Thanks for the videos and write-up!
I'm not surprised you didn't get to see the mud mechanic in effect since it's probably not something most people knew about, and even the ones who did I'd imagine you have to go to specific spots on the map to do it and nobody would have known where those were unless they stumbled on them randomly. Very cool that you got to use the self-destruct though!
I almost feel like Stargazer being the bad guys is a holdover from the original version of The Predator, back when Edward James Olmos' character was going to be introduced and order Traeger's death and the US military was going to clearly be shown as being separate from them. As it stands now it feels kinda weird that, as the gameplay trailer implied, they're being explicitly named as the baddies you're going after.
But whatever, I'll just head canon it as being some folks who used for work for them now teaming up with some random guerrillas for whatever reason.
As you mentioned, hopefully the Predator's spawn point isn't solely determined by where the fire team decides to spawn, otherwise it'll be eventually become easy for the Predator to tell where they are after playing a few games and learning the locations, so hopefully that's not the case.
The individual fire team members having unique perks is cool too, definitely gives you a good reason to try and have one of each on your team (or at least those two anyway) and not just because they have different weapons. Tagging the Predator and being able to keep track of him for a while s he's zipping around the trees seems like it'd be really useful.
I love some of those little details like putting the skull of a victim on your belt, complete with flapping jaw as you run around, the claw marks on the trees as you climb them and also just the little animations of the Predator swinging round the trunk of the trees or pushing off of it as he moves from branch to branch. Those are all really cool little touches.
And yeah I really like what they've done with the Predator's movement as well. I was also a fan of the 2010 focus jumping but this looks even better and more fluid. It looks like it's going to be really easy to quickly move around the treetops while still being able to keep an eye on your surroundings and your targets. I'm really glad they went in kind of an Assassin's Creed direction with it, I really like it.
And yeah apparently those little "pulse bubbles" are generated by sound. I remember reading in an earlier hands-on that one of the devs mentioned that it can often be better for the fire team to start out silently, taking out enemies by stealth with their melee weapons so that they don't alert the Predator to their whereabouts too early.
I kinda like that you can only see those blips when you're using your thermal vision too, and how that also seems to be the way that you can "scan" the enemies to be able to tell which ones are the real human players and which are the AI. I noticed in the videos that the red markers over the human players only appeared in thermal, then disappeared when the Predator went back to normal vision. That's a cool touch that really encourages the use of the vision mode beyond just making it easier to pick out your targets.
I also noticed in the fire team video that when you shoot an enemy you see to get both XP and "WP", I'm thinking "weapon points?" Perhaps attachment and cosmetics for guns will be levelled up and unlocked individually depending on how much you use them, alongside general overall player XP?
Seeing this though does make me worry that this might literally be the one and only map in the game though. I know Illfonic has previously said there were going to be "variations", I just wonder if that's going to end up meaning "go here to press X instead of here" with nothing about the map itself really changing.
I hope I'm wrong, but given their track record with Friday the 13th and one of the biggest flaws with that game being its lack of maps, it is a worry.
But regardless I'm still super excited for it! Good to see some matches all the way through finally too! I can totally imagine the Predator in that second video shouting "you got lucky!" as that lone player escaped at the end!
