 Firewall Ultra hands-on previews have gone live and we found out a whole plethora of new details about Firewall Ultra. Some of these details are raising questions and concerns, some of them seem pretty cool, but one of them in particular seems to be dominating the discourse that's been occurring since the previews went live. Even though this was known for a while now, especially if you follow this channel, the VR community seems to be reeling from the revelation that Firewall Ultra will have button-press reload instead of manual reload. And I think the whole thing is just way overblown. In some cases you've got people saying they're not excited for Firewall Ultra anymore, you've got other people saying that the game might as well play itself now, and you even have people saying that it's a deal-breaker. I'm not getting Firewall Ultra because no manual reloads and I think that's nuts. So here's my position on this. I want manual reloading to be in Firewall Ultra as an option. My eyes have been opened to the beauty of manual reloading since playing Pavlov the Oar. I've put a good chunk of time into Pavlov the Oar and I really do enjoy manual reloading. So it's not like I don't understand where people are coming from with the desire to have us in Firewall Ultra. However, we are discussing reloading a gun. Firewall Ultra is a big-ass triple-A game with a multitude of facets. You know, and even though reloading is something you'll do very frequently in a game like Firewall, it is just one small fraction of the overall package. Now some people are arguing that because Firewall Ultra is a tactical game, that it's unacceptable that there is not manual reloading. But what I would ask is what exactly is tactical about manual reloading compared to button-press reloading? Your decision-making is the following. You're playing the game, you notice your gun is either dry or it's getting low, so your monitor and your ammo, that doesn't change. You decide when to press the button when you're reloading, and then the process happens. So just because it's an automatic process after the animation is automatic, it's just a difference in animations really. When you think about it, the destination is the same. So I don't really buy the argument that it's less tactical that way. Now there's also the argument that automatic reloads are less skillful, and there is some truth to this definitely. You can definitely, you know, practice your manual reloads. You can get better at it over time. You can get faster at it over time, and that does add a layer of skill. I'm not going to deny that. However, it is a double-edged sword. What you can also do is you can whiff the magazine. Well, you can drop the magazine on the floor, you know? You cannot set the bolt correctly back in position when you're using a bolt-action rifle. All of these things have happened to me in Pavlov VR. Now, I consider Pavlov to be more of a fun social kind of messin' around kind of game. I love that game, but it's not what I consider to be the tactical-sweaty kind of game where, you know, I consider firewall to be that type of game. But even in Pavlov, when that does happen to me, I find myself getting agitated when it does, and then it costs me a life. It has cost me a life, in some cases. Not often, doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's annoying. And this is in Pavlov where you've got the respawning modes. Now, imagine this happens in firewall Ultra. You're playing a game, you're reloading your gun, all of a sudden you drop the magazine because you didn't grip the grip button correctly, or maybe the trackin' goes a bit iffy for a split second, and it's just enough to get you to drop your magazine on the floor instead of sticking this in the gun. And then you're dead, and you spend the rest of the round on the cameras because of that, which was outside of your control. But even if you find that to be a weak argument, look back to firewall Zero Hour. There was no manual reloading in that game, and can you honestly tell me that that felt like it was Baby's first viewer game? Did it feel like that game was playing itself? Did the lack of manual reloading get rid of the fact that you needed good teamwork, good communication, map knowledge that you needed to know how to set the traps correctly? Did it get rid of your tactical decision-making in firewall Zero Hour? No, it didn't. And you can say that the only reason they did that was because of the aim controller, but that doesn't change the points that I've just met. And if anything, you could argue that they're leaving the door open for a potential aim 2 controller, or for third-party stocks that mimic the feel of an aim controller. To me, there are far more pressing concerns than the reloading. Ian Higton's preview over at Eurogamer indicates it that there's something sluggish or something off-feeling about the way the weapon is handling in the game. And not only that, but the weapon wheel eye-tracking interaction seemed to become more and more unstable for him the longer he was playing this. And then on top of that, we've got this new aim-down-sight