I didnt play the beta but I have heard there were some interesting difference from now. Tell what you know. Stuff I have heard: * Tankbuster had freelook * Infiltrators could use shotgun. * Biolab dome shields could be disabled. * AMP stations had a different layout. * Proximity repair stacked. * Enforcer fired lock-on missiles. * There were 2 versions of MAX AV weapons. One with splash for AI. The other without it and better for AV. They all had 3 shot magazines. * MAXes had flamers. * Nights were darker. * Vehicle lights were stronger and had ES color.
As i didn't explore everything the game had to offer at the time things i don't recall being true were biolab domes able to be turned off, the AV max weapons you mentioned and vehicle lights being brigher and faction colored. Ones i can confirm are infiltrators with shotguns, AMP stations being slightly different, MAX flamethrowers and darker nights. Other notorious features included Flak causing the screen to shake uncontrollably for nearby infantry. Spawning at a gal under burster fire was like being thrown right into a 10.0 earthquake. Another was the engineer tool not having the heat mechanic (still waiting for yours, medigun). One often forgotten feature that i loved especially as being a 24/7 Galaxy AMS pilot at the time was the requirement to land cautiously. You had to land the planes at a MUCH slower and softer pace than what we have now. If you were anything but gentle with the landing your plane would either become severely damaged or explode. Wing tapped the side of a tower? Explode. Trying to land at an angle which the landing gear isn't perfectly horizontal with the ground? Explode. Pilots have it so easy now with all the mistakes and mismanagement the crafts will allow that it kind of ruined the authenticity of controlling a flying machine.
Don't forget the amazing amount of points in Tech Plants. "Alright, I want half of alpha to A, other half to B, half of bravo to C, other half to D, half of charlie to E, other half to F, then put half of delta on G, then we can throw the last half of delta spread out across all 7 points " then there was the ESF rocketgodpods
I remember when you couldn't even accurately shoot someone 50 meters away because of the early "realistic" recoil mechanic.
* Rocketpods were rapid-fire-high-velocity HE shells and ridiculously OP. No one who has seen those things would even think of complaining about the current ones. * Infiltrators didn't have ES-cloaking sounds and ES-cloak colors, which made them much more effective. (or were those added after release... I don't remember... ) Also Infi-shotguns. Never used them, but I also never considered them OP.
Different playstyle of players. They didn't zerg so much. You know I'm starting to see a correlation between freebies and cert farmers. Apparently people didn't zerg in PS1. When it was made F2P I tried it and it was a zergfest like PS2 is. I don't remember it being a zergfest in Beta when you had to get an invite or Alpha Squad to get in.
Oh man, it was a horrible time when Infis had shotguns. I thought all ESF and Lib noseguns had freelook for a while, not just the TB. There was also Galaxy AMS. And nights were definitely darker. We also had MAX and vehicles able to cap points. Skyguard and lolpods were crazy.
There was a time, post beta, when scout radar functioned even when vehicle wasn't occupied. There were no radar assists, but pretty much everyone had a scout radar flash which was parked somewhere near the base, so everyone was highlighted on the minimap. Didn't seem OP at the time.
Yeah, several months at least. I know it's offtopic, just wanted to share a bearded story since I didn't play beta myself.
Vulcan did not need to be reloaded, just resupplied and had well over 1200 rounds (cuz of a display bug it wouldn't show ammo counts higher then that). It also fired straight and had awesome tracers on every single bullet going out. Was quite the sight seeing a prowler column at night opening up with those things. Gosh I wish they would revert it back to that. Galaxy AMS was pretty awesome too and I'm still hoping they reconsider bringing that back. Night vision was way better then thermals and a quarter of the cost. Like the unmanned scout radars mentioned earlier, I believe this made it beyond beta for a while. Oh and all ground vehicles flipped randomly for no particular reason every now and then. Current harassers are tame in comparison.
I seem to vaguely remember Saron being this weird Lancer-like laser. Galaxy AMS was ridiculously broken. Then they added little shield flaps on the wingtips, and that was silly. Sunderers didn't always have AMS. Crown was a ridiculously bad base design, impossible to attack. Only the active ESF weapon reloaded (which sucked.) Generators could be directly damaged. C4 was fantastic for it. Warpgates didn't always have the shield. Which naturally led to the enemy team rolling right up around your spawn buildings (which were shaped different) and keep everyone boxed inside. For a while warpgates supplied either zero or very low resources, which meant if you got warpgated you could be really screwed on resource income. Later, they added the tiny hexes near warpgates which each provided a pretty hefty chunk of resources (so that you always had a reasonable baseline of income, but capturing territory got you more.) The capture mechanic was tweaked a lot. The main one was super confusing but involved like 6 capture points at certain bases and the more you owned the faster your bar would fill. Base capture speeds were increased based on the number of friendly hexes adjacent to the battle. So if you encompassed a base, it would capture extra fast. Biolabs used to have just one teleporter in the middle (where the SCU is), which wasn't shielded so players would just shoot at it and kill players as they spawned through. MAXes used to take extra damage when attacked from the rear. (Was pretty dumb and didn't play very well since they could basically turn instantly to face you after the first shot.) Resources were Polymers, Catalysts, Alloys (instead of infantry/ground/air resources.) It wasn't just a name change, basically one resource was for light vehicles, another was heavy vehicles, and I think the third was infantry resources. It created some different tradeoff costs (tank or lib with the same resources) but never really had the costs set right to work well
I've got a few minutes of footage from one of the very first tech test builds of ye old warpgate layout but someone was mic spamming diahrea sound effects. if i feel like uploading it i may cut out the sound lol.
