Having not been a ROOST fan prior to RO2 (I tried it and didn't really find I enjoyed it), I enjoyed RO2, enough to put at least 100 hours into it. It's crunchy, wholly unlike most modern FPS. There's actual battlelines that form, defense is viable (i.e. you don't have people constantly running up to shoot you in the back unless you're in a dumb place.) The pace of the game is slower and there's a lot of dev love in the system they put in.
What has led to me not playing it more is that it isn't populated enough. The game is at its worst when servers are half full, IMO. Then everyone is running around with the best weapons, everyone is effectively a sniper and you spend a lot of time looking for targets. When servers are full, there's plenty of riflemen, movement, pushes, counter-pushes and the like.
I've had games.....I remember sitting on the 3rd floor of the "Tower of Power" in Pavlov's with a German MG42....just staring out over that battle field with guys swarming out of cover. I'd mow them down, denying them doorways and windows, and keeping that whole flank on lockdown for the next 20 minutes. Or awesome games on Barracks when you just go building to building with a couple friends, finding good spots to post up in and picking people off.
RO2's problem is that it tried to court two markets, pleased people in the middle but not the ones on either extreme (casual or hardcore.) Its detractors are obnoxiously vocal and make up the bulk of what's said about the game. It's got 364,233ish game modes, splitting the community into little groups (that run the gamut from full on classic realism to arcade mode) that hate each other. Its visible community is fragmented and bitter.
It also tried to do too much in too short a time, so some parts of the game to this day feel rough and unpolished. (Squads, tanks, ect...) Things were planned and featured that were eventually cut, and that never does a dev house any favors.
Lastly, there are hardcore ROOST fans that have nothing but bilious contempt for TWI and RO2 now. Their CEO is outspoken (read as: a loud mouth who doesn't back down from fights), and he and the uber fans have continued to go at it over RO2 to this day. He just opened his mouth around a month ago during an interview and started talking about casual gameplay ruining a generation of FPS players. His comments were a large part of the feature article about RS. The reactions on the forums were....pretty vicious. Thus, the community is small, toxic and fragmented. All of those increase a game's chances of shrinking.
But TWI says it was a clear economic win for them, so *shrug*. I think they get entirely too little credit from their "fans" for what they made or how they bent over to let players customize it how they wanted. But the market spoke and the game isn't a popular success, whatever TWI says about their numbers.
All that said, I look forward to RS mostly because there will be a resurgence of players, for a while at least, and I can have some good games. RO2 can be nerve-wrackingly tense, but when you get that kill at 150m+.....man you feel good. It's a good game, and I wish more people were playing it.
There's very little of taking and holding important locations except in attack/defend maps...
At release, I don't believe this was the case. Played Germans on Grain Elevator? Tell me even getting out of the spawn alive didn't feel like an accomplishment. Still, TWI didn't make enough use of 'no entry zones' in my opinion, so some of their structured objective taking does get ruined by players who ignore the objectives. Full servers tend to cut down on people being able to move freely across the whole map.
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Topic: Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad - Rising Storm banzai charges your HDD (Read 24998 times)