• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

GunZ2 The Second Duel Released on Steam Early Access (F2P)

The worst was when someone right-clicked you to the ground and machine gunned you to death before you could get back up.

Still, it was fun as hell and I can't wait until this is a bit more stable. Needs more wall-running and crazy acrobatics, though.
 
Wow, I didn't see this coming. I was expecting to have to learn some Korean and deal with ping- wait have the server locations been announced?

You'd get less lag playing on Korean servers. That's how bad it's been so far.

Although I actually did see a Korean name in one of the lobbies.

The worst was when someone right-clicked you to the ground and machine gunned you to death before you could get back up.
Ah yes. Right clicking opened you up to infinites via properly timed butterfly dashes. I remember people fighting by trying to dash in and get the first right click.
 
The worst was when someone right-clicked you to the ground and machine gunned you to death before you could get back up.
That's why jump recovery was in the game. I was kicked out of rooms for doing that so many times early on when the game was just released and people thinking I was hacking when they couldn't get back up.
 
I remember seeing GunZ years ago, downloading it, playing for a few minutes, and then never looking at it again. This looks like more of that, except I'm older now and somehow manage to have even less interest! Cool for people who liked the first one, though. Never would have thought I'd see a sequel.
 
That's why jump recovery was in the game. I was kicked out of rooms for doing that so many times early on when the game was just released and people thinking I was hacking when they couldn't get back up.

Even with jump recovery, they can still butterfly you as you falling down to death. Or with 2 shotgun, they can alternate between the shot using the reload bug to instant kill you while you floating on air. It is really tricky to pull off, but amazing to see every time.

Anyone played the game can tell us whether the game have the same depth as the original gunz? Or just another generic tps?
 
Even with jump recovery, they can still butterfly you as you falling down to death. Or with 2 shotgun, they can alternate between the shot using the reload bug to instant kill you while you floating on air. It is really tricky to pull off, but amazing to see every time.

Anyone played the game can tell us whether the game have the same depth as the original gunz? Or just another generic tps?

I played briefly until I couldn't find a match anymore. I don't know the ins and outs of everything, but I'm sure there's plenty of room for discovery here.

Some of the most notable things that are different:

-The dash you could do with your melee weapon out in the original, you do with ALL weapons now, they got rid of that roll.
-Walking on walls is a little different. You keep tapping space to stay on the wall, and you can change your height if you're going sideways by how much you tap space.
-Probably the biggest thing, you have to choose one character for your account and if you want the other ones, you have to pay for them, this basically limits you to only one thing unless you feel like shelling out the cash.
 
i played a bit and the big difference is that airdashes have a considerable amount of "recovery' frames, basically. once you do an airdash you are committing to it 100% with no way to change what you're doing.

you can't force yourself down with anything (like how butterflying worked) that i tried, so it's really similar to how in the original you could just keep mashing dash over and over to try and simulate butterfly movement speeds poorly. doing blocks in the air or attacks in the air simply floats you slowly, with no change in your trajectory.

you can't chain dashes like old gunz either- there's a 'recovery' to them to where you can't even do old dagger-style dashing on the ground. it's really dissapointing, because i thought at the very minimum that was going to be left in

melee fighting which imo was the most interesting aspect of gunz has been changed drastically- i don't know what ot make of it yet, but at the moment i can tell there's strong and weak attacks, and 'skill bar' melee skills that are equivs of the charge power attacks that were a substantial part of the mindgames in the melee. even if someone does figure out how to butterfly in gunz 2, the other issue is that melee attacks being blocked cause huge stagger, like the 'rebounding stagger' animation in gunz when you hit a blocking opponent directly with a raw swing. that right click stuff mentioned was like the 'hail mary' of gunz melee fighting. it rarely worked vs good players, but sometimes you could catch folks offguard due to the terrible netcode. it had a huge risk involved with it (because it was instant death if you whiffed it vs a good player bc they're stunlock you with butterfly to death) but a huge payoff if you made a good read and had the execution to back it up (the instant butterfly followup for it was legitimately hard, which is kinda what spurred that really shitty garbage duel mode contest where you just launched each other and tried it over and over again. execution dick-waving contest and whatnot)

