By Jim Rossignol on December 21st, 2010 at 8:44 pm.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising was disappointing. It had the big sprawling landscapes that pluck my heart strings, but the missions were dull and the game was basically a bit wonky on release. Not to mention all the other problems with it being useless online. Will Red River be any better? I hope it will at least hit a higher standard for the main game. The Codemasters team are likely to have hit their stride now and made this a better game, and the noises they’re making about mission design influencing level design are positive. It’s also very pretty indeed, as you can see with this latest bit of footage, via Blues, below. Yeah, I will play this one too, just to be sure…
21/12/2010 at 20:47 Gap Gen says:
Dragon Rising was actually pretty fun in co-op. Kinda like a streamlined ArmA if all you do in ArmA is fight in a small squad.
21/12/2010 at 20:55 derf says:
The coop element was fine but the mickey mouse missions (starting 50m from your objective) made it unplayable.
21/12/2010 at 23:35 Jason Moyer says:
Co-op was fantastic. Really didn’t mind singleplayer much either, the really big weakness to the game were the vehicles, but the infantry control was fairly decent I thought. I’m a huge fan of Bohemia, but I’ve never really gotten on well with their squad control stuff in OFP/Arma compared to Full Spectrum Warrior, Brothers In Arms, or Dragon Rising.
23/12/2010 at 01:35 TheTingler says:
It was superb, except that the game often kicks me out for no reason or just doesn’t acknowledge that I’m online.
21/12/2010 at 20:51 mlaskus says:
I’m playing the Dragon Rising campaign in coop with a friend and while the shooting is quite satisfying and giving out orders is quick and easy, the missions are extremely boring and unimaginative.
21/12/2010 at 20:55 ZIGS says:
Games For Windows LIVE
That’s all I needed to know
21/12/2010 at 20:57 Theory says:
That was very well-written. I like him already.
21/12/2010 at 21:17 Mistabashi says:
Anyone else think he sounds a little bit like a younger version of The Bunk?
Also, Tijikistan or whatever it is is quite amusing, they should just go all-out and call it Iraqistan :D
21/12/2010 at 21:36 Conor says:
Tajikistan is a real country, y’know. Bears a startling similarity to Takistan, however…
21/12/2010 at 21:51 Joshua says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajikistan
One can see why they picked it.
22/12/2010 at 08:51 Lightbulb says:
Genuine lol.
21/12/2010 at 21:18 Arclight says:
Looks like they forgot about recoil again…
*sigh*
Think I’ll just stick to Operation Arrowhead and pick this up when the price comes down… Picked up DR for €5,- and still regretted it though.
21/12/2010 at 21:35 RiptoR says:
That voice actor sounds A LOT like the black cop on the new “Mike & Molly” sitcom.
21/12/2010 at 22:14 ALJA says:
Did anyone else think that dialogue was so jingoistic and macho it borders comedy
21/12/2010 at 22:29 ZenArcade says:
Isn’t that the case with all of this bullshit? Any war game immediately becomes so stooped in military-conservative rhetoric that it hurts to know your protagonist is exactly the kind of bastard you desperately try to avoid in the real world. Hey game devs, how about some complexity in these war game themes, hmm? Y’know, like in real life and all? how about, once, just once, you lose for a change, you retreat, your enemy retreats, or maybe, just maybe, your protagonist starts to question his role in what is essentially the mass, organized slaughter of human beings, instead of rolling over corpses and rubble as if that’s something to be proud of. Sheesh.
/end rant
21/12/2010 at 23:45 Jason Moyer says:
Retreat? I take it you haven’t played any Bohemia games?
Actually, the first Modern Warfare (i.e. the last good CoD game) included some serious “allies fail” situations.
22/12/2010 at 02:10 ZenArcade says:
Yes I have, and frankly I find the whole emotional deadness a bit of an annoyance. They’re worse in a way because they are apathetic in the extreme, presenting you with a clinical expression of something which is arguably intense and devastating, and I always thought that this subject matter is something that is in dire need of some proper investigation and an actual point and, goddamn it, some fucking subtext at least, which is what opflash/arma avoids like the plague. At least CoD doesn’t hide how it feels about war (i.e it fucking loves it.) BTW, one or two bad things happening in Modern Warfare… y’know, I don’t think that really counts, considering you spend the other 90% of the game going on a machine gun rampage across the whole entire fucking world, mowing down nameless, faceless baddies, with no human connotations applied to them, it’s just a shooting gallery. It doesn’t matter that one or two bad things happen to you. The fact is, your western buddies are given lines of dialogue, they care, where as the people your shooting? not a thing. The narrative disallows them any kind of humanization or dialogue or values or anything. They’re just there to die and war isn’t as clear cut as that, I think as intelligent human beings we know that, and damn it, aren’t you guys tired of this crap in your video games, anyway? Wouldn’t it be nice to see some complexity in these things for a change?
