Red Orchestra 2 - she loves me, she loves me not

Oh, Tripwire.

I was going to make a bunch of posts between last August and now. I have about five or six drafts kicking around and a bunch of half-formed thoughts still lingering at the back of my mind, or scribbled down on various sheets of paper that litter my desk (and much of my floor). In the end, though, there's really only one game that I feel strongly enough to write about. Not because the others weren't good, or I didn't think some features revolutionary and others counterproductive, but because Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the gaming industry, and everything that is right about it, at the same time.

As anyone who knows me even vaguely will know, I am a diehard Red Orchestra fan. From the day I got the game in late 2006 - on the suggestion of a good friend and curiosity stirred by various Steam ads - I fell in love with it. I've never been good at most shooters, as I spent my childhood playing combat flight sims and then RTS games. They're too fast for me, or demand too much fine motor control too suddenly. They're also... well, kind of bland, honestly. You can only play so many rounds of Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (grav gun volleyball excepted), or even the early Battlefield games before it all starts to feel like one big blob of sameness. Now before anyone sends me death threats for implying that HL2 and Battlefield were samey dross, I'm not saying that - what I'm saying is that the core mechanics were always the same. Moonwalk around with WASD, put crosshair over bad guy, shoot mans. Half your bullets will miss unless you have a sniper rifle and hit detection and damage output are done by hitscan calculations on a giant invisible refrigerator box your enemy is encapsulated within. If you hit them enough times and luck is on your side, they fall over. No matter how many revolutionary or genre-defining features games have introduced, nearly every shooter on the market has fallen into that same category.

Then I discovered Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Developed by modders-turned-studio Tripwire Interactive, the game was an improved retail version of a mod they had used to win the Make Something Unreal competition. In terms of gameplay, I understand it was similar to the later versions of the mod (which I have sadly never played) but featured considerable polishing. The game was still a fairly recent release when I bought it, and it immediately proved to be a different beast to Day of Defeat: Source, Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault, and Call of Duty, which had been the only WWII shooters I had really logged any play time with up to that point. There was no crosshair; my weapon would move around the screen and deviate from centre, and the bullets would go where the muzzle was pointing, not where the camera was looking. The only method of aiming reliably was to use ironsights or a scope. Hitboxes were no longer gigantic boxes, but so detailed that I began to make a habit of shooting enemy snipers' rifles out of their hands to annoy them. Players couldn't heal and their health didn't regenerate, and they couldn't take many shots before they went down, either. The gameplay was slow compared to the games I had come from, and yet far more tense and astronomically more rewarding. There was a definite sense of your actions having consequences - if you tried to race across a street being covered by a machine gun, you couldn't take a couple of hits and then change your mind halfway. You were dead. It was also a game (probably one of the first) where teamwork wasn't just a suggestion - it was a necessity.

It wasn't just this that made RO appealing to me. I've always been mesmerised by WWII history, and this was the first game to really explore the Eastern front in any considerable depth (since CoD did little more than reinforce make-believe Hollywood stereotypes). Maps were based on real engagements, and in some cases they almost perfectly replicated locations that existed or even still exist today. Weapons and vehicles handled as close to their real-life counterparts as possible in the Unreal 2.5 engine (well, except the well-known nerf of German tanks and the awesome might of the IS-2, and the recoil-o-matic submachine guns). Uniforms were based on the real things. Visuals were gritty, but not overly dramatic.

Red Orchestra was not a game that would appeal to a vast majority of gamers. Free weekend promotions from Steam would see an influx of players from mainstream shooters, and while some would stay, the majority had little or nothing positive to say about the game. Tripwire realised they had a niche market, however, and continued to support the game and its community without sacrificing the things that made it great in the name of a larger profit. They continued this tradition of excellent support with Killing Floor afterwards, although that game enjoyed a much larger playerbase, likely because gamers can't say no to a zombie game.

With all that said, you can imagine how excited I was when Tripwire finally announced that "our next project" was indeed a sequel as many had expected. Initial screenshots and gameplay videos confirmed my suspicions it would blow everything else out of the water, including the preceding game - Tripwire had taken all the things that made RO great, and improved upon them. They'd also listened to the community's suggestions over time, incorporating sight adjustment, functional ironsights on sniper rifles, improved weapon deployment, and a drastically improved tank element. They'd also added a whole bunch of new gamemodes. Everything looked set to astonish.

