I'm still super pissed at DICE that I didn't get a key emailed to me from them despite signing up the second you could, but I was lucky enough to win one from a kind gaffer, so I was able to download and play it yesterday. I "finished" it up this morning.
First off, it runs fine on my PC at all Ultra aside from a few hiccups when it was night/raining. Intel 3770K and GTX 970 FTW. Was happy to see that.
That being said, something about the image quality, even at full 1080p, seemed really off. Maybe it was the motion blur (which, when turned off, improved the appearance dramatically) or maybe it was the depth of field - but for some reason, this doesn't look that impressive to me. I would occasionally even go as far as to say the last one looked better in spots.
Textures in the beta seemed really low quality, even at ultra settings, and the lighting at times was just downright awful. I was in areas that you could not see any detail in the characters (the hub, for example, at night time) and it just looked super unnatural. I really hope they improve the lighting when it comes to shadows and nighttime. And I'm not sure if it was just me, but there were some crazy bad LOD problems with a lot of the models in the game, especially the microchip container boxes. You can't even see them until you're 3 feet away and they just pop in. The graphics are just really overall super inconsistent and it doesn't feel anywhere near as clean and polished as the last game.
The gameplay seemed fine though. It's about what I would expect from a Mirror's Edge game, aside from the need to level up/unlock skills. I really don't get why they did this. Combat feels really weird in this game and I have a hard time really getting anything going when it comes to combos. The controls seemed fine once I got used to them, though. One thing I really hope they improve on for the final game is the damn load times - in the last game, if you died, getting back into it was really quick. In Catalyst, it can take what feels like forever. Some of the time trials and dead drops are extremely unforgiving, too - I was often failing them or finishing with 1 or even 0 seconds remaining.
Music seemed great, although there is literally only one song that plays when you're free-roaming. I hope that changes in the final game. I absolutely loved the main theme that played when you saw the title card, though. Voice acting seemed great, aside from Faith. I really don't like her new VA.
All in all I'm happy with the beta aside from the really disappointing graphics and lightning. Here's hoping that small delay can be used to polish it up a bit. I'm still in for day one and still just as excited as I was the day it was announced.
edit: oh, and +1 to the weird animation jankiness in cinematics. It seems like all scripted sequences just perform very poorly in the game -- the drones floating around the city were doing the same thing for me.
First off, it runs fine on my PC at all Ultra aside from a few hiccups when it was night/raining. Intel 3770K and GTX 970 FTW. Was happy to see that.
That being said, something about the image quality, even at full 1080p, seemed really off. Maybe it was the motion blur (which, when turned off, improved the appearance dramatically) or maybe it was the depth of field - but for some reason, this doesn't look that impressive to me. I would occasionally even go as far as to say the last one looked better in spots.
Textures in the beta seemed really low quality, even at ultra settings, and the lighting at times was just downright awful. I was in areas that you could not see any detail in the characters (the hub, for example, at night time) and it just looked super unnatural. I really hope they improve the lighting when it comes to shadows and nighttime. And I'm not sure if it was just me, but there were some crazy bad LOD problems with a lot of the models in the game, especially the microchip container boxes. You can't even see them until you're 3 feet away and they just pop in. The graphics are just really overall super inconsistent and it doesn't feel anywhere near as clean and polished as the last game.
The gameplay seemed fine though. It's about what I would expect from a Mirror's Edge game, aside from the need to level up/unlock skills. I really don't get why they did this. Combat feels really weird in this game and I have a hard time really getting anything going when it comes to combos. The controls seemed fine once I got used to them, though. One thing I really hope they improve on for the final game is the damn load times - in the last game, if you died, getting back into it was really quick. In Catalyst, it can take what feels like forever. Some of the time trials and dead drops are extremely unforgiving, too - I was often failing them or finishing with 1 or even 0 seconds remaining.
Music seemed great, although there is literally only one song that plays when you're free-roaming. I hope that changes in the final game. I absolutely loved the main theme that played when you saw the title card, though. Voice acting seemed great, aside from Faith. I really don't like her new VA.
All in all I'm happy with the beta aside from the really disappointing graphics and lightning. Here's hoping that small delay can be used to polish it up a bit. I'm still in for day one and still just as excited as I was the day it was announced.
edit: oh, and +1 to the weird animation jankiness in cinematics. It seems like all scripted sequences just perform very poorly in the game -- the drones floating around the city were doing the same thing for me.