i feel it's probably gonna not be a big thing, like sword duels were in old gunz

overall i think this is kinda what i was expecting in terms of what most developers do with modern day reboots of competitive games with technical aspects that create interesting gameplay. they base the game around their original intent of design, streamline it and then add in some homages to the natural, interesting evolution of gameplay that drew folks in. the big thing is that the streamlining of the game usually means that they do something to really limit players' ability to explore the system and come up with stuff that creates interesting gameplay because streamlining games creates a more 'controlled' environment. that's what i'm really scared of since it means the game might be stuck as it is, which is ultimately not as interesting or unique (i think) on a gameplay level.

the game at the moment reminds me more of that anime looking 3d shooter game that folks used to play that also had airdashes/dashing-based movement. i don't remember the name but it had a really big yellow/white/blue color scheme. it has the same kinda 'fake speed' pacing to it.

even basic stuff like the character class design and equipment design making it more streamlined rather than giving folks a more 'open ended' character building kinda deal is in line with that game and modern reboots in general.

at the very minimum the campaign mode is something that is actually well developed, and is actually kinda fun to me haha. it's way more fun than the quest mode of old gunz, which i loathed.

edit: a huge plus is that the soundtrack actually really kicks ass, just like old gunz. even the menu music for the lil bootup screen is awesome, haha
 
the game at the moment reminds me more of that anime looking 3d shooter game that folks used to play that also had airdashes/dashing-based movement. i don't remember the name but it had a really big yellow/white/blue color scheme. it has the same kinda 'fake speed' pacing to it.

Are you thinking of S4: The League? It was a tps like Gunz and tried to be fancy with airdashing and melee weapons. Though Gunz was a faster game than S4 imo, but I didn't spend as much time with S4.

Downloading this game now and trying it out tomorrow. Checked some streams and it seemed that they only capped the server at like 1500 or something rather low, with lots of connection errors. Already saw some people mentioning a lot of changes from Gunz.
 
Are you thinking of S4: The League? It was a tps like Gunz and tried to be fancy with airdashing and melee weapons. Though Gunz was a faster game than S4 imo, but I didn't spend as much time with S4.

Downloading this game now and trying it out tomorrow. Checked some streams and it seemed that they only capped the server at like 1500 or something rather low, with lots of connection errors. Already saw some people mentioning a lot of changes from Gunz.

yeah, that's the game i'm thinking of. in terms of speed ranking atm it'd go high level gunz>s4>scrub level gunz=gunz 2 right now.

playing some more matches i am currently in the opinion of that damage is too high for the mobility- it's basically down to low-level gunz where spray and pray was king because of the exact same reasons (no ap to prevent auto fire shredding, high dmg on smgs and high fire rate meaning auto weapons ruled and nobody knew how to move around quickly so it was a clusterfuck of bullets with no real good defense vs 'em)

it also doesn't help that the maps are a bit of a clusterfuck. they're huge without the fast movement to compensate for 'em. i think it's a huge shame that they didn't port over the actual flat out designs from the old gunz for the maps because i think some of those (town, mansion, dungeon lol) were absolutely amazing and would be perfect for this game.

instead they're like towering vertically-stacked maps with lots of lil hallways and interiors to work out of- like more traditional modern fps maps rather than the really strangely boxy tight maps of yore

also i still don't understand melee but launches are still there and i think some primitive form of dash melee fighting might still be around- but purely on attack rather than a combination of attack and defense joustin'
 
really hoping the sword/movement aspects of kstyle are in. those are what made gunz really unique and interesting imo. but judging from this thread they're gone.


weird..
Gunz 1 was kind of a weird phenomenon that I don't see them repeating with Gunz 2, even if they wanted to. K-style was the result of thousands of people with thousands of hours exploiting flimsy game systems to essentially create a new game. They can't bring something like that to a big group of Gunz virgins unless they just wanted to give Gunz 1 vets fresh meat to feed on for awhile before all the new players abandoned the game.

And I'm sure there will eventually be new exploits.
 