Except it didn't. Well, not the way I had hoped.

You see, somewhere along the line, the decision was made that the game should appeal to a wider audience. You may recognise this as the scourge that is currently plaguing the gaming industry (and even many mod teams); instead of picking a solid audience and sticking to it, developers are trying to make their games all things to all men and the result is seldom a good one. I've said it on here before: you can't do everything and do it well. You can do it mediocre, and make your game a bland experience for everybody rather than an excellent one for a specific audience. RO found its niche and catered to it exclusively, and was dearly loved for it. Its successor seems to have gone astray somewhere along the line.

RO2 is much, much faster paced. You move faster, you bring up your sights faster, you reload faster, and automatics rule the day. Long gone are the times of bolt-action rifles making up the overwhelming majority of a team's arsenal; in any given RO2 match, you're lucky if a third of your team is using them. Exceptionally rare, experimental weapons - which may not have (and in some cases almost certainly did not) seen action anywhere near Stalingrad - shift the balance even more, with the MKb.42 (H) giving the Germans a decisive upper hand reminiscient of the StG.44 in RO. The difference here is that the Soviets have no real answer to it until players unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh, and even then the MKb's versatility is unmatched.

Yep, you read that right, folks. There's an unlock system. This is quite different from the titular 'Heroes' system, which was by no means a bad idea; this is purely weapon-based, and it unlocks improvements for some weapons, cosmetic changes for others, and nothing for some. As well as improving the way your character handles the given weapon (which is just fine by me), you will magically upgrade it as time goes on. This could have worked if it hadn't been cobbled together in such an arbitrary way. Already good weapons like the MKb and MG34 - both of which totally outmatch their direct counterparts - can be extensively upgraded, while the DP-28 remains in its normal state regardless. Players must unlock the drum magazine for the PPSh-41, despite the 35-round stick magazines the weapon starts with only becoming widespread in the year following the battle the entire game is centred on. They must also unlock select-fire for the weapon... despite the fact that this feature was standard on it until its deletion in a 1944 revision of the design. Similarly, Soviet snipers start with the PU scope for their M91/30, and must work towards the side-mounted PEM. The PEM was almost ubiquitous until 1943, when it began to be replaced by the PU. I'd like to remind you that the Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942 and ended in February of 1943.

I could write a small book about the sheer mess of bugs that the game has been since the early-access beta, and how very few have been fixed despite constant patching, but I won't. I'm here to talk about game design, not technical details.

As you can hopefully glean from the above, the game has a lot of historical inaccuracies; it also has maps accurate to the last brick (not exaggerating) and uniforms that are absolutely on the money. Despite the changes to weapon balancing, the weapons themselves are the best I have ever seen in a game and I seriously doubt they will ever be surpassed - they are as close as you will get to shooting an actual firearm in any game. At times, I can feel the gameplay that made RO my one true gaming love struggling to shine through. That's the most infuriating thing about this game; under the mountains of slutty makeup and MKb.42s, there is the true heir to RO's throne as the reining monarch of tactical realism in games, and everything we could ever have asked for. The problem is getting to it under the aforementioned, and Tripwire's attitude so far has not been promising. The game's sales figures were excellent - it far outsold Ostfront and at one point was well ahead of Modern Warfare 3 in number of preorders on Steam - but only a few weeks from release, the servers are barren wastelands and many, many people have been left with a sour taste in their mouths. Is the game doomed? I really hope not. The core gameplay and mechanics are far superior to anything, and I don't just mean in its class - not even Battlefield 3 can scratch the surface, and the latter comes off as gamey and shallow in comparison. All the game needs is some love and for Tripwire to go back and undo the haphazard and ill-advised design changes they kept quiet until release, and give us the game we expected - the game that wants to get out.

This, people, is why you do not ever try and leave your niche once you've found it. Please remember this lesson.

I hate modern gaming, and here's why

There are a lot of reasons I'm growing increasingly frustrated with gaming. Some are to do with the developers, both commercial and mod, and some are to do with the community. This won't be a comprehensive guide to my pet hates, but a list of things that do irritate me and why. Feel free to chip in - the comment section is there for a reason.