system that we're not really 100% sure of, and some kind of fine-aim thing as well. I feel like that's something I need to try myself to fully understand how that's going to affect the gunplay. But right now, those things need to be nailed down before launch, before I can even consider worrying about manual reloading. So that's what's really annoying about all this talk about the manual reloading is that there is other things that maybe should be being addressed, but they're being overshadowed by the manual reloading. There's been a bunch of new features or changes confirmed for Firewall Ultra thanks to these hands-on previews that are intriguing, worth talking about. One of them being the whole flashlight thing and the blinding mechanic, we'll say. So with a flashbang and a flashlight, you can shine it directly into people's faces and you can blind them, their screen goes always or whatever. However, if you're the person on the receiving end of that, you can close your eyes and because the eye-tracking, it knows when your eyes are closed and you can avoid the visual penalty for that. Or you can even raise your hand up to block the light or whatever and reduce the effects of that. And is it just me or does that whole mechanic not way more drastically add tactical depth than manual reloading never could? Another change that you might have missed thanks to reload gaze is that when you're downed now, you can crawl to find cover whereas in Firewall Zero Hour, when you were downed, you were glued to that one spot and you were a sitting duck. Here's another one. If you are dead and you're on the security camera system, going from camera to camera and looking for the enemy team to give feedback to your living teammates, instead of needing to communicate now, you can simply use your eyes to look at whatever enemy player you want and that player will be highlighted for your whole living team members, whatever living team you have left. They'll be able to see them through walls presumably and stuff like that. And I haven't really seen people asking if that's a good change because, you know, on the one hand, it's good if you're playing with maybe a mused person or maybe a random that you don't really communicate very well with. They simply have to look and then they can communicate to you where they are and vice versa. But then on the other hand, is it too overpowered? You know, is it too punishing on the winning team? These conversations don't seem to be happening, which I think are more important than the reloading thing, but, you know, did you know that you can assign an attacking loadout and a defending loadout and that they will automatically swap in between rounds so that you don't have to worry about that? It'll just do as automatically if you've had them assigned before the match started. And what about the dedicated servers and the best of three rounds? I mean, for the last six years, six is an exaggeration. What's it been? Five years? It's been five years, roughly. Maybe not there yet. But what I've heard from so many places on Redis and YouTube comments on my own videos and blah, blah, blah, is the same thing repeats it over and over again. Firewall would be so good if it had rounds and if it had dedicated servers or some combination of the both or, you know, whatever, some variation of that. What I never heard was Firewall would be great if it had manual reloading. Although now that we've got my dedicated servers and now that we've got the three rounds, it seems to be shifting to, oh, no manual reloading, I'm out of here. Now, obviously that's an exaggeration. I think it's a very small minority of people who are thinking that way, but still it's crazy to me that even one person thinks that way. I mean, they've even sorted out the lobby now so that it's more of a social hub where you can, you know, mess around in the firing range. You can apparently the soccer balls that you can move around maybe possibly kick, I don't know. And maybe they'll add other things over time, you know? So let me say again what I said at the start of the video. I hope the first contact entertainment do add manual reloading to Firewall Ultra. If not at large, then at some point down the line, at least the option for us would be nice. However, it is in no way a deal breaker in my eyes. I think there's way more interesting and cool things that they've added to Ultra and possibly even things which are raising more concerning flags. As I hope gets sorted before launch that are worth talking way before we talk about manual reloading to me. So this whole manual reloading thing just seems like making a mountain out of a mall hill. If you agree or disagree, we can talk about this in the comments below. If you want more Firewall Ultra coverage or PSVR2 coverage in general, then you can hit the subscribe button. Thank you to Decepticon for letting me use his music and all of my videos. You can check them out in the description below. That is it for this video, lads and ladies. Thank you very much for watching. If you stuck around this long, until the next time, please stay nice and moist.