02feffd5832aa7ed3800ceb872cbd468.png


Yo damn!!!
 
I remember loving the first one, for some reason everyone used to think that katanas and dashing were cool/funny and they always run in the same paths, i, that i was already used to take advantage of stupid AI in single player games, used to equip machine guns(well i always loved machine guns lol), used to roll and took alternative paths, i used to win a lot even against people with paid equipment, and i had pretty basic not paid equipment and i wasn't even able to do wall running correctly lol.
Then i dunno what happened but suddenly i became everyone's enemy number 1, every time they were all against me, i remember one time when everyone had powerful weapons(now i remember only the rocket launcher and a gold machine gun) but i killed them all lol...
Shortly after i left it and never played anymore, having always everyone against me was not fun at all.
 
Gunz 1 was kind of a weird phenomenon that I don't see them repeating with Gunz 2, even if they wanted to. K-style was the result of thousands of people with thousands of hours exploiting flimsy game systems to essentially create a new game. They can't bring something like that to a big group of Gunz virgins unless they just wanted to give Gunz 1 vets fresh meat to feed on for awhile before all the new players abandoned the game.

And I'm sure there will eventually be new exploits.

A good matchmaking system will solve all those problem. To be honest I just want original gunz with HD graphic and more customization. I will still try this game, but the more I read the more I am glad that I can't log in.
 
I remember loving the first one, for some reason everyone used to think that katanas and dashing were cool/funny and they always run in the same paths, i, that i was already used to take advantage of stupid AI in single player games, used to equip machine guns(well i always loved machine guns lol), used to roll and took alternative paths, i used to win a lot even against people with paid equipment, and i had pretty basic not paid equipment and i wasn't even able to do wall running correctly lol.
Then i dunno what happened but suddenly i became everyone's enemy number 1, every time they were all against me, i remember one time when everyone had powerful weapons(now i remember only the rocket launcher and a gold machine gun) but i killed them all lol...
Shortly after i left it and never played anymore, having always everyone against me was not fun at all.

haha yeah, this shit was hilarious. bad kstyle players being prevalent was always a great 'lil joke because they didn't understand the strength of the movement and could just get destroyed by anything, yet complained about automatic weapons because it wasn't in what they thought was 'pro' or whatever.

rocking assault rifles, lmgs and smgs against those types was always hilarious because they never seemed to put 2 and 2 together when they got wrecked and others didn't. they'd just continue dashing along in a really obvious, slow pattern and get blasted. and then get mad at you for not using shotguns.

the interesting thing with old gunz character builds were that while shotguns were king, they were ap-shredder type weapons, same as smgs. high bullet volume, no penetration. on the other hand, lmgs and assault rifles both had good penetration (but not revolver level, which was the ~true pro weapon~) and would just destroy folks who equipped armor based around defending vs shotgun fights since that's what the majority of others used. so they'd have really high AP but middling HP buffs-wise and yo ucould just wreck 'em with sustained gunfire.

that's something else i'm wondering about right now- it seems like that whole thing isn't present in the lower level design of this game, but it wasn't present in lower level design of gunz either so idk. the character classes holding only their specific type of weapon makes me think 'no', but it's not like any of this is a long-term impression

edit: something interesting i noticed about dashing: you can cancel dashes to wallrunning into another dash.. so there might be something there re: movement. at the very least it increases your movement ability somewhat.
 
First day was horrible because you couldn't even get into games, but now that they have done better with the servers the game has proven really good so far. They took a couple of steps to make up for the loss of K-Style at least:

- Wall running is greatly improved from the original Gunz. It's basically what wall running could have been in Metal Gear Rising where you can run on walls Matrix style, but also run vertically up walls with no limit. You can even go from running vertically up a wall to running along side it. I even noticed that my character was running around corners of walls.

- Melee seems to be stronger in its core design with the addition of skills and left click combos knocking down now, so if you are able to get somebody caught in your attacks, you are greatly rewarded for it (meaning you won't really need to catch somebody in a lengthy butterfly chain). I believe you can even initiate a ground combo from a jump slash, but I haven't messed around with that enough. The problem is, of course, that with the lack of K-Style sword duels are a thing of a past.
 
