Worth tracking: RCTW Coop news

Most of the id software games already have some built-in coop, or community coop mod. Despite the populatiry of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, nobody has ever made a coop mod for it, so a few brave solders have started the development, and after a few months, we already have a playable version. One of the devs (Marvin) already shown us the ammount of dedication to the wolfenstein franchise, by making the recreation of Wolf3d on source engine…so it seems the RCTW coop project is in good hands already.

However, this is still a beta version, so let’s talk about the ups and downs of this modification. I have tested the mod with my friend (shown on the vid below), and it was a lot of fun. The enemys are not in the same places, so we have to careful where we rush just like that, so if they manage to make a good dynamic spawn system, the mod will have a really good replayability factor. The other very good thing is the radar itself, which is a lot useful then a simple team overlay. We can easily locate our mates, give them ammo, help them out with granade spam. My favorite part of the mod is the ioquake exe: you can easily set all the options like fov, custom resolution, music, sound…everything! And of course, it’s Win7 compatible.

…but let’s see the „downs” of this mod. First of all, the mod gets laggy after some times. I’ve started with a stable 50ms ping, and after a few maps it become 150ms, it was impossible to zoom in with this latency. I would have checked the config file with the snaps / maxpacket / rate settings lines, but theres no config in the dir (?) and i can’t type zero into the console, so I’ve made an autoexec file with better net settings (this helped a bit, so it should be a good idea to force better net settings by default).

Unfortunatly most of the players played the game itself more then 10 years ago, or haven’t tried it yet, so it would be a lot more useful to show the objectives green points on the radar, or something like that, maybe an objective line on the score panel (maybe some tips for new players).And here is the last and most annoying part of the mod: sometimes the doors just shot down, and they don’t let all the people in, and it’s kind of impossible to go in again. In these cases we have to restart the whole map. Sometimes the AI is too strong, and hard to spot due to the ammount of trees…and the best parts are when you try to kill a bot, but it’s already dead and stands frozen. Fortunatly this wasn’t a suprise for me, cause this was in the readme…this means the devs are testing the mod over and over, and they DO spot the bugs over time, unlike at other mods (i don’t want to write a long list here).

So my final word is: it’s a really awsome game, with an almost perfect beta coop mod, if you are a big fan play it now, if new to the game…wait a few months and let the devs clear the rest of the bugs.