Let's start with the sudden, almost unanimous swing from 'quality' to 'quantity'. While this is at least understandable on some level for some of the larger commercial developers and their publishers, what really gets me is how infectious it seems to be. The mentality of modders almost reflects this to a tee: pack in more shiny features, and focus on blinding players with a plethora of new toys before worrying about 'small' problems like game-breaking bugs or substandard gameplay. It's astounding just how rapidly this has spread; I've been hard-pressed to find a game or mod in development which isn't more concerned about adding in more filler than delivering what's needed most: consistent, enjoyable gameplay. It's another example of how devs are trying to be average at everything, but good at nothing, and it's not something that works well.

Back in the old days of gaming (read: last decade), the focus was almost solely on improving gameplay. Indeed, devs would cut enough content to create an entire new game just to streamline the experience. Some games were cut and restarted altogether, like Half-Life 2. There was no DLC, patches were entirely devoted to bugfixes and gameplay improvements, and people seemed happy with this arrangement. I certainly was. If we wanted more, we could add it ourselves; it wasn't the devs' job to pack the game full of whatever whimsical wants each and every player possessed. No longer! Devs will now go out of their way to accomodate for as many people as possible, broadening their target audience from a well-chosen niche to literally anyone. We high-and-mighty PC gamers usually attribute the overwhelming dumbing-down of games (particularly when favourites are ruined in this manner) to console gamers, but that's not entirely true. We, too, are the ones causing this downfall. More on this later, as now I'll explore some of the effects.

There's no two ways around it: modern games are becoming increasingly easy. I don't mean that we're all getting so good at them it seems easy, I mean that developers are deliberately dumbing these games down so they're more accessible. In a lot of cases, this is absolutely not a good thing. A game with a steep learning curve will usually have a strong, dedicated fanbase (no matter their size), and more often than not, this fanbase have become very good at the game through a lot of hard-learned lessons. Opening up that game to the 'drooling masses' usually results in a much bigger and more mainstream fanbase, but very likely will drive the old hands away. We'll look at two examples: Red Orchestra: Ostfront and its mods, and Il-2 Sturmovik.

From its earliest days as an Unreal Tournament mod, Red Orchestra has been aimed squarely at those looking for a more immersive and realistic WWII shooter. It's hard to pick up and even for veteran players, it remains unforgiving. There's very little room for error, and what room there is tends not to exist for very long. It says a lot about Tripwire's dedication to staying true to their roots that upon making the retail game, Ostfront, they did very little in the way of making the game more accessible to new players. While this means RO has a comparatively tiny community for its age, those players tend to be fairly close-knit and have stayed the course, despite newer shooters coming out in the years since. I recall watching a G4 review of the game shortly after I got into it, and sitting there in disbelief as it was labelled pretty much the worst game ever just because the presenters - who presumably don't care about any game that isn't Quake - thought it took "forever" to reload the bolt-action rifles. The video accompanying this review showed quite plainly why they had such a horrible experience: they were trying to play the game as if it was a typical fast-paced FPS. They were running around in the open with a 91/30, trying to hipshoot enemies from across the map. At the time I was pretty mad that such a good game was reviewed by such idiots and thus given a bad image, but now I'm rather glad that was the case. It's kept the CS:S kiddies away and kept bullshit to a minimum.

The mods Mare Nostrum and Carpathian Crosses follow the same path as the game itself, providing quality content and not dumbing the gameplay down at all. Both mods are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Mare Nostrum is under continuing development, but I've yet to see a populated server; the last time I recall anyone playing it was after its release on Steam. This is an almighty shame, as it's one of the better mods I've played for any game.

On the other hand, we have Darkest Hour. The mod takes place in Western Europe - chiefly France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - but I suppose someone had to do it. Unfortunately, this immediately ropes in a whole lot of gamers with little or no interest in RO or any of its other mods; all they want to do is relive scenes from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. A whole Day of Defeat clan, numbering somewhere beyond two hundred members at last count, immediately came into the mod, bought up a whole lot of servers, and set about trying to turn it into their previous platform by making replicas of maps like Donner. Any other RO vets should know how this turned out - for the rest of you, 'badly' doesn't even begin to cover it. The map was dominated by SMG classes and an exercise in misery for everyone else. By the time they finally got over their hard-on for bringing DoD:S into the mod, they decided to play realism with the long-standing units. At time of writing, they own the only frequently-populated mixed-map server outside of Europe, and take a generally hostile stance to anyone and everyone. In short, a single external influence has a monopoly on the game servers. You work it out.

