FKRegulars: Portal

Red Orchestra: The PAX Trailer



If this morning’s interview caught your interest, then you’ll probably want to watch this. It’s an in-engine FMV sequence, rather than being actual game footage, but you get the idea. Tanks, men with rifles, machine-guns, hats. Lots of grimness. Yeah, there’s really quite a lot to look forward to at the minute, isn’t there?



Source

Looks like someone is not forgetting what PC Gamers want and need.

Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad: Vehicles



To anyone who swore and panicked their way through the original Red Orchestra modification back in 2004, or its commercial release, Red Orchestra: Ostfront, back in 2006, the upcoming sequel Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad should represent a big deal.

To anyone with no idea what Red Orchestra is, let me help out: It’s a multiplayer FPS, set on the Eastern front of World War 2, which captures above all else the grayness and desperation of those nightmare battlefields. Red Orchestra is a game of wincing at suppressive fire, of bayonet attacks, and of struggling to figure out whether that figure is a German or a Russian because muddy gray and muddy brown often look the same in dim lighting.

The sequel’s looking to expand on everything that made the original game great, including its horrific tank combat. Here, we present an exclusive interview with Tripwire President John Gibson, in which he talks freely on the as-of-yesterday unrevealed vehicle combat coming in the sequel.

RPS: You mentioned that you plan to set the standard of tank combat in FPS games for years to come. How, exactly?

John Gibson: The big thing we’re doing with tanking for ROHOS is to really immerse the player in what it was like to be an actual soldier inside of one of these lumbering beasts in World War 2. The typical FPS tanking experience generally has the player viewing the tank from third person, and the player essentially feels like they ARE the tank rather than feeling like they are a person in a tank. For ROHOS our goal is to move beyond that and provide the player with an immersive and robust first person experience. For starters we have fully modeled the entire interior of every tank in the game. At any position in the tank the player will see what a real person in the tank would see. Look down and you’ll see your hands operating all of the levers. Move between positions and it will be fully animated in first person. And your tank will have a full crew of either AI NPC’s or human players to fight alongside you. Look to your right and you will see the hull machine gunner blasting away at the enemy. Fire the main cannon, and you’ll see an NPC crewman reloading the cannon shell beside you. You have a living breathing crew all around you and you can see all of the elements of the tank operating. When a shell penetrates your armor, you’ll see your crewmates die around you, and hear their screams as the tank catches fire.



Beyond this we have added a whole new level of functionality and interaction to the tanks. The first thing that we’ve done is what we call a virtual interior. The player can actually look around in the interior and very easily interact with the interior. Want to look out of a view slit, just look at the slit and press a button. Want to stick your head out of the hatch, look up and press a button. It is all very streamlined and allows the player to do a lot of things but very simply. We’re actual giving players very near to a tank simulation’s level of functionality, but streamlined so it is easy to use and accessible. Speaking of view, one of the things we discovered after we shipped the original Red Orchestra was that while the view inside a tank is somewhat limited, there are a LOT of view ports, view slits, and periscopes that the tank crew had at their disposal to get a better view of what is happening outside of the tank. So for ROHOS we have added the ability to very easily interact with any of these and get a better view of the situation.

Another area which we’ve greatly expanded on is the damage system. The original RO had a generalized damage system with just a few key damageable components. For ROHOS we’ve expanded this to include a very broad range of damageable components with accompanying gameplay effects. Things such as damaging optics, damaging the engine and transmission, damaging the turret rotation mechanism, hitting the fuel tank, drive sprocket, treads and more are now included. And now shots that penetrate the tank armor can hit the crewmembers inside.



RPS: Can you repair tank damage? And what amount of damage can be repaired?

JG: We are actually a bit torn on repairing damage on the tanks. Realistically there aren’t a lot of repairs that you could do to a tank within the time frame of a match in ROHOS. But not allowing repairs leads to unrealistic gameplay where everyone always fights to the death, instead of retreating for repairs when they are too damaged to continue fighting. We’re looking at the idea of allowing tanks to be repaired at the resupply areas. This is something we’re still prototyping and trying different things, so we’ll have to wait and see what the final system ends up being.

