Long time no see

I'm not much of a blogger, huh? It's been over a month since my first post. Well, it's better to progress slow than not at all. I finished the India campaign in Crusader Kings II very succesfully, so I just might write about that. However, I have more important things to do right now such as...

Killing Floor 2 in Steam Early Access

That's right, they finally did it. Just a couple of days ago Tripwire Interactive released the sequel to their award-winning co-op shooter Killing Floor. I burned almost 1000 hours on the first game, shooting mutant monster creature thingies with my wife who basically got into gaming with that game. We still have a couple of levels to complete on the highest difficulty, Hell on Earth, so we might still have to revisit it.

Killing Floor 2 (KF2) is currently in Early Access. This means it has way less content than it's supposed to, so I'd vouch only the fans should get it now. What is there already looks and feels fricking awesome. The faulty hitboxes of KF are a thing of the past. You can actually see your bullet move through the air and hit, so you can observe your headshots come to pass.

The existing three levels are pretty big, they look really nice and the blood stays on the floor. Not that we've had much time to observe the latter effect even on Normal difficulty that we have limited ourselves into for now because we can't beat the frickin' new boss.

Here's a picture of him after he tore our group of four friends apart.

...we haven't beaten him yet. Either our level and/or skill is too low, but we have played only some 5 games. For first impressions the normal difficulty waves are rather easy but then there is a huge difference in power levels to the boss. Likely, our tactics are also inadequate for this guy. But still, we are also missing some perks that were more suitable for Patriarch (the original boss) killing in the original KF

Yes, the Early Access build has just 4 perks, missing for instance Demolitions, Sharpshooter and Firebug, all of which were very useful and powerful when fighting the old Patty. Patriarch itself will be introduced in a later update.

Our very own dedicated server

Before we got to play we had the nemesis I would like to call the Matchmaking. That's right, there are no listening servers any longer. Hopefully, they'll add them in the future but initially we were stuck with the public servers and no way to find a suitable server. Also, when looking for a game with the group, there was no feedback whatsoever that a game was being looked for. Now, these are all instances of stuff that's being fixed and why there is Early Access in the first place. Tripwire will be adding more servers too, amending the situation further.

But we really wanted to play and this system was denying it for us. So we needed to set up a dedicated server. For anyone interested there's adequate instructions in KF2 wiki, here:

http://wiki.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?title=Dedicated_Server_%28Killing_Floor_2%29

After initial hiccups we made it work. Our server is private at the moment but I think it would be a nice public service (so to say) to open it for public after a while.

It was still not trivial to make it work. There was a faulty link (now fixed) in the instructions, and some port-forwarding was required to make the server show on the in-game server browser. I have previously set up a dedicated server just once, a few weeks ago in Minecraft, a difficult and exciting stuff to do when you have nerdy tendencies. It's now the unofficial server of the physics students and they have started to build the science campus around the student room, albeit irregularly.

Why, I even made quick & dirty dedicated server guide for KF2 myself, based on the official wiki. You can check it out here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=429704087

I will be updating it to make it as useful as possible, while retaining at least the quick aspect in setting one up.