Dragon Rising has been released

[Zipper5 74]

You guys seen this yet? That just proves that CM had no idea what they were doing, since they are very happy with the reaction the game has been getting. Yet that reaction shows console gamers lapping it up, and PC gamers upping and leaving. Talk about having no idea who you're wanting to please...

[GRS 10]

I'm a PC gamer who likes it... :D

And I stand by what I said. The AI is no were near good enough to allow a mission failure over one death. ;)

Edited October 10, 2009 by GRS

[4 IN 1 0]

You got to understand they are the Morris Marina owners' club of its kind;)

[kozzy420 21]

What side of the world is up right now space? Look at the numbers when Europe/UK is online. I find most people online from 3 in the afternoon until about 6pm EST. And these are the public servers. You are missing many private (what I do) servers, and single players. I don't do Xfire, but doesn't it just log those who ARE on xfire? or does it scan the farms for the application?

Xfire just tracks people who have xfire and the game.

So it will track me and my friend playing ARMA2, but not the 4 friends of my mate who DONT HAVE XFIRE.

Its a cool little program, but the minutes/numbers can be a little wierd, as not everyone has Xfire.

[Zipper5 74]

Well, I have now reached a mission in the campaign that won't end because the helicopter refuses to land, despite the area being completely cleared of enemy APCs and infantry. Just sits there and flies around in a circle. Ordering my team to enter it does nothing. I figured it was a one time thing, restarted the mission, played through it all over again, and the same issue happened. I think I'll stop playing the campaign now...

[turin turambar 0]

Forget the technical problems, there are others problems with more weight:

-Stealth missions where killing a lone enemy with a suppresed rifle in 1 burst alerts the entire army (the solution was killing him with a single bullet in the head, because there is a difference between dying in 0.1 secs and 0.3 secs).

-Checkpoints triggered by event. The event itself is me failing a secondary objective. Yeah, it saves after the fact, and when you fail. And it overwrites the previous checkpoint-save, so you have to restart the mission.

-The game, ideally, should save before and after the big fights/eventful zones, but only saves after, making me repeat lenghty parts of the game again.

-Did i say the game save after a completed goal? Well, not always, it usually doesn't save after doing the sec. objectives, only after the primary objectives.

-Did i say the game save after a completed primary objective? Well, except in the 2nd primary objective of the 8th or 9th mission where the designer forgot to put the checkpoint. Grrrr....

-Difficulty is off. The game itself is kind of easy. Except from time to time, when a bullet goes to your head and you die instantly. It feels uneven, as mostly it's easy as i said before (playing in 2nd diffuculty) and then there are times you fall dead to the ground and have to load the save. It feels random and annoying as there isn't much you can do to evade death. It would be better if the enemy would have a little more of accuracy so the game is harder and in compensation drop the rate of insta-death in the game.

-Still with the difficulty: so the game is more or less easy (i should say "medium difficulty", it's not really that easy, it just feels easy to me after Bohemia games :P), completing without problems goal after goal.. and the designers said "hey, this is too easy, let's spice things up" so they come with some bullshit like annoyingly accurate mortar fire (more instadeath in a checkpoint only game, yay!) or timed objectives, that kind of lovely stuff.

-More specifically, they seem to have a great love for escort missions. Bullshit gamey annoying unrealistic escort missions. I had already three moments where i had to eliminate Antitank squads/vehicles in a hurry because the convoy/vehicles will run into the enemy without waiting until the threat is eliminated (no, there isn't any ingame justification for the hurry). One of these "moments" is not a moment, it's almost entire mission that consists enterily of this gameplay mechanic. I remember a Ofp escort mission where i could radio the "stop" and "go on" orders to the convoy....

-I had some fights with my AI mates, they seem to forget to follow me after i give them a specific order (like a heal order, or formation order, etc). It happened to me three times already, one of them i noticed it when i was in the last objective and they were like... 1300 mts behind xD. Also one time one mate tried to fire a bazooka from inside a house (the control tower in the airport). The whole building was destroyed, with us inside. But that's a minor "only one time" problem, mostly the ai was good enough.

-Aircraft is just wrooong. They move like on rails, they turn and move slowly, they fly too low, it is kind of freaky to watch the choppers in this game.

-The scenario itself, by the way, when it's not being bathed by a blue moon or a red sky, it is a bit... featureless. Drab. Dull. There isn't any towns or big forests or zones where the vegetation is different, there is little detail. Only a few dirt roads, no power lines or safeguards in roads or farming fields or asphalt roads or traffic signals or fuel stops or any kind of special feature (well, it seems in the last part there will be a swampy area and a big mount/volcano).