RPS: Will we see any playable vehicles other than tanks?

JG: For the initial release we’re going to ship with two medium tanks – the T34 76 and the Panzer IV. I know that might not seem like a lot, but for ROHOS our goal with the vehicles was to focus on quality over quantity. In tank simulations you typically only see a couple of drivable tank in the game. This is due to the sheer amount of work required to implement a vehicle at that level of detail. And for ROHOS, we’re actually implemented tanks at a level of detail and functionality far beyond tank sims or any existing game.

Tripwire has a philosophy though when it comes to releasing games. We like to give gamers a lot of value for their money when they buy a game from us at launch, but they can also count on getting even more out of their game in the form of free content packs. We’ve put out a LOT of free additional content for the original Red Orchestra as well as Killing Floor. So we do already have four additional vehicles in production and those will likely come out in our first free content pack not long after the launch. The four additional vehicles will be two more tanks and two troop transports.



RPS: Awesome as they were, in the past I’ve found tanks in RO can be a source of frustration- either getting slaughtered by them as a fleshy little infantryman, or finding yourself inside one with a crew that doesn’t know what they’re doing. Were you planning to address either of these situations?

JG: A lot of our work for ROHOS for both tanks and infantry has been to make a game that stays true to its realism roots while also being much more accessible than the original game. Infantry versus tanks is a tricky thing to balance in a game that aims to be both realistic and accessible, because tanks really should do very well against infantry. For us one of the things we learned during and after the release of RO: Ostfront was that making good combined arms gameplay is about putting tanks in situations where they are vulnerable to infantry. We found that in the right setting, tanks can be at a serious disadvantage to infantry. In the first game we put infantry in a lot of scenarios fighting tanks in their element – wide open landscapes fighting infantry. These scenarios end up with happy tankers and unhappy infantrymen. So we’ve taken what we’ve learned from the first game and applied that to the levels in ROHOS. Now when we do combined arms levels, we make sure that there is plenty of cover and concealment so that the infantry can more easily get the drop on the tanks. We’ve also given the infantry some additional tools for their tank fighting arsenal in the form of semi-automatic anti tank rifles, and anti tank grenades.



Regarding making tanks less frustrating, let me just say – we hear you. Tanking in RO: Ostfront at its best was an amazing experience you couldn’t get anywhere else, but at its worst could be an exercise in frustration. The biggest issue we found was that tanking with other random public players was extremely frustrating, especially if they didn’t know what they were doing or weren’t using their microphone. To address this we’ve made a lot of changes for ROHOS. First off, players will never have to tank with some one that they don’t want to. When a player chooses a tank role they have the option of locking the tank, or allowing other people to join their crew. Another frustrating thing was standing around waiting for a tank to spawn. Tankers now always spawn inside their tank, and respawn with their tank. Additionally every level will feature enough tanks so that every tanker will have a tank.

Since tanking with random public players was frustrating in the first game players usually ended up tanking by themselves. Because the tanks in the game were designed to be crewed by three people, tanking by yourself was cumbersome requiring the player to constantly switch between positions. This was neither realistic nor fun, as a tank would never leave base in a real battle with just one tank crewman. So to address this the big feature we’re adding that I’ve touched on a little bit already is the AI crew. When you choose to tank by yourself you will now have a fully functional intelligent AI crew at your disposal. You can choose to play any of the main positions in the tank still, but now the AI will handle the rest for you. If you just want to drive around, the AI crew will man the MGs and take out infantry for you, or fire the main cannon at enemy tanks. If you want to operate the main cannon, you can use your movement keys to easily give orders to the driver to move the tank. If commanding is your thing, you can take the command position and designate targets for the AI crew to attack, give locational movement orders to the tank driver using a 3d command widget or the overhead map, give normal movement commands using the movement keys, spot artillery targets with your binoculars, and more.