That fucking sound when you click the exit button comes out the left channel of my headphones and sounds just like someone is knocking on my door and I get startled and I hate that.
 
I'm in the game right now. The problem is that you can stay in the game as long as you want, even if you AFK, so people are able to quickly fill the pitiful server limit and never leave.
 
Yeah, it constantly says servers are down for maintenance - Servers full.

Reddit says open and close the program until you get in - official forums say it's an issue with firewalls...

Oh well, I'll just wait it out.
 
I was wrong. Sword fighting is definitely a thing because of the block button and with ways of getting up or counter attacking if you get on the ground.
 
I was wrong. Sword fighting is definitely a thing because of the block button and with ways of getting up or counter attacking if you get on the ground.

swordfighting is really different but definitely really strong in this game. it doesn't flat outright beat guns because you don't have the defensive option but if you can catch someone in a sword slash they're deader than dead unless they were ready with a parry from block position

i think they're gonna end up buffing blocking atm because there honestly is 0 reason to ever block, ever unless you're the minigun guy or planning to parry them and kill them

i still hold the same opinion of this game ultimately having an extremely low skill cap in comparison to the original gunz though simply because of the lack of mobility and defensive techniques to really stop simple options from reigning supreme.

you really can't come back on a full team on pure skill anymore simply because that gap can't be that wide anymore, unfortunately...
 
Honestly I think that had more to do with how easy it was to avoid getting hit in the original GunZ due to the poor prediction mechanics where there was a huge disparity between where you shot and where you hit. There is a ton of feedback and punishment in this game in comparison, that if it were in GunZ 1 your heroic K-Styler would have a lot more trouble carrying an entire match due to how much more dangerous it would be to step out into the open.

Sword fighting is definitely nothing like the original game where it's a game of trying to out-maneuver your opponent for a very long time, but sometimes it happens when you go in an enclosed space, making what I said in an earlier post technically (but only on a technicality) wrong.
 
Honestly I think that had more to do with how easy it was to avoid getting hit in the original GunZ due to the poor prediction mechanics where there was a huge disparity between where you shot and where you hit. There is a ton of feedback and punishment in this game in comparison, that if it were in GunZ 1 your heroic K-Styler would have a lot more trouble carrying an entire match due to how much more dangerous it would be to step out into the open.

Sword fighting is definitely nothing like the original game where it's a game of trying to out-maneuver your opponent for a very long time, but sometimes it happens when you go in an enclosed space, making what I said in an earlier post technically (but only on a technicality) wrong.

i don't think that's quite it- the thing is that even with that, the area where you could actually damage someone when butterflying so that level of maneuverability + a tiny hurtbox was like, legitimately a pain in the ass to hit.

the big thing though is that specifically that kind of movement prevented automatic spray and pray from dominating most matches because of the spread on the majority of those weapons- at the ranges you'd engage them in it would be really hard to hit that tiny hurtbox (the veeeery bottom of their feet) when they're going in weird motions quickly. it's why the uh, level 18? i think it was 18, assault rifle was one of the best mid-low level weapons- it had perfect accuracy and an insane fire rate, so you could actually wreck folks using kstyle movement if it was in narrow hallways or if your tracking ability was good enough- especially at the ranges where shotguns were mostly ineffective.

but yeah, like just jumping out into an open area into 4 dudes spraying automatic fire at you would still get you killed- team elim games in old gunz were basically based on this fact so a lot of folks had dedicated machinegun/assault rifle or assault rifle/rocket launcher dudes who could poke away at folks' health while others kept the enemies busy.

but at the same time, the great defense and high maneuverability meant that you could outmaneuver the people fightin' you if they weren't skilled enough to hit you. you know what i mean, right? you probably saw it a bunch when actually good low level scrubbusters came around and just shit on entire teams of folks new to the game sprayin' and prayin' singlehandedly because those guys would only hit like one bullet out of 100 spraying against good kstyle movement.

like really the lack of great defensive movement really just means that automatic weapons are going to always dominate, which is how the game is designed since everyone's carrying auto-guns anyways. i think the game basically works how they designed it more or less, but it's part of that streamlining thing where everyone's options are so limited that the most of the possibilities in the gameplay are based on the designer's limited intentions rather than a natural evolution.

sorry if this is like sounding like i'm explaining obvious things or being condescending, i really don't mean to be i just want to talk about that ol' game i loved haha
 
While wall running in Titanfall's beta I knew that I had felt the same experiance somewhere before, of course it was back when GunZ was out and I played it often.

