Gamecloud talks with John Gibson of Tripwire Interactive, the developers behind the MSUC winning UT2004 mod Red Orchestra and the new standalone U-Engine title Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. The topics of conversation include the content you should expect to find in the new release as well as some general gameplay elements.
Gamecloud - What other new improvements and additions will be added to Red Orchestra?
John Gibson - We’ve made major improvements in almost all areas of the game. Essentially, we looked at the feedback from all the fans and the testers and picked the things we thought needed the most improvement, or would have the most impact on gameplay if we added. Player movement is a big area that we have concentrated on for the retail version. We’ve added leaning, diving to prone, crouched sprinting, etc. Some of the things the player can do now have never been seen in this genre such as the ability to dive over obstacles or even dive out windows. With all of the new player movement features the pace of the game has definitely increase in a realistic way.
Another thing that we had gotten a lot of feedback on was the learning curve. What we found was that almost anyone that got past the learning curve was hooked and became a diehard fan. But with all of the things that you can do in Red Orchestra, we found people were a bit overwhelmed by it all. For the retail version we have went to great lengths to streamline things and make sure the player is never just standing in a field with a gun in their hands wondering what they are supposed to be doing. Many things in the mod were unnecessarily and unrealistically difficult. Our philosophy has always been simplistic realism - if it is easy to do in real life, it should be easy to do in the game. This philosophy really permeates the whole retail game.
Gamecloud - What other new improvements and additions will be added to Red Orchestra?
John Gibson - We’ve made major improvements in almost all areas of the game. Essentially, we looked at the feedback from all the fans and the testers and picked the things we thought needed the most improvement, or would have the most impact on gameplay if we added. Player movement is a big area that we have concentrated on for the retail version. We’ve added leaning, diving to prone, crouched sprinting, etc. Some of the things the player can do now have never been seen in this genre such as the ability to dive over obstacles or even dive out windows. With all of the new player movement features the pace of the game has definitely increase in a realistic way.
Another thing that we had gotten a lot of feedback on was the learning curve. What we found was that almost anyone that got past the learning curve was hooked and became a diehard fan. But with all of the things that you can do in Red Orchestra, we found people were a bit overwhelmed by it all. For the retail version we have went to great lengths to streamline things and make sure the player is never just standing in a field with a gun in their hands wondering what they are supposed to be doing. Many things in the mod were unnecessarily and unrealistically difficult. Our philosophy has always been simplistic realism - if it is easy to do in real life, it should be easy to do in the game. This philosophy really permeates the whole retail game.
