Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising

The Game Room
1

Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising is a sequel to what I consider to probably be the best military shooter game/sim of all time, Operation Flashpoint.

It’s a realism focused first person wargame played in a massive gameworld. Rather than having specific maps, they mapped out an entire island that’s 250 square kilometers or so. You could run from one end of it to the other in one sitting if you wanted, and it would take you 10 hours. The draw distance on the game (PC at least, not sure if it’s restricted on consoles) is 35 kilometers(!) which means you can see terrain and enemies as far as you could in real life, rather than being restricted to looking at fog a few hundred yards out. You have firefights at realistic combat ranges - not the 25 yard fights you typically see in pretty much every FPS games, but you could shoot it out at hundreds of yards as infantry or even further with vehicles. And you’d have to factor in bullet drop, leading targets, projectile travel time, etc - not a hitscan instant railgun bullet.

Any vehicle you can see you can use. Hop in a car, if applicable load your squad in tanks at a friendly base, etc. And you can use any weapon you stumble across, whether it be part of a cache or from a fallen enemy. Depending on the mission, you may be able to call in off-board artillery, laser designate a target for an airstrike, call for a helicopter to pick you up, etc.

Since you aren’t funneled through a map designed to make you take one path, you are simply given missions with objectives, transport, support assets, etc. and you can choose how to go about accomplishing them yourself. You generally command a squad. There’s coop play available for the single player missions, or different game modes available for adversarial multiplayer.

It isn’t made by the same people - the publisher owns the name “operation flashpoint” so the developers of the original game went on to make their own spiritual sequels to the game, most recently Arma 2. Which is an ambitious, but flawed game - I really like what they were going for, but it’s a huge project for a small dev team, and it’s not very polished. I have some control issues that make the game nearly unplayable for me - I’m hoping they fix it in a patch before I buy the game.

So anyway, the publisher hired a new development team to work on the official sequel, since they own the rights to the property. I was skeptical at first because I didn’t think another dev team would stay true to the spirit of the original, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it looks like they may have. It’s also a bigger budget, larger development team game that’s likely to have a lot more polish and fewer bugs than Arma 2, while still being the same style of game.

I’m really excited about the game. If they pull it off well, it could be among the greatest games of all time. The biggest negative currently is that multiplayer on the PC only has a 16 vs 16 format. In a game with as big a scope as this, with multiple vehicles in use, the bigger the better. Hopefully it will be moddable somehow to allow for more players. The console versions are limited to 4vs4, which is really crappy.

Here’s some game footage where the developer runs through and explains aspects of their design goals. It looks great, and it seems like they really have the right idea. IIRC this footage is from the xbox version - why they’d want to demo that, I don’t know. It should be beautiful and more detailed on the PC.

Vid 1 part 1
Vid 1 part 2

Vid 2 part 1
Vid 2 part 2

2

Im getting it for the Xbox as soon as it comes out

and this wil be the first thing I try when I get it…hope there is a achievement for that.

3

Sort of.

Skirinka Island Tour (30)
Find the PLA helicopter and fly it around Skirinka Island in Dragon Rising

4

Shame you cant get one for just walking across the island
By the way, if these are video’s from the Xbox version this game is going to be the best looking games on a console ever.

5

That looks brilliant. I played quite a bit of the first game, and the long nights planning and executing a mission with a few mates were good times indeed.

6

Hmm, interesting. Keep us updated if it turns out to be good and not a buggy mess.

7

You can do the whole campaign (or any part) in 4 player coop, so I’m hoping we can build at least a small SDMB community around the game for the PC version.

8

I was looking into a more realistic shooter I can (suck at) enjoy recently and was disappointed by ARMA’s unpolished and overly complex take on the genre. This seems to fit the bill however: a realistic approach that is neatly and efficiently packaged in a modern and polished UI.

The whole premise sounds great, from the incredibly huge, seamless battlefield to the great graphics and tech working behind the scenes.

I’m pre-ordering it tonight.

