I logged into the head start 4 hours ahead of schedule (which was slated for midnight) but being both bored and curious I tried early and found that I could login and play at 8 pm. I grabbed my favorite last name and spent the next 10 minutes creating my toon. Armed with the fore-knowledge that my armor would soon be replaced with loot drops and quest rewards, I didn’t spend as much time tweaking it as I did during beta. So there I was… a new recruit in the AFS… resplendent in my hot pink armor and Village People mustache.
I quickly ran through the mini tutorial where I learned the basic functions; how to equip my weapons and gear, how to shoot, what keys did what, how missions work and most importantly… what happens when you get whacked. I then hopped onto a dropship headed for the Concordia Wilderness Sector.
Landing at the base camps LZ was pretty routine… I grabbed a few missions, locked & loaded my pistol and bolted out past the safety of the bunkers and guards for parts unknown. 52 seconds later… I rezzed in the field hospital. Bane 1… Zippee 0.
My second foray into the wilderness went a little better. I jogged out toward a forward firing position, guarding a wooden bridge. When I say “forward”, I mean just outside the gate and to the right, by “firing position” I mean a couple of sandbags and by “wooden bridge” I mean big ass tree over a river. There was a small NPC patrol and a few other players in the area so I wasn’t outnumbered too badly when that first drop ship came floating out of the sky over my position. I spent a bit of time there, ganking Thrax’s and looting them for anything I could find. Picked up a nice shotgun off of one of them and a few pieces of armor. It was then that I noticed that I was running low on ammo, so I hoofed it back to base camp to resupply and complete the missions I picked up when I first landed.
They were quick, fairly easy and garnered me some pretty nice loot. I also managed to make it to level 5 during that time. So I headed off to find the trainer, taking a few minutes to drop to the character select screen to clone my guy before branching off down the soldier tree. I was quickly becoming a fairly dangerous guy… I checked my inventory and found that I had opened up the use of two new weapons and some nice armor pieces. I loaded my new pistol, my trusty old shotgun, my recently awarded Accumax Rifle, put on a new set of reflective armor leggings, strapped on a few grenades and hauled ass out the front gate to find something bigger to kill.
I didn’t have to search very long. Reports were coming in that the Lower Eloh Creek CP was under heavy attack so I made my way towards that point. As I came around the bend I could see the devastation before me. We held the bridge, for the moment, but the Bane dropships were pouring in reinforcements. I could see a series of heavy Bane bunkers on the ridgeline and figured that would be a good point of attack. So I made my way across the bridge relatively unscathed and joined in on the assault. As we made our way deeper into the bane complex, the fire steadily increased. We cleared the first few bunkers and made our way still deeper into Bane controlled territory. Things were going pretty well. Then it all went wrong.
Artillery fire poured in all around us. Guys were dropping like flies. Those of us that wern’t taken out charged straight ahead, firing from the hip, over a low hill to find a small group of ASF troopers trying to hold a hole they had punched into the Banes flank. The artillery barrage had shifted fire to another target so we helped clear up the remaining Bane forces in the immediate area then went off to search for that big gun. The heavy bane cannon was perched next to a cliff and flanked by a couple of bunkers. So the only way to assault it was to go straight up the middle. A few of the guys broke off to assault the left bunker while the rest of us went in after the main gun. Most of our munitions were useless against such a heavy target so those with EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) rifles dealt with the main gun while the rest of us kept the heat off of them from the steady flow of Bane soldiers pouring out of the drop ships. Luckily, we had a few squads of AFS troopers show up just in the nick of time. We took out the gun and cleared the bunkers. We then regrouped and pressed forward. What we saw then made us stop in our tracks. The valley before us was littered with AFS corpses and pock marked with no less than a dozen Bane bunkers… and another gun.