General feedback of the campaign, being in the 9th, of 11 missions:

Is worthy sequel of Operation Flashpoint? Fuck, no.

-At my actual pace i will finish the campaign in a bit less than 6 hours.

-No variation. There aren't missions where you are alone, or mission where you are grunt soldier in a big platoon, or missions where you lead that big platoon, or vehicle-centric missions (no tanks, no choppers for now). You are always the leader of the 4-man team doing more or less the same kind of missions. It's very... Ghost Recon-ish in how it is, more than Ofp-ish.

-Generic, uninformative briefing. No intructions in the map, no additional information about the objective, nothing about possible enemy zones, nothing. There were two times where in fact the briefing was so bad it kind of broke the mission: once they give you a secondary mission in the briefing even if it was supposed to be a little 'surprise' later inside the mission, and the second mission, i was supposed to recon, seach and find a lost crashed in the ground chopper and rescue the pilots, but i already knew the pilots were reallly in a small village at SE before playing the mission (the goal number in the map!).

-Lack of story, no plot twists or anything interesting in the war. Just completing militar objectives one after other. No resistance guys, no civilians, no traitors, no nothing.

-There isn't any kind of backstory for characters, or personality. Or names, for that matter. You are a generic soldier doing soldier stuff.

-In fact, there aren't dialogues in the ENTIRE GAME, apart from orders from the "radio guy" and your answers. Wait, there is a 1 (one) line that a soldier shouted in my last mission, but it was something like "marines kick ass, we will finish this!!".

-No insertions in the game, no "being transported to the war zone" in trucks or apcs.

-No big firefights, it seems that this is a future war where the future U.S. army uses 4 men squads (it's not only your squad the one with 4 men, it's everyone).

-No memorable missions to remember years after. Do you remember the defeat and posterior escape in Montignac? helping and having to left the resistance guys at their own? Getting your ass kicked in the first defense of Malden, in the coast? Charging with your tanks in the first armored mission, following you fearless leader and having to fall back because you fall in an ambush? the mission where you are guarding alone by night a post, and stealthy specops attack you, using flares to fight in the night? Using the stars to find you way home when the enemy capture you? The first time you parachute in enemy territory? Searching the nukes before they use the Scuds in the last mission? Well, you still are going to remember it, because it's not like Ofp DR is going to substitute them.

Some of these problems are bad for a "Operation Flashpoint" game. Other are problems, for any type of shooter, the end.

The possible redeeming factor of the campaign is the coop mode. It's straightforward-ish affair, a bit more actiony than Bohemia games, so with a few friends it could be pretty fun.

[And i still have not touched the multiplayer]

[ProfTournesol 956]

Amen and good response.

...

Well, in fact that's quite amusing. You're judging ArmA2 by its campaign, as a lot of newcomers do, the way you would judge Ghost Recon or COD. I agree with you about the fact the spirit of this ArmA2 campaign isn't the way i'd like it to be (Razor team thingy, warfare mission etc.). But we don't buy those games for the campaign, do we ?

I'm playing ArmA2 and i'm still playing the real OFP, i don't replay the CWC campaign every day ! I'm using the powerful mission engine together with mods and community campaigns and missions and here's the BIG fun. Those who don't understand this should definitely play other games.

Oh, and my dear space, we all know that ArmA2 market is a small niche inside the PC games market becoming itself a niche in the gaming industry. We shall pray for BIS to survive and stay independant, and give them all the money we can. Otherwise we'll only have poor games to play.

[jw custom 56]

Pains me to think how much custom BIS lost/drove to OFP-DR through that.:(

Yes but those sales belongs mainly to kids and cosolers, i'm glad they are not here to ruin the online gaming and just as important this one of a kind and amazing community.

I hereby welcome those dedicated OF1 in the other camp who was burned by the DR failure to come over here and play the proper sequel, you'll be more than welcome ;)

Edited October 10, 2009 by JW Custom

[dm 9]

No one on my xfire even plays arma2 anymore

every arma2 server you get on theres 32 players

Wait.. so no one plays it... but every server has 32 players on it?

Logic fail much?

If you and space hate arma so much, why the fuck are you still here? If I hate something, I try to avoid it as much as possible, you should probably try the same. And dont give me that "I'm waiting for the next patch" bullshit, you've both categorically stated how much of an "epic fail" ArmA2 is [supposedly] surely no patch could fix that?

Do us all a favour, make like a tree, and fuck off.

Edit: To remain ontopic:

LOL at the vid showing the LOD popping. That's a good engine stress test but not a good indication of how gameplay is. At least it forces you to design missions with good FPS in mind.