9

Some questions:

Does it feature deformable terrain/destructible structures?

Can we create free form/scripted missions?

Love the night mission vid.

10

I’m not sure as to those questions. I’m pretty sure they’d include a mission editor - since with the whole world designed, it’s very easy to let people create their own objectives, assets, etc. And it would expand greatly on the replayability of the game.

If I read some good reviews today, I’m going to get it off steam, and me and a friend are going to run through the campaign in co-op mode. Does anyone want to explore the game with us?

11

Uh, caution before you buy the PC version. They may have massively screwed up the multiplayer.

I’m reading that they didn’t release dedicated server executables, instead they want to use a console style matchmaking system where one of the players is chosen to host the game through games for windows lives or whatever the service is called. This would massively hamper the online experience and possibly quickly kill the online community very quickly. I have no idea how they could possibly fuck up this much, so I’m hoping this is some sort of misunderstanding or mistake. In the meantime I’m holding off on buying it until this situation is cleared up.

12

This preview indicates the buildings and other structures are destructible…and stay that way. Blowing that bridge now might be a real pain in the ass later. It also mentions fires permanently scarring the landscape, but I doubt there’s true deformable terrain, just from a practicality standpoint.

The Wikipedia page also mentions a mission editor for the PC version.

13

Looks really good, but I’d like to turn a bunch of that HUD off, starting with the crosshairs. Amazon has it for $39, but it’s out of stock. :frowning: Console versions are $73!!?

14

The steam price lowered to 39.99. The HUD elements are turned off with higher levels of difficulty. The game controls difficulty not by making you a bullet sponge or making your fire hit any harder, but rather easier modes have more HUD elements, tells you where to go, where the enemy is, lots of checkpoints to save whereas the hardwer modes remove HUD elements and reduce the amount of saves.

I’m holding off on buying this until I find out what the deal is with the lack of dedicated servers. It seems like they have managed to deliver a probably DOA multiplayer experience through sheer incompetance.

15

I’m hearing the same thing about multi-player. No servers and no way to join a multi-player game once it has began. It makes no sense. Better delay the game than let it go out like that.

16

If someone picks this up for console, can you post up to let us now if it supports split-screen co-op? Based on web comments, I am hearing no, but I hold out vain hope. :slight_smile:

17

Beef, I’m sorry to hear your shiny new toy is broken! That sucks.

(To keep you occupied while they fix it, you could help me complete an Expert campaign in L4D before the new one comes out. ;))

18

Well, there goes another game ruined by multiplatform development for the lowest common denominator. The multiplayer is basically just a port for what they did for the Xbox. Unless they implement dedicated servers, anti cheat, server browsing etc. in a hurry then the multiplayer for the game will be dead pretty quckly. Coop will still be fun probably since you’re only dealing with 2-4 people in that case but competitive multiplayer will suck ass.

19

Having had a little more time with it, the coop is actually pretty fun and you can avoid their laggy buggy online matchmaking service if you’re playing with friends and you can tell them your IP.

The multiplayer is so half-assed and broken that they don’t even do a cd key check like every other game ever has done, and that’s the most viable means of preventing piracy.

I haven’t played the whole campaign yet and I haven’t tested out the vehicles except for some jeeps, so I don’t know how fun that stuff will be - but the actual infantry combat in this game is very cool. It’s one of the few games where you actually fight at realistic ranges. It feels like a beefier, better Ghost Recon in that regard, and that’s high praise from me.

I wouldn’t recommend buying it though unless you can get it cheaply and/or they fix it and make proper multiplayer.

But some of the SDMBers from the steam group and I were playing some multiplayer. If anyone else wants to join us, contact me and we’ll see when schedules match up. 4 player coop will be awesome.

20

Had a try over at a friend’s house today. Beautiful game, very hard to see what you’re shooting at, but tons of fun.

Got killed a few times by a gunship, that sucked. Had to reload a checkpoint because my sniper/AT guy decided it would be a brilliant plan to fire his AT through me. Four times in very nearly exactly the same spot!