And with a full live AI crew the player can instantly switch between any of these positions assuming the role of that AI crewmember, and the AI will dynamically take over the functionality in the position you just left. Now there is a catch. If an AI crewmember is killed the player will need to move to the position of the dead crewmember to perform the function of that crewmember. And transitions to the position of a dead crewmember will be a real first person animated transition that will take time. The good news is, if you lose a crew member you can go to a vehicle resupply station and get your tank reinforced with fresh crewmembers. And the player can mix and match other human players with the AI crew members.

There are a lot of other things we’ve done to refine tanking and make it more accessible. In the first game people found the in tank view very limiting, either because they didn’t understand that you could zoom in on the view slits or open the hatches, or because we didn’t provide all of the views that the real tank actually had. So for the new game we will have a training mission that will familiarize the player with the tank functionality, including the use of the view system so they don’t get in the battlefield and think the only view they have is a tiny slit that is feet from their face. Additionally, as I mentioned before we’ve added a lot of additional view ports that the real tanks actually had, and created a system to easily look out of them. This makes the view system a lot more robust and tanking in general easier in the new game. There are a lot of small things too like refining the controls. One example would be we now use a more intuitive mouse based aiming system which better mimics how players aim with their first person weapon as an infantry soldier.



RPS: Hang on. If you can choose to lock your tank with an AI crew, do the AI count towards your team’s playercount? Because if they don’t you’re giving your side a couple of bots, for free, no? And if they do, you’re limiting how many people get to tank on your team.

JG: The AI Crew doesn’t count toward the playercount. On combined arms maps, the infantry are good for fighting in the buildings and the tanks are good in the open areas. So for the players it will be a decision of where they want to allocate their human players. For example, let’s say you are playing with 64 players and there are ten tanks. You could have 1 human player in each tank with a full AI Crew and then have 54 infantry players. Or you could have 30 human players in tanks (3 human players filling the playable positions in each tank) and then only have 24 infantry players. Or you could do something in between.

It all sounds pretty complicated, but the way it is presented to the players in game is pretty simple and streamlined. The key thing here is that every tank rolls out with a full crew either human or AI NPC, and no one is ever left standing around at the base waiting for a tank to appear.

RPS: I’d guess that finding statistics to build a simulation of WW2 small arms is a lot easier than finding info on tanks. How’s researching this been?

JG: Basically, small arms were around in huge quantities and can even be bought in working order today. People still use them. Tanks weren’t – and aren’t. The tanks of the period were practically obsolete by the end of the war and there are very few left running today. Tech was moving so fast that there was also relatively limited research conducted on the “old tech” – everyone was too busy gearing up for the cold war. The research and documentation that WAS done had been done under war-time conditions, was sketchy, too much guess-work – and half of it got lost anyway.

All this adds up to making research on tanks a complete nightmare – certainly at the level of detail we needed. Exteriors weren’t too bad. The interiors were really difficult – mostly some old photos, a few bits of plans, plus recent photos of the interior of (mostly) trashed old tanks. The T-34 is easier – there are at least more modern examples still around, although that means interpreting what the 1942 version was like. Add to that the whole business of armor technology and penetration in the 1940s, of course, and we’d have to say it has been very hard.

We worked with museums and archives (Bovington, Littlefield’s, Patton Museum for a start) to dig out the info, as well as some individuals who have made WWII armor tech their life’s work! And all of that is just to get the information – after that we’ve done a lot of additional work interpreting it and turning it into meaningful, working, accurate models in game!



RPS: If you were a tank, what kind of tank would you be?

JG: If you are talking about the tanks that are in ROHOS, the tanks are pretty well matched. If you are talking about WWII tanks in general, I would say the Panther. It was a great balance of armor, mobility, and firepower. Funny you should ask this though, as there is a long standing debate on the Red Orchestra forums about what the greatest tank of WWII was that has almost taken on a life of its own. As a matter of fact, it has gotten so big, that if you google “greatest tank of ww2” the discussion on the Red Orchestra forums is the top link that pops up. This thread has been going on for 4 years and has reached over 30 pages. Most people there will say that the Russian IS-2 heavy tank is the best tank of WWII. It has reached the point where it is almost an inside joke among RO fans. We even have an IS-2 emoticon in our forums (http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/images/smilies/is2.gif). And people have forum signatures…

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Source

All I have to say is I was in a dark place, dead with no video game on the horizon that appeals to the casual gamer inside. TANKS! TANKS! and more TANKS!!