22/12/2010 at 02:43 Kevin says:
To its credit, at least the voice acting isn’t shaping up to be as immersion-breaking as the text-to-speech voice-acting in the ArmA games that makes people sound like robots having a stroke (as fine as those games are). It’s gotten to the point that it has become a joke between my room-mate who watched me play and I (“Will you GET me a COLD ONE from the FRIDGE, enemy MAN!”)
I like ArmA, but it’s one of those things that really infuriate me against Bohemia. For god’s sake, man, there’s a bunch of really good sim games out there that do great job of making that type of thing not as jarring. Plus the fact that they have never fixed the buggy AI and the game has absolutely no excuse for why it runs the way it does.
22/12/2010 at 08:27 Mil says:
@ZenArcade: admittedly all that killing of hundreds of soulless enemy soldiers is pretty dehumanising, but at least it’s not like they were showing someone’s boobs.
22/12/2010 at 16:36 battles_atlas says:
Zen wins my Rant of Christmas award. May Santa be most generous to you.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this crap when we inhabit a culture that lauds The Hurt Locker as an anti-war film. Strip out the slow-mo-falling-shellcase pretensions and its no more a critique of America’s warlust than The Green Berets was.
21/12/2010 at 22:35 leplaisirquitue says:
I’m torn; I want trailers to move forward – to be be more serious – to rely less upon action-run-and-gun base pleasures; I don’t, however, want this.
At least they tried with the dialogue – someone clearly went past a first draft, for sure. But, that’s where it ends.
Condemning it as ‘cringe-worthy’ would not be fair, because, at times, it displays a degree of maturity – the problem is that it retreats into over-wrought jingoisms at too early an opportunity. Not ‘comedic’, but, ultimately, immature. Very much like their opening gambit trailer, it approached being sickening in its faux-heroism, in its ‘need to impress’.
As for the technical quality – the long distance vistas are something to behold – and one should always remember it’s a console game.
However, the reliance upon bloom, the several technical faults on display – it’s a little worrying. Some of the issues could be excused by a sloppy pre-release evaluation from the person responsible for the quality of the video, and I’m aware that no game is perfect upon launch. As always, they impress with their non-game text-effects.
Certainly something I’m interested to see develop.
21/12/2010 at 22:35 heretic says:
what is this game trying to be? another arcade-y shootthem up? or is it trying to be more realistic arma style or just in between the two? (haven’t played the first one)
just from the footage of the guy running around it seems like he’s on speed or smth, walking around like serious sam carrying 1000 guns.
one thing I really like about arma is that walking around really seems like an effort.
21/12/2010 at 22:43 12dogs says:
oh man that was quite painful to listen to, at least arma’s dialogue is just charmingly stunted, still that video does make me wish Bohemia Interactive would actually put some effort into making their engine a little better
21/12/2010 at 22:49 heretic says:
the ARMA engine has come a long way, even for OA I was quite impressed with the improvements (and I’m not running it at particularly high detail)
I do agree that they should optimise it a lot more though… I can play recent games without much frame rate problem but ARMA is a killer!
22/12/2010 at 09:46 Tommo says:
@heretic – thats because recent games are all console ports and are designed on run on 5year old hardware. Arma2 is purely a pc game and its built with future rigs in mind.
21/12/2010 at 22:46 Multidirectional says:
When will developers making games about modern marines finally watch and read Generation Kill? This is not how a guy trained to be a killer talks. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m in the life saving business”. Yeah right..
22/12/2010 at 02:07 poop says:
the last trailer used “when the man comes around” as its music so they definitely are aware generation kill exists, but all they got me to do is wanna watch generation kill again
22/12/2010 at 16:53 battles_atlas says:
Don’t get me wrong, Generation Kill was great, but I was saddened that Simon did exactly what ever other US war film/drama does, and reduced the enemy to bit-part cannon fodder. One of the truly great things about the Wire was seeing multiple sides of the story, not just the cops. I know its based on the book of an embedded marine, but its not like Simon himself cant write. He could have built on it, and presented a truly groundbreaking view of warfare.
21/12/2010 at 22:46 yhancik says:
Something Related to War : Allusion to a flow of Red
21/12/2010 at 22:53 The Magic says:
I love this guy’s voice. He sounds so ordinary. At first I thought “oh macho voice over man,” but it sounded weird, stilted, like he wasn’t the best silly voice actor they could find. I like that.
As for the game, I enjoyed it for what it was worth.