In the early days I was actually a moderator for the forum before Maiet (forget their company spelling right now) moves them to unofficial sources about 6 months after release, I had the white bug free jacket in-game which was unique but only gave 1 or 2 armor, so it wasn't that great for combat.

Main reason for stopping was college and uni work along with GunZ lag for me, you always had to shoot bullets ahead of your target to make up for ping as all collision was server side and I must have been getting 100+ ping often.

I also never used to do the butterfly or K style stuff, I was a more hardcore run and gun guy who would make wannabe-elite players cry in chat, heh.
 
The first GunZ game wasn't worth playing because of all the hackers. Hopefully that issue doesn't plague this sequel.
 
haha yeah, this shit was hilarious. bad kstyle players being prevalent was always a great 'lil joke because they didn't understand the strength of the movement and could just get destroyed by anything, yet complained about automatic weapons because it wasn't in what they thought was 'pro' or whatever.

rocking assault rifles, lmgs and smgs against those types was always hilarious because they never seemed to put 2 and 2 together when they got wrecked and others didn't. they'd just continue dashing along in a really obvious, slow pattern and get blasted. and then get mad at you for not using shotguns.

the interesting thing with old gunz character builds were that while shotguns were king, they were ap-shredder type weapons, same as smgs. high bullet volume, no penetration. on the other hand, lmgs and assault rifles both had good penetration (but not revolver level, which was the ~true pro weapon~) and would just destroy folks who equipped armor based around defending vs shotgun fights since that's what the majority of others used. so they'd have really high AP but middling HP buffs-wise and yo ucould just wreck 'em with sustained gunfire.

that's something else i'm wondering about right now- it seems like that whole thing isn't present in the lower level design of this game, but it wasn't present in lower level design of gunz either so idk. the character classes holding only their specific type of weapon makes me think 'no', but it's not like any of this is a long-term impression

edit: something interesting i noticed about dashing: you can cancel dashes to wallrunning into another dash.. so there might be something there re: movement. at the very least it increases your movement ability somewhat.
I agree(lol)
 
What is this game. Dashing by constantly double tapping on WASD keys, dudes spamming grenade launchers like no other, constant droppers, people doing crazy ass constant dashes and putting me in stunlocks I can't get out of.
 
D-Style > K-Style

i liked all the styles, but k-style is more or less the foundation because the system that allows for k-style allows for all the others too haha

my favorite style is 'lazy fake kstyle' which is what i ended up using, which was to butterfly into tumbles into cover from mid-long range because tumbles were actually faster moving than butterflies (but far less safe)

this also brought in the illusion that you sucked at butterflying so when they got close you could just destroy them because they'd do really weird reckless crap like raw launch or charged attack

the lag was bad enough to where tumbles were actually godly in that scenario because them shooting would miss because of the tumble speed and the lag lead

most people never fought kodachi-style players since it was basically still k-style and they were really annoying to use in comparison to katana butterflying (you had to hit them much faster and much longer with kodachis to kill), but kodachis had some really interesting stuff to them- their power attack was possible to get to be unblockable rather than a mixup power attack of low/high and they actually could butterfly at like probably 2x-3x the speed of katanas due to their incredibly low startup on attack lowering them asap meaning they could move that much faster

i think the movement in the game as it is is slightly similar to d-style but like, it lacks the really strong mobility variability of instant direction changing and speed that d-style was all about. i really feel bad for dstyle dudes 'cuz i think they'll be the most annoyed at the changes because the game makes it 'seem' you can do dstyle movement with the guns having the same dash as the sword but you can't do like triple instant dashes or nonstop fast-dashes or all that crazy shit they had movement-wise
 
Top Bottom