FK's Cloud Server

In the month of September we will be migrating over to a new VoxCLOUD server by Voxel.

This will allow us better utilization of resources. Deploy and expand as needed. Maintain reasonable server expenses with out having to worry about having too much or too little.

The transfer should be pretty seamless. If there are issues during the migration we will update this thread.

Do you want to be a part of the Black Ops Multiplayer Reveal Event? We'll be sharing a TON of great info with the press & community about Black Ops MP on September 1st, but we'd like to hear some of your burning MP-related questions. Simply ask your questions in the comments below, on our Facebook Page, or via @JD_2020 on Twitter. For the most commonly asked questions, we'll be fielding them at the Multiplayer Event, and will promptly provide answers here on CallOfDuty.com/BlackOps - So ask away!

[Treyarch] via [FPSAdmin]

Interviews// Call of Duty: Black Ops - Josh Olin
by Mark Johnson

Call of Duty: Black Ops is just around the corner. You know, give or take. The game will be a departure from Treyarch's previous Call of Duty games, bringing the developer's entries into the series more up to date than it's previous WWII offerings, if not quite to a time when terrorists can put videos on YouTube.



Over at Gamescom I was thrust into a room with Josh Olin, community manager for Treyarch, to find out what the Cold War means for CoD, where the series might be heading and how Inception ties into it all...

SPOnG: With three 'modern' Call of Duty games out there, a lot of people have their favourite maps. Is there any chance that we'll see any of those existing maps brought forward into Black Ops, perhaps for free, a la Rainbow Six?



Josh Olin: No. Everything in Black Ops is pretty authentic and unique. What we're trying to make is something that's new and fresh, really. For players, we want to provide them with a game that they haven't seen before and is all new experiences and that would kind of spit in the face of that philosophy.

SPOnG: One of the problems a lot of people had with Modern Warfare 2 was that a lot of people were going straight for the kill streaks and not necessarily working too well with teammates. Has anything been done to balance all that?

Josh Olin: Yes, and we'll reveal more of that at our MP event on September 1st. Unfortunately I can't go into great detail here about it, but yeah, there's... We are aware of all those problems and we're refining that experience to make sure that none of the game is frustrating. It's got to be a fun game.

SPOnG: What's your process for addressing something like that? Do you talk to Infinity Ward? Do you go directly to the fans?

Josh Olin: As community manager that's my job, basically, is I go directly to the fans. I'm constantly reading forums, I'm reading Twitter, I've got my finger on the pulse of the community from every possible angle. I play every night, I play all the Call of Duty games. We have that added advantage of having a very long lineage of great Call of Duty games to incorporate the feedback into Black Ops.

SPOnG: Do you guys look much at the other shooters out there? Your Medal of Honors and whatnot?



Josh Olin: Yeah. We look at other shooters outside the franchise, absolutely. Our Number 1 goal is, of course, servicing our players, so we want to make sure the Call of Duty players get what they want. But yes, if there's another shooter out there that's doing something cool or nice that we think that we could do better, then we take a look at that. If there's a big mysterious misstep that another shooter took that we wouldn't want to repeat then we'll avoid that, absolutely.

SPOnG: What plans do you have for customisation?

Josh Olin: Lots and lots of customisation, lots of personalisation. A lot of that lives in 'create a class', we've completely overhauled that system. It's a much bigger feature now. But yeah, there's a lot of other things I can't talk about just yet, but less than two weeks away now and we'll reveal everything.



SPOnG: What was behind the decision to bring this game forward in time from WWII? A lot of people were expecting it with World at War. What drove the decision?

Josh Olin: It was really the need to provide some fresh, new experiences to the players. Like I was saying before, there's a long lineage of great Call of Duty games. With that it's done the World War II thing, it's done the modern thing, we really needed to pick something that players hadn't seen before, and this Cold War era is perfect because we dug deeper we found out that these black operations took place - teams like SOG, the studies and observations group - the kind of missions and operations they carried out, it all cried 'this is Call of Duty, this could be a great Call of Duty game'. It's something players have never seen before. It has a variety of locales, a variety of weaponry, a variety of tactics and mission types that these Black Ops guys would go on.