I cant agree with that at all. A row of empty vehicles should not be "stressful" on the engine. If its struggling to render things with a few other objects in view, and especially as poorly as that, there are some serious underlying issues with the engine. A real stress test would be 100's of vehicles AND AI moving aroundat the same time. But dr can barely do half of that.

All that does, just like the 63 entity limit, is force you to design missions that are empty. Good mission designers should always design with fps in mind, without the engine needing to remind them by failing to render objects at ~10m distance.

Edit2: Anecdotal; a good stress test is what I did the other day. A good stress test is copy/pasting 127 units, at run-time, in multiplayer, with several clients and a lot of scripts running. Yeah, I did that. I copy/pasted TWICE the amount of AI dr can handle, and I did it whilst the game was running in a networked scenario. THAT is a stress test. Oh, and although the copy/paste was a little bit slow, once the synchronisation was done, we lost the sum total of 2 fps in the scenario.

Edited October 10, 2009 by DM

[NoRailgunner 0]

DR is for mainstream/console crowd who mostly like to play (fun) shooters.

OFP, ArmA and Arma2 are for people who mostly like a bit more realism and ambitious + not limited gameplay in SP/MP incl. a real open-world.

Isnt it this yaddayadda "DR vs Arma2" more like "fun racing games" vs "racing simulations"? ;)

Some people need to think what they really like to play/spend time with:

Arma2 - stay here in this forum

DR - ok, goto CM Forums

both - sure, but keep in mind different developers, different engines, different target groups and different publishers.

[eble 3]

haven't been able to log into the OFP-Dr MP servers for the last 3 hours, of the joy this game brings.

[nettrucker 142]

No true Bi games lover will ever have the same love for DR as for the Bi series. Bi games have just a complete different magnitude and ambition. I did not buy DR and will most probably do it when the price has dropped down significantly, just to get my own impressions on DR for comparison.

Arma releases have been buggy due to a bad quality control that is the only negative thing that I would complain about so far and that had driven away a lot of potential players and customers. It hurts to see that BI is getting a bad reputation for this reason and it's difficult to get rid of such. I only can hope that OA will be released at least with a fully playable campaign. No bugs which prevents you from playing and finishing the missions.

The fact that so many people have technical issues to run the game is a real pity. But just think of the difficulty for a developer to create a game that runs on all available hardware configurations equally well. I really do believe it's a "Mission impossible" at least from release date. Bi ran into trouble in unforeseen things. And as always they are gathering feedback to fix all possible things. I see lot of people with "uber rigs" having troubles to run the game properly. I have a mid end PC and I'm running ArmA2 from beginning with no problems. I consider myself lucky. Can't say much about the campaign bugs because I haven't touched it yet. I'm on the latest patch and ArmA2 runs quite well. I'm experiencing lag issues in case I put too many units on a map. I love large scale missions company size type.LOL. :D Constant frame rate from 20-30 FPS. It is not much but it doesn't disturb my game play. I have no stuttering and everything is very fluid

Now I think when ArmA2 was released and the trouble shooting section was flooded with threads, CM devs s**t their pants and took a drastic turn in direction. They favoured obviously stable game play and sacrificed everything what has made BI games so great. Something that the most part of real OFP fans can't forgive them. They favoured console play (more money) and therefore they had to dumb down the game. I really doubt that a game like ArmA2 could be transferred to a console game, given the magnitude, without being forced to dump it down too. Prove me wrong.

Seems that all the ArmA community is disappointed with DR and that a lot of people will revalue newly ArmA as the best combat game momentarily available on the market. At least for me it is not withstanding all the flaws.

But I can live with that and I know that BI has never let down the community.

regards

nettrucker:D

[Pauldarrington 9]

haven't been able to log into the OFP-Dr MP servers for the last 3 hours, of the joy this game brings.

Same here

Oh Weeeeel then

[rorypat 10]

I will never complain about Arma 2 bugs again.

The ofp game is the worst piece of shit. Its like when Championship Manager changed to Football Manager but they still released Champ Manager with a different developer.

The graphics are awful and iam at "high", cant imagine low.

They copied Arma 2 idea of following a group of 4 marines.

Created a Humvee using the editor and fired 8 grenades at it and it didnt explode, infact it only had done slight damage.

I run out of ammo for my gun about 5 mins into every mission because you cant deselect burst mode.

I havent rigured out yet how to tell one of my squafmates to move and not have all the idiots running off

One good thing about the game are the night scopes on the assault and sniper rifles. Bi should integrate this into Arma 2

Thank you Bi for making Arma 2

[Herbal Influence 10]

Xfire just tracks people who have xfire and the game.

