game plays fine, then they can always improve the looks later. They definitely seem to have the dual wield system down.

 

[Pesmerga]

Some screen shots I took while I played with myself () because there were no open servers.

Hmm, interesting landscaping ideas.

Clipping issues

My magicks. For some reason, in this game, it's called Nuben. Not magic. Let me redirect your attention to a little graph

We continue.

I fell off the world and died. On air.

It doesn't look too bad inasmuch as people who only think about raping children aren't too bad.

Uh huh. I'd tell you what's going on here, but honestly, I don't even know.

I got stuck in the terrain. I cast my spells PEW PEW PEW

Still stuck. PEW PEW PEW

Exit'd. Baleted.

Good day, sirs.

 

[Mutley]

This is amazing.

 

[TwwIX]

Another one of those college student "games", eh?

 

[highlander]

Hm...er....ok.

 

[Insano]

This has the potential to beat Monkey Wars.

 

[605Scorpion]

This has the potential to beat Monkey Wars.

But Monkey Wars went nowhere.

 

[Vino]

I should make some notes, as a representative of this game.

* It's just a beta We know it doesn't look awesome yet and has a few bugs, we'd rather people who are interested play the game, and everybody else can sit out while we improve it.

* Two servers are up now. We're planning a play session for tonight.

* As of the next version, we're killing the Nuben and going back to plain old "magic."

* That video is very, very old and the game no longer has purple and black dudes. They look more like this now:

 

[Reflex]

I tried this but I couldn't find any servers. :|

 

[Dr.Freeman]

Awesome pics pesh.

 

[Crispy]

Honestly looks too early for beta. I've seen better pre-alphas. The sort of bugs that people are finding in this version would be quicker and more reliably reported and fixed using an internal testing team.

By jumping into beta this early you're going to have a lot of people playing it but you're unlikely to get the sort of feedback you need at this stage. Instead it's more likely that you'll get a bad rep.

Ambitious concept is ambitious. When I saw a health bar stretching across an entire screen I decided this wasn't the mod for me.

 

[PvtRyan]

On the other hand, this is how mods used to be made: very early releases with lots of new versions. I remember playing the Omaha map on Day of Defeat alpha 0.1 or something, and we all know where that went. Same for CS. But with this generation of games, mod teams like pretending they're full blown development studios and don't release anything until it's fully done.

Coincidentally, this generation hasn't seen any mods that are anywhere NEAR the size of DoD/CS/NS or even the smaller mods like Firearms. While that may have to do more with the scope of a mod project these days and the work a full conversion requires compared to ye olde days, all these diva-like mods don't bind many players to them because they're not playable. They're all looks but that only gets you so far.

As a mod team these days, who are you going to get feedback from when you don't release anything? Sure, you got fans masturbating over your model renders with global illumination, but when you finally release your game and it sucks, who's going to come back for version 1.1 after a long wait of anticipation that was met with disappointment? Do you know why Valve makes consistently great games? It's because their development is centered around constant playtesting, rather than posting spiffy model renders on a website.

I like the concept of this game and I like what I see, even in the first video, because unlike Pesh, I can look past the pink-black models and see a cool idea unfolding.

But yeah, way too early to be calling this a beta from what I see.

 

[Crispy]

Well said, but you can't compare this to DoD because at least its early publicly released versions didn't have massive gaping holes into the void and holes in the map boundaries where you could fall out. Early DoD (Omaha, Hill) was the most horribly unbalanced thing ever, but the maps were still insanely fun because there A) was very little else to compare them against and B) it was a young man's wet dream to live out the d-day beach landings and get blown to pieces over and over again as your team managed to gain maybe a few feet every painstaking minute.

There's no doubt they will learn a lot from this, but unless their team was about to fall apart this probably wasn't a good time to release, not because it's not feature complete, but because what parts are included are not complete to basic standards. But if they get good feedback and it makes it clearer where to take the mod and how to improve it, then the end will justify the means.