21/12/2010 at 22:55 CMaster says:
“Proficent fighting machines”
Cue image of US marines crouching and firing in the middle of a road…
21/12/2010 at 22:59 GoodPatton says:
Looks promising…I hope.
Also, did the voice over guy sound Irish for the first 5 seconds to anyone else?
21/12/2010 at 23:32 exurban says:
After being put off for so long due to all the negative comments, I ended up really enjoying Dragon Rising. For me, it felt like the spiritual successor to Novalogic’s Delta Force games. I loved those in their heyday. I think if Nova had put this exact game out with the Delta Force name instead of Op Flashpoint, a great deal of the criticism leveled against it wouldn’t have been uttered.
So I am looking forward to Red River, especially since I’ll likely never get to play Angel Falls.
21/12/2010 at 23:42 westyfield says:
Well, that wasn’t at all tedious or jingoistic.
22/12/2010 at 00:17 Paul says:
I think I will stick with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_41u9dQuI8
22/12/2010 at 01:38 Thants says:
I thought that was a really good trailer. It may be jingoistic bullshit, but it’s well done. It’s like they got an actually writer involved.
22/12/2010 at 05:33 D.H. Lawrence says:
The original Op Flash really impressed the hell out of me. It’s rare to play a shooter in which the player is no more skilled or powerful than the AI. Also had a very solid story devoid of any gung-ho bullshit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Red River has a similar tone … they need silly trailers like this to grab some of the CoD crowd.
22/12/2010 at 10:47 Dominic White says:
Sorry to break this to you, but OFP2 and Red River have absolutely nothing to do with the original OFP, other than the title, which the publisher took when they split from the actual developers.
The Arma games are the true sequels to OFP, right down to running on a newer version of the same engine.
22/12/2010 at 07:35 konrad_ha says:
Wow, the level of pro-army propaganda in the clip just made me throw up in my mouth a little. It was just a tiny, teeny bit too much, even for a seasoned FPS-gamer like me.
22/12/2010 at 08:04 brulleks says:
It was the timed missions that destroyed the original for me.
“Here, have a lovely, open-world sandbox to muck about in. Now take this gun and run through it as fast as you can, no, don’t stop to look around and marvel, plan tactics, make your own approach or anything that would actually give some credibility to the level design. Just run. GO.”
If they get rid of that then I’ll probably consider this (once it’s at sale price), because I quite enjoyed ambling through the first level at my own pace.
22/12/2010 at 10:21 Warth0g says:
Think I’ll probably given Op Flash a miss, but I still wonder if I should give Arma II a proper go. Given that it will probably pop up at a decent price in the Steam sale, could someone advise the best way to go? I’m a bit confused between Arma II Vanilla, OA and PMC?
I played the demo of Arma II when it came out and thought it was pretty scary – and not in a good way. Has it been optimised since? Still got the robot speech? Because if it hasn’t improved since then I’m not sure I can get past the bad stuff to get to the good stuff which I know is in there somewhere….
Advice gratefully received chaps…
22/12/2010 at 10:38 Thants says:
I tried the demo of Arma 2 and… when I turn am I supposed to be lurching around like a drunk person? There was some weird movement that I couldn’t get past.
22/12/2010 at 10:40 Jim Rossignol says:
Thants: You probably need to turn off the fine cursor movement so that it operates like a normal FPS, ie the whole camera moves with the mouse all the time, rather than allowing the reticule some movement in the centre of the screen, which Arma has on by default. I did the same.
Warthog: Play with a group of people online.
22/12/2010 at 21:45 Thants says:
Ah, good. I was hoping there was some setting I could adjust.
22/12/2010 at 11:20 El_MUERkO says:
As a fan of all things Operation Flashpoint & ArmA I played Dragon Rising expecting it to be bad and it delivered on my expectations.
But how it was bad smacked of management demanding an unfinished game be rushed out to a deadline, the limitations of the engine the quality of the missions both seemed like problems that could of been fixed with another 3/6 months of development.
I love BIS but I’m all for healthy competition in the soldier-sim market so I’m going to hope that this time they’ll be allowed to polish the game properly, but I wont be pre-ordering it to find out, once bitten, twice shy.
22/12/2010 at 13:59 theleif says:
Yay for another game where I can kill evil Muslims, bringing freedom, Haliburton and true Christian values to the uneducated masses. Couldn’t they at least let us do the same as British soldiers?
22/12/2010 at 14:16 -Spooky- says:
Codemasters: Games About Real-World Conflicts Are “Inappropriate”
*nuff said*
http://is.gd/je5nQ
23/12/2010 at 09:44 Daave says:
Damien Knox is the name of the head of Dark Star comics in Spaced.
“BISLEY!!!!”