So it will track me and my friend playing ARMA2, but not the 4 friends of my mate who DONT HAVE XFIRE.

Its a cool little program, but the minutes/numbers can be a little wierd, as not everyone has Xfire.

Good to put that correct.

By the by: xfire is broadly advertising DR ...

[LoLL 10]

I will never complain about Arma 2 bugs again.

The ofp game is the worst piece of shit. Its like when Championship Manager changed to Football Manager but they still released Champ Manager with a different developer.

The graphics are awful and iam at "high", cant imagine low.

They copied Arma 2 idea of following a group of 4 marines.

Created a Humvee using the editor and fired 8 grenades at it and it didnt explode, infact it only had done slight damage.

I run out of ammo for my gun about 5 mins into every mission because you cant deselect burst mode.

I havent rigured out yet how to tell one of my squafmates to move and not have all the idiots running off

One good thing about the game are the night scopes on the assault and sniper rifles. Bi should integrate this into Arma 2

Thank you Bi for making Arma 2

Did you say OFP?? the one from 2001? This thread is discussion of OFP 2 : DR!

[bangtail 0]

I will never complain about Arma 2 bugs again.

The ofp game is the worst piece of shit. Its like when Championship Manager changed to Football Manager but they still released Champ Manager with a different developer.

The graphics are awful and iam at "high", cant imagine low.

They copied Arma 2 idea of following a group of 4 marines.

Created a Humvee using the editor and fired 8 grenades at it and it didnt explode, infact it only had done slight damage.

I run out of ammo for my gun about 5 mins into every mission because you cant deselect burst mode.

I havent rigured out yet how to tell one of my squafmates to move and not have all the idiots running off

One good thing about the game are the night scopes on the assault and sniper rifles. Bi should integrate this into Arma 2

Thank you Bi for making Arma 2

Another user who has realised that if we don't support BIS, all we'll have is games like DR that offer little versatility or scope.

Eth

PS : You can set the fire mode, it's "F" I believe.

[vilas 473]

No bashing.

No flaming.

No namecalling (this includes CM moderators).

No discussion how the CM Forums are moderated.

so Wolle how do you expect me to say anything about OFP2DR ? :)

[Zipper5 74]

I find it really annoying the way that Codemasters made you switch fire modes and ammunition types with weapons. You can't cycle through ammunition types as every time you get to a grenade ammunition type you have to wait for it to reload that grenade before you can switch to another type. There's also no visual indication apart from a changing image in the lower right to show you changing fire modes as since Hardcore mode removes that image, you have to shoot to know what fire mode your gun is in.

God, the design errors are everywhere...

[Bulldogs 10]

Also, to command one unit, hit the quick command key "q" then hit the function key (or was it the number key) for the quad member you want to move. Make sure you deselect him after or you'll only be commanding him.

[eble 3]

I have been making some video's of interesting OPF-DR stuff, was messing about with the tanks and was able to do this :)

<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHdU9v05wqU&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHdU9v05wqU&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>

[Bulldogs 10]

I have been making some video's of interesting OPF-DR stuff, was messing about with the tanks and was able to do this :)

I gotta test this out now. It reminds me of the old Stunts car game where if you could get up enough speed your car would lift off and fly for up to 5 mins.

---------- Post added at 11:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:56 PM ----------

I'm a PC gamer who likes it... :D

And I stand by what I said. The AI is no were near good enough to allow a mission failure over one death. ;)

Try putting them on "danger" mode when you get in combat. That usually gets rid of their suicidal tendancies.

[KorpeN 0]

I will never complain about Arma 2 bugs again.

The ofp game is the worst piece of shit. Its like when Championship Manager changed to Football Manager but they still released Champ Manager with a different developer.

The graphics are awful and iam at "high", cant imagine low.

They copied Arma 2 idea of following a group of 4 marines.

Created a Humvee using the editor and fired 8 grenades at it and it didnt explode, infact it only had done slight damage.

I run out of ammo for my gun about 5 mins into every mission because you cant deselect burst mode.

I havent rigured out yet how to tell one of my squafmates to move and not have all the idiots running off

One good thing about the game are the night scopes on the assault and sniper rifles. Bi should integrate this into Arma 2

Thank you Bi for making Arma 2

noob...learn at least the controls before you criticize a game...

and btw OFP2 >>> ArmA2

[Defunkt 431]

I honestly don't think we ArmA fans should be pointing the finger at sub-optimal physics.

[NeMeSiS 11]

I honestly don't think we ArmA fans should be pointing the finger at sub-optimal physics.

We have to when they were praised pre-release. ;)