Ghouls vs Humans: Tons of Classes! v1b1
Disclaimer: The following following is based from my observations in playing the "tons of ghouls" server in best-ever. This will cover not only the tons of classes mod, but everything else loaded in the server as well. So when I refer to this mod, I am referring to the additional wads loaded in the server as well. Please do keep in mind that I'm partially biased as I've worked on a Ghouls vs. Humans project before. Also, this mod is not final and appears to be a work in progress.
Project Background: Essentially this project adds a massive selection of classes to the cacoaward winning mod, "Ghouls vs. Humans". In total, it adds 12 new ghouls and 18 new humans. Other than new classes, it comes with some handy features like toggleable screamers. The project itself seems to have various authors, but the leader is Hekmatyar.
Initial Impression: I stumbled across this server as it was the most populated server during the night. I had played this before, but it was a terrible experience. Was I really going to enter the server and see the horror that awaited me? Hell yeah.
Let me start by saying that this server has a ton of wads, and I mean a ton. Why does the author not condense all the fixes into one wad? I don't know. 120 megabytes later, I was able to connect. As soon as I connected, I was hit by this wonderful message. This absurdly huge text on the top left corner of my screen constantly told me that screamers are off. It was getting old, fast. So I tried setting hud_scale to true/false did not make it any smaller so I was stuck with this obstructing my vision for the two hours I've played. And it is placed in such a dumb spot that it makes it harder to read text from allies. How wonderful. As soon as you enter the game you immediately notice a plethora of new classes. Some being completely pointless, like the Meepy class that shrinks down to one pixel, while others are just completely overpowered, such as a ghoul with hitscan. One thing I noticed is that the author did not correctly line-up any of the images properly in the hud, so you get things like this. The weapons don't line up with the weapon bar, and most of the classes don't have a mugshot of their face, so the classes seem to be very barebone.
Content: As far as the guns go for humans, they are either poorly animated, or realm667 rip-offs. Having realm667 weapons isn't bad as long as you atleast edit the code, but the author seems to have edited little to nothing. The classes themselves are in poor taste, the silly shit needs to go away. For instance there is a BJ Blazkowitz class but he doesn't even use his weapons from wolfenstein, instead you get a shitty recolor of a smg and a gattling gun. Another thing is this mod has too many marine-esque classes. In the original GvH each human class appeared to have something unique about them, may it be a futuristic cyborg, or a hunter from medieval times. This however, has boring and generic classes. For instance, 8 of the new classes are literally generic shotgun classes. What is the point of adding Duke nukem, Caleb, Ivy, etc if they are just going to be a clone of marine? On top of that one of these classes came with a nuclear missile launcher for some reason. And not only was it a realm667 ripoff, but it teamkilled as well. Besides the generic shotgun classes, the rest felt out of place. I know we're talking about a mod that added Santa Clause, but does someone like Laura Croft really fit into the atmosphere of Gvh?
As for ghouls, they aren't actually that bad. There was actually some pretty decent ones (like this creepy monkey). However, the author decided to add humanoid ghouls, and they really don't fit with the theme. Another thing that annoyed me was that some of the ghouls had their vision obstructed for god knows what reason. The problem is that it can be completely circumvented by deleting the texture from the wad, so it was a poor way to balance a class. As far as the attacks went, they were generic bites. The most unique class would probably be the mohoph that can transform into humans just to trick them.
I played some of the new maps and it was so-so. Anything made by hekmatyar was usually poorly detailed and relied too much on gimmicks. The new maps not made by Hekmatyar were actually decent.
Balance: Oh boy, where do I begin. The balance is awful. There was absolutely no thought put into any of of the new classes except for "lolz this funny xDDDD lelel". The ghouls are fucking broken. The humans literally get stomped every map, even with a nuclear missile launcher. During my gameplay the ghouls won 23 games in a row. And when we complained about the balance, the author suggested we should go humans to balance it out, even though there were less ghouls than humans to begin with. In some cases we even won 4 vs 8. Considering there is a class that can turn pitch black, move 10x faster than choke, and instakill, it's not very surprising. The biggest insult to GvH are the ranged ghouls. Why do these exist? Just because the choke and frostbite have ranged attacks doesn't mean a ghoul should get hitscan as a weapon. For those untrained, that weapon has a much tighter spread than the Super Shotgun, fires 6 bullets each doing either 4, 8, or 12 damage each, and each shot takes less than a second to fire. Considering it can potentially do 72 damage per blast from far away with (almost) limitless ammo, that's pretty fucking broken. Another thing is, some of the ghouls have ranged attack as a primary. WHY? The point of ranged attacks is to annoy humans, in order to follow up with their melee. This completely fucks up all sorts of balance because not only are humans unsafe in close distances, but from long as well. This also has a human that can out-damage ghouls in melee range, but this is completely overshadowed by how broken ghouls are.
The most outrageous thing is that it's been like this for six months straight and during that time-span the author didn't even lift a finger to balance shit. Instead we get new classes because they are "lelele funny xDDDD". And when you do bring this up on the server, the author simply pretends to be afk or insults your mother. Another outrageous thing is that there are several obvious bugs with the project that the author refuses to fix because he doesn't want to admit that he doesn't know how to fix them. Instead he responds by telling us that he doesn't "care" about bugs unless they are game breaking. What a great developer.
Conclusion / tl;dr: In conclusion this mod is a great example of why quality is better than quantity. And is only complimented by a stubborn dev that refuses to admit he doesn't know what he's doing. I mean honestly, if he had just seeked help instead ofplagiarizing from other projects, this would've been much better. But when confronted about this, the guy goes nuts, kills his own server, then proceeds to kill his own clan. Will we see him in another alias? I don't know, maybe. But as the dev elegantly put it himself,
<Teletha> too less oxygen
<Hekmatyar> Just leave me alone
Rating:
Fun Factor - 4 / 10 - Stale, nothing really new added to the formula.
Balance - 1 / 10 - *Rips hair out*
Creativity - 2 / 10 - What is original content?
Replay Value - 1 / 10 - Never again.
Bonus point - +1 for killing your own clan in retaliation.
3 / 10 - Congratulations, well earned!
Geeze, we don't have even one positive review in Zanstuff, I promise the next one will be less of a rant