SPOnG: Has it been difficult, crafting a game around such a different kind of conflict - one that's not as cohesive as World War II? How has it affected the narrative?

Josh Olin: Yeah, it's different. More than anything, it presents more opportunities for us, because we've got creative liberties, creative freedoms. When you've got a game that's set in history you can't really alter that history too much. But even with World at War we told our own storyline, it was fiction, but there was still this big setting of World War II.

SPOnG: What was behind the decision to bring this game forward in time from WWII? A lot of people were expecting it with World at War. What drove the decision?

Josh Olin: It was really the need to provide some fresh, new experiences to the players. Like I was saying before, there's a long lineage of great Call of Duty games. With that it's done the World War II thing, it's done the modern thing, we really needed to pick something that players hadn't seen before, and this Cold War era is perfect because we dug deeper we found out that these black operations took place - teams like SOG, the studies and observations group - the kind of missions and operations they carried out, it all cried 'this is Call of Duty, this could be a great Call of Duty game'. It's something players have never seen before. It has a variety of locales, a variety of weaponry, a variety of tactics and mission types that these Black Ops guys would go on.


SPOnG: Has it been difficult, crafting a game around such a different kind of conflict - one that's not as cohesive as World War II? How has it affected the narrative?

Josh Olin: Yeah, it's different. More than anything, it presents more opportunities for us, because we've got creative liberties, creative freedoms. When you've got a game that's set in history you can't really alter that history too much. But even with World at War we told our own storyline, it was fiction, but there was still this big setting of World War II.

With Black Ops the settings that we're using in the Cold War. Some of them you've seen before but others you've never heard of. The others, they are the denied operations, so really anything you can imagine could have happened.

We talked to actual veterans from those teams - Major John Plaster from SOG, we also talked to Sonny Puzikas from Spetsnaz, and they would tell us first-hand anecdotes about the stuff they did, so we're able to create these missions and these scenarios that are inspired by very real events, and some of the stuff they were doing was unbelievably ballsy, unbelievably risky and brave and it's true Rambo shit, I'm not even kidding. Some of their stories had us in awe of stuff they'd actually done for real.



SPOnG: And how does it affect the missions that we're seeing in the game?

Josh Olin: You're not just a regular footsoldier, you're not just a run of the mill marine in the army. You're part of this elite team. You're the biggest, baddest bad-ass there is on the playing field.

So, you could literally single-handedly change the tide of war one way or the other and that's a first for the Call of Duty franchise. [We've given] the player a voice so you'll also speak in our game, you'll know what your voice sounds like, what your face looks like. It adds to the immersion, it really does. The character development, that immersion, that level of plot narrative, it's important for us. We know players want a complicated story, we know they want a very rich story, so we give it to them.

SPOnG: So, as far as you're concerned is World War II done now?

Josh Olin: For us, I don't think we would go back because we've done a lot of World War II. I'm not saying that the genre's done. It would be important that, if there ever were to be another game set in the World War II era, it would have to be something that's fresh and new. You still have to by that code and do something players haven't seen before.



So, World at War was one example of that. We brought the players for the first time to the South Pacific to fight the imperial Japanese army. It was a different game to the other World War II shooters in the franchise. So, as long as there's new experiences people will still play them.



It is sort of refreshing to be in this new locale where we have all these new toys that we can play with. We've been making World War II shooters for a long time.

SPOnG: Does it concern you guys that you're looking at the different conflicts getting ticked off by the Call of Duty franchise and that you're running out of wars?

Josh Olin: No, there's still a lot of legs left, there's still a lot of things we can do. As long as the players still want that kind of action there's still a lot of conflicts and stories we can tell.

SPOnG: How long is the single-player campaign? The length of the campaign in Modern Warfare 2, although it's obviously not your game, was criticised by a lot of people. How many hours have you got in this one?