Even if there were some less strictly-run (and equally populated) servers to play on, the community has been so saturated with imports from other games that each passing update makes it that little bit less fun for the old hands. Rather than adapt to the RO way of gaming, the overwhelming impression I get from the Darkest Hour community is "this is too boring, it's too realistic, it's not fun, change the game to make it perfectly balanced". Balance is not something that works out so well in a game like RO or its mods; you end up with the Tiger situation (i.e. the Tiger was nerfed to the point of uselessness in the retail game) or the SMG situation (they suffer worse muzzle climb than rifle-calibre semiautomatics). Both of these were measures to try and prevent complaints from the less attentive players, and both (in the opinion of this writer and also many others) is the game's biggest downfall. Mare Nostrum did away with both issues and is far better for it; Darkest Hour got rid of both issues and replaced them with ten more. Grenades, as of the last patch, are utterly useless; they have to land within three feet of your target, and even then it's not a sure thing. The reason? To prevent "grenade spam". Never mind that oftentimes during not just WWII but before and since, whole sections would throw a grenade or two each into a building to clear it out. There is currently a lot of debate about putting Pershings or even Super Pershings into some maps, because apparently no Allied tanker has the sense to just flank their German counterparts and kill them from behind. The 'Super Stuart' is so incredibly buffed that it's preferred over most Sherman variants.

Unlike the other two mods, DH also suffers from an acute case of 'Shiny Kit Sindrome' - every update, scores of new features (usually of questionable value) are added, while the basic art assets remain less consistent than my shooting scores. Some of the art is beautiful and a handful of the maps are on par with the best commercial offerings, while a good deal of the weapons look horrible and most of the other maps are a few boxy buildings on some flat ground. Calling for these issues to be addressed will earn you a lot of abuse from the community, whose only concern is how many more updates they need to wait for X super tank which saw little to no combat in the war, or Y useless fantasy feature I wouldn't expect from ArmA II let alone a mod running on the UE2.5. I'm not kidding; some of these people unironically beg over and over for a single, massive open-world map, field repairs for vehicles, and logistics chains. Of course, they also ask for the team they don't play as to be nerfed into oblivion as well.

Like RO, the Il-2 Sturmovik series is extremely hard for new players to get into; going online is like attending the Hartmann family reunion, even for someone who's been playing flight sims since CFS 1 (like myself). While the original developer works on the next game, Storm of War: Battle of Britain (which looks to be continuing the tradition of realism over all else), a third party released Il-2 Birds of Prey on consoles, and later Wings of Prey on PC. Playing the latter was a serious eye-opener; even with the settings on full realism, I felt more like I was watching the aerial combat sequences from Pearl Harbour than playing a game in the Il-2 series. While the graphics were gorgeous, they were stylised to hell and back; everything was either desaturated or over-saturated with no middle ground; the aircraft models, while detailed, lacked the accuracy of the former games; the aircraft paint schemes weren't even vaguely close to what they should have been (even the average Hollywood flick does a better job of replicating RAF markings than was done in WoP) and overall, the flight models just felt... wrong. I still can't pin the exact problem, but I do know that I didn't feel like I was playing an Il-2 game at all. It felt more like Battlefield flying.

In previous posts (if memory serves correctly, as it's been a long time since my last update), I have spoken about how Fallout 3 suffers horribly from this dumbing-down. It's not so much a hardcore post-apocalyptic survival game (like the true Fallout games) as it is babby's first venture into post-apocalyptic games. Apparently New Vegas remedies this, but I am going to have to wait and see; it doesn't unlock here until tomorrow. Why we still have to deal with staggered release dates and regional pricing in these days of Steam is anyone's guess - mine is publishers are concerned only about profits and not about actual gamers. Prove me wrong.

Jesus, I go on a bit when I'm irritated, don't I?

Atmosphere vs. Gameplay - Round Two

Back to gaming, finally.

Lately (mainly due to the two more recent STALKER games being broken, and me having played Shadow of Chernobyl through about six or seven times by now), I've been playing more Fallout 3. Technically, I've finished the game once; however, on my first run I was still in the 'hurry up and finish the main quest, before it all goes down the pan on you' mindset of nearly every other game I've played. This sense of inevitability drove me to blast through the main quest at such a rate that I had barely explored the map beyond the central area of the Capital Wasteland, as well as the most direct routes between quest objectives. In doing so, I missed probably a good 50-60% of what the game had to offer, and it was too late to do anything.

Thankfully, I'd saved halfway through the assault on the Jefferson Memorial. After the credits finished, I immediately loaded up and put as much distance between myself and the ensuing battle as possible, before wandering off to explore. This broke the game pretty badly, but at least I got to explore a little.

Recently, I started the game over for the sake of altering my playing style a little. It's this character I've been playing on, and it was halfway through a trip between Meresti and Arefu that I decided on the topic for my next post.

Fallout had a very tangible time restriction on the main quest, and this was very apparent. You were told in your briefing, you had a countdown timer accessible from your Pip-Boy, and it added the very real risk of not getting things done in time and suffering for it. Fallout 3, on the other hand, seems happy to do away with this utterly. STALKER used time constraints on its side quests, but Bethesda wouldn't even take this step; even where a sense of urgency seems logical, there is absolutely none. The Big Town residents you're supposed to save from the Super Mutants in Germantown can and will wait for as long as you want. You could feasibly spend a year ingame; they'd still be there, and you'd still be able to rescue them. With this in mind, it's not entirely strange to ponder whether they really need saving at all.

Bethesda seem to half-do things a lot. The potential for character variation is decent at worst, yet everyone looks and sounds the same. Some areas of the Wasteland shine in their own desolate way, while others look like they simply took rocks, puddles, dead trees and grass and scattered them willy-nilly around the landscape. I haven't been to Washington DC (or at least not that I can remember), but I'm fairly certain even all-out nuclear war wouldn't make it look like some kind of incredibly rocky hinterland. Most pertinent to this post, they try and create a sense of urgency through the briefings for your quests, but they utterly fail to follow this through by creating any kind of consequence at all for not completing them as soon as possible.

Of course, this would present problems for players like me, who try to do everything at once: it'd result in a lot of failed quests and a lot of bad consequences. Presumably the main reason for their choice is to comply with the ever-worsening trend of molly-coddling players, making things nice and easy for them while making sure they never feel a sense of failure or regret. Fallout was made back in the day where games were challenging to the point of frustration, and the player was left on their own to work things out. Very few games seem to opt for this philosophy anymore, and that's a sad loss on our part.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind sacrificing a little of the openness of the game world for the improvements to the overall atmosphere that such a change would bring about. Sure, you might have to decide whether to save those settlers or not in order to complete another quest. You may even need to drop everything halfway through and run back to the other side of the Wasteland in order to complete something of a much higher priority. Having said that, though, it's important to realise that the way the game works is a large part of why quests will always wait for the player.

Basically, nothing happens without your presence. Until you show up at the quest start location, it simply hasn't started. Once it's completed, that's it, there's no more. Everything that happens within the Capital Wasteland hinges upon the player, and the player alone. In some ways, GSC did get something right with Clear Sky and its faction war system: things will happen, whether you're there or not. If your friends in the Cordon are attacked while you're in Yantar, then hard luck. Life (and death) will go on with or without you or any other given character. This created some frustrating scenarios, but in the eyes of this gamer, that's preferable to a magical world where everybody simply sits around, waiting for that inevitable protagonist to show up.

The Zone feels fluid, almost real. If you're not there to help your friends, they die. If you die, nobody really cares. Your body will be looted, maybe eaten, and will decay back into the irradiated earth it lies upon. The Capital Wasteland feels like some kind of bizarre dream. If you're not there, your friends won't even be attacked; if you die, everything stops.

I doubt we'll see anything change in New Vegas, but I certainly hope that as more open-world games are released, we'll start to see more believable environments and less shallow facades.