Josh Olin: We're not entirely sure yet, and there's definitely a sweet spot. A game can be too short and you don't want that, and a game can be too long and you don't want that. You don't want people losing their attention span, you don't want them sitting around the controller and not finishing the game, so there is definitely a sweet spot that you want to aim for and a lot of that's driven by the kind of content you have in your story. So, the game will be long enough to tell a great story and long enough to get all of what we want to say out there.

SPOnG: Do you think we'll see more Black Ops, Cold War games from you guys or do you think you'll be moving into new conflicts?

Josh Olin: It's tough to say. We're just so focused on finishing Black Ops, we haven't wrapped our heads around the future just yet, but anything's possible. It's a pretty awesome game.

SPOnG: What point are you up to in development now?

Josh Olin: We're just approaching release candidate stage, so in the next four to six weeks we're going to be submitting our first release candidates to first-parties, so they're going to start reviewing it and making sure that it's publishable on their platform. We're very close.



SPOnG: Does it concern you guys that you're looking at the different conflicts getting ticked off by the Call of Duty franchise and that you're running out of wars?

Josh Olin: No, there's still a lot of legs left, there's still a lot of things we can do. As long as the players still want that kind of action there's still a lot of conflicts and stories we can tell.

SPOnG: How long is the single-player campaign? The length of the campaign in Modern Warfare 2, although it's obviously not your game, was criticised by a lot of people. How many hours have you got in this one?



Josh Olin: We're not entirely sure yet, and there's definitely a sweet spot. A game can be too short and you don't want that, and a game can be too long and you don't want that. You don't want people losing their attention span, you don't want them sitting around the controller and not finishing the game, so there is definitely a sweet spot that you want to aim for and a lot of that's driven by the kind of content you have in your story. So, the game will be long enough to tell a great story and long enough to get all of what we want to say out there.

SPOnG: Do you think we'll see more Black Ops, Cold War games from you guys or do you think you'll be moving into new conflicts?

Josh Olin: It's tough to say. We're just so focused on finishing Black Ops, we haven't wrapped our heads around the future just yet, but anything's possible. It's a pretty awesome game.

SPOnG: What point are you up to in development now?

Josh Olin: We're just approaching release candidate stage, so in the next four to six weeks we're going to be submitting our first release candidates to first-parties, so they're going to start reviewing it and making sure that it's publishable on their platform. We're very close.


SPOnG: Infinity Ward tends to develop for PC, 360 and PS3. You guys tend to develop for more platforms. Does that come from you or from Activision? What drives that?


Josh Olin: What drives that is tool chains. The engine itself is a multi-platform engine. So, if content runs on the 360 it will run on the PC, it'll run on the PS3. Each platform has it's own dedicated engineering team to make sure that they're catching all the nuances for that platform, so that's all done concurrently in parallel.



We do develop primarily for the Xbox 360, simply because the development tools and the pipeline there is very fast, it allows us to make iterations very quickly. So, it doesn't mean that the PS3 or the PC are poorer by any stretch of the imagination. They have their own teams. It just happens that that's why we demo on the 360. It's our flagship platform. It's not that we are 360 fanboys or anything, it's just that that's where it's easiest to develop.


SPOnG: There were rumours of a subscription charge for multiplayer...

Josh Olin: You will not have to. I was quick to nip this in the bud we didn't want it spreading any more than it already did. You will not need to pay to play Black Ops multiplayer at all. So, you'll buy the game, pop the disc in and you'll be able to play everything on that disc. I mean, you've got to subscribe to Xbox Live.


SPOnG: Did you see Inception? (***In case you didn't guess, MILD SPOILER WARNING FOR INCEPTION***) You know that snowy bit towards the end? To me that screamed 'Modern Warfare 2!' Did you notice that?

Josh Olin: It kind of did, you're right! Actually, when I was watching it I was watching with my girlfriend and she was like, 'this looks a lot like Call of Duty'. It wasn't as much Modern Warfare 2 because she's seen some of the Black Ops stuff too and our snowy level for WMD is kind of a lot like that too. It's fun, right?

SPOnG: Thanks for your time!

[Source] via SPOnG