I'M MAD, MAD AS HELL

Yes, I'm aware this is meant to be for articles related to gaming. Yes, I'm aware that rants are generally not something people want to read. No, I don't care. I'm seriously getting sick of this bullshit and I need to blow off steam.

Once again, Youtube comments are the cause. You'd think by now I'd have just disabled them, but unfortunately some part of me feels compelled to try and educate the great unwashed masses of drivelling neckbeards that dwell there, whether they want it or not.

I'd best give you some background: I decided to go watch the video clip from the Herd's version of I Was Only Nineteen set to the original Redgum music. For those who are currently giving their monitors the vacant stare of cluelessness, that's an anti-war song written about Vietnam, from the perspective of a returned digger who is suffering PTSD. Rather than inspire massive protesting, it actually ended up becoming basically a kind of soldiers' anthem.

Naturally, you'd expect the usual pro-war/anti-war/anti-argument shitfight to be going on. It was, and with spectacular ferocity. That didn't really bother me. What did bother me were the comments of two or three people in particular. One was railing against 'those uniformed cretins', alternately calling us 'murderers', 'killers', and various other insults. One was essentially calling us all idiots, suggesting we have somehow been hoodwinked into doing the dirtywork of the so-called 'Elite', who naturally control the world and everyone and everything in it through means so subversive that only these people can see it. Yeah, sure. The other was basically backing the second guy up.

Once again, I'm left wondering where this lot gets off on telling us how much more they know about our line of work than we do. One said his dad was a Vietnam veteran, but he himself was a civ. The other two are just idiot civs who think they know everything. I'm all for world peace. I think it's a wonderful little dream. I say dream because it will literally never happen. As long as there are two people left on Earth, at least one will want to impose themself upon the other; more likely, both will. I live in the real world, so I realise that disarming a country is little more than an open invitation for whichever despot or resource-hungry nation that happens to be nearest. Apparently, though, wherever these nuts live, every single person gets along in perfect harmony and nobody is motivated by greed or by wanting to impose their beliefs on their neighbours. I sure wish I lived in this mystical place. Meanwhile, when someone decides they don't like your kind and comes around trying to kill you off, enslave you, or otherwise do something you won't like by use of armed force, don't be surprised when waving signs and chanting slogans and wearing flowers around your neck does absolutely nothing to discourage them. I would truly love to see how fast these oblivious morons change their precious world view when, for whatever reason, there are no friendly troops around to keep their cushy little lives from being completely ripped apart. We maintain their right to insult us. We might not like it, but we do it anyway. I can take all the insults in the world, but one thing I absolutely will not stand for is when people insult my mates, which is what all this bullshit amounts to. Worse yet are the kinds of scum who insult people who died so they would be able to say shit like this without disappearing into some black hole and never coming out.

For those people who actually have some common sense and common decency, thanks.

ATKINSON GONE; LIFE OWNS

If this works out to be hype, I don't even know what I'll do. Likely something involving copious amounts of alcohol.

Article

Good riddance.

Fratricide

This was actually written in March, but it hadn't posted yet (presumably the fault of my oh-so-wonderful connection). Since it's still rather relevant, here it is.

I'd best warn you now, faithful readers. For this article, I'll be breaking from my usual attempts to avoid anything people would get offended by; if you do, for whatever irrational reason, find yourself offended by arbitrarily-chosen words, perhaps you'd best stop reading for now.

I've had a pretty boring day. My internet has been causing me no end of trouble - as usual - and so even Youtube was out of the question for entertainment. I couldn't start many of my games, because Steam kept crashing and then wouldn't switch to offline mode. I didn't really feel like playing any of my non-Steam games, either. Eventually, I resorted to a mix of Lock On and sitting around waiting for Steam to start working properly.

Eventually, I was able to get it running. I then found myself with only a few games to play, as I can't update anything (my connection is shaped, so I'm running at dialup speeds right now). I decided to give World in Conflict MP another shot, since I've been playing against the AI a little and I seemed to have made at least some improvement. I sign in, find an Australian server with a pretty decent number of active players, and figure I've lucked out. Not so.

We lose three games in as many minutes because our support player seemingly can't be bothered to get any anti-aircraft cover up and running. In light of this, and the fact that I'm sick of watching my units get slaughtered defending our last capzone while my teammates mill around an empty zone doing absolutely nothing, I decide to go support and drop some artillery. I settle into this pretty well, and when I don't actually make kills, I'm still denying the enemy any hope of taking the capzones.

Apparently, though, I'm violating some unwritten rule of the game by doing this, and my own team starts gobbing off at me and trying to votekick me. I raise the issue that I'm by no means good at the game, and instead of actually being helpful, they figure this is an even better excuse to harass me. Eventually, one bitches that I'm just dumping artillery and not providing air support; last I checked, nobody else had been in any of the previous games, but no complaints were forthcoming then. Not only that, I was actually dropping effective barrages, eventually dumping a nuke right in the middle of the map and shaving a fair chunk off of the enemy force. You'd think my teammates would be at least a little appreciative of this, especially since the explosion wiped out several helicopters. Nope. Not good enough, apparently. I got kicked about ten seconds later.

It's fucking well hard enough having to deal with sore losers and other pricks in general without your own team joining in. As far as I saw I had the second best score on the team, was constantly disrupting and destroying enemy assaults on my teammates' forces, and I actually saved up my tactical aid points rather than pissing them away like everyone else was. Just because some self-absorbed piece of shit thinks I should be personally sacrificing every unit I can to protect him as he ponces about doing sweet fuck all, I got kicked from a game which I was helping to win. With all the bullshit gamers have to take, you'd really think they'd be less inclined to act like absolute pricks to each other, but I guess not.

It sure is a good thing I like the game and I'm not easily discouraged by morons (quite the opposite), because this kind of thing is what kills off good games. Sorry if you don't like me using an effective weapon to maximum potential; I guess if WWIII comes, you're going to ask the enemy to stop bombing the shit out of your house so you can finish that one more game before you get up to the next rank by cruising around and dragging yourself up off of your teammates' hard (and utterly thankless) work.

A little originality, please.

Some time ago, I posted an article on the generic locations used by many games, and put forth the proposal of developers going to a war far removed from any they've portrayed (however accurately or poorly) so far. Perhaps I was setting the bar too high. Perhaps it's too much to expect from the modern PC gaming industry, where large developers are so single-mindedly fixated on churning out the next reiteration of the same game in time to seize the Christmas market (yes, Activision, I am talking about you right now) that any suggestion of originality warrants the deposing of a studio's chiefs.

Maybe we should take this a little slower, then. So here's my new proposal: why not stick with the same locations, but go to a different war. Surely this isn't too much to ask? There have been plenty of wars in every developer's favourite areas, so it's not as if there's a lack of choice. In Europe alone, war has been raging since the dawn of time and it's only since WWII that things have settled down. The Middle East has probably never been at peace in human history. Likewise, central and south-east Asia have been hotbeds for conflicts through the ages.

As the favourite of late seems to be the Middle-Eastern Area of Operations, let's go to Afghanistan. But how about we do it differently this time? No more ACU-clad Americans. No more high-tech rifles which will never actually end up replacing anything, let alone the M4. No, let's take a trip back in time to the 1979-1989 conflict with the Soviet Union, in what has come to be known as their own Vietnam.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I watched Charlie Wilson's War recently. By recently, I actually mean yesterday. I see no reason this game does not exist, aside from the industry's apparent reluctance to make anyone who isn't American (or sometimes British) appear good at all, let alone a heroic character. The war was long, was bloody, and had a distinct turning point; it had a spectacular victory by the underdog, only to plunge back into chaos due to cessation of support from the US government; it had plenty of intrigue, thanks to the incredible scheme that saw the utterly outgunned and outmatched mujahideen armed with Stinger missiles. The Soviet helicopters, in particular the Mi-24 gunships, had been the absolute scourge of the Afghan resistance fighters. However, as the imposing machines began to fall from the sky, the entire course of the war changed and the eventual withdrawal by the unsuccessful Soviet invasion force was considered a contributing factor in the crumbling of the USSR.

So once again, I'm putting out a challenge. Quit working on the tenth samey re-release of a tired series, and put the love back into games that has been missing from the mainstream for years now. Eventually even the drooling diehards, who are currently oblivious to the sharp decline in quality of their favourite franchises, will come about. Try actually doing something different, something which sets you apart from the rest of the industry. Who knows, you may even make a killing.