Ender Wiggin
Junior Member
Alright so I got this game so I could play co-op with a friend; final verdict: Playable, Much more Polished then Dragon Rising, worried about replayability.
In more detail the game traces the on going operations of US Marines in Tajikistan versus a Taliban-Lite militant outfit before finally a border skirmish with PLA border troops result in an escalation as PLA mechanized forces intervene in Tajikistan in retaliation for murdered athletes in the 2012 Olympic Games.
In contrast with Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising which was a linear string of American missions with little story or characterization the new OFP takes a more narrativist route and attempts to present a more engaging and immersive experience. There's characterization and heavy dialogue that makes one wonder how many times the game developers must have marathoned Generation Kill. While at the same time cleverly merging gameplay and story segregation by much more fluidly combining gameplay, story, and tutorials into a more fluid experience.
This is a boon for them characterization-wise as the Master Sgt,. In charge of your fire team is quick to remind of important gameplay tips and tactics through the guise of "His Rules" ("Don't Forget Rule one, if your in over your head fall back.") cleverly combining the Drill Sergeant Experience with gameplay to keep the player immersed at all times, I was never jarred from my engagement with the game and felt that the game maintained its verisimilitude at all times, in ways any casual viewer or reader of military fiction would appreciate.
The dialogue is funny and contains genuine charm that grows on you as you interact with your teammates, but unfortunate this is where the game developers show their inexperience. The charm it does show, shows how lacking it tends to be. Your limited in your interaction, the characters are roughly just walking marine stereotypes munching on an endless stream of one liners when they're not funny and no amount of replaying or awkward fumbling with the keyboard will allow you to learn anything more about Coto, Belatto or the Sgt then you did in the first 5 minutes. The Sgt is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold Hard Ass who cares about keeping you guys alive, the marines with you have foul mouths who live just for conflict and an endless game of oneupmanship epeen contests with each other of who espouses the most machismo before dying to enemy fire like a suicidal penguin.
The story itself has for the length of gameplay and for its intended tactical shooter experience has few flaws. The mission briefings are genuinely entertaining and creative with the usage of intense graphical visuals to the point that never before has map reading been more avant-guard. The game insists on not wasting too much of your time walking around point A to point B and for longer segments gracefully provides vehicles that would otherwise frustrate even the most committed tactical gamer.
The game takes a fairly realistic look at unfolding escalation, since your a fire team led by a Sgt your hardly going to have the most up to date geopolitical information at your disposal and information is withheld and furiously rumored upon by your squadmates, again; increasing immersion. The Mission briefings lets you know the pertinent information with just enough foreshadowing and decent writing to pull off a narrative.
So in the end what does the game accomplish? Well it is an improvement over Dragon Rising, it does decently combined story and realist gameplay elements together and provides excellent hope for future titles. But the lack of a mission editor, competitive multiplayer or an SDK severely limits the games applicability and ultimately rather forgetable. It would have done better as a console release. The game's story is certainly no Modern Warfare.
What can they do to improve?: The game has an indentity crisis, on one hand they seem to want a story to justify the gameplay but don't give much effort to it, they have a low bar and they meet it but never has it been more painfully obvious that the bar was set low.
Their next title they need to aim big, they need a much larger concept, a larger emergent story directly affecting and affected by your choices and success as a player.
What I would suggest is work on expanding the open world game play, have the huge map and then give multiple choose-your-own-adventure multiple choice missions where you can go to different places to do the mission (while locking other mission story paths as now closed) progressing the story and have your success and choices affect the story allowing for different endings (Chinese Victory, US Marine Victory, Taliban Victory, Minor, Major, Decisive, Stalemate etc).
Write Better More Indepth Characters: I liked the Sgt in this game, he was genuinely helpful in an immersive way and had solid characterization but we know nothing nothing about him. The other teammates and numerous other marines seen in the game might as well be red shirts for all we know about them. It should be possible to have conversations with them and learn more about the motivations, strengths and weaknesses and the personality of every marine you contact. The CYOA gameplay suggested earlier can help with this by giving different marine outfits you need to interact with a FOB or some kind of base you can hang out in between missions to get to know marines, and letting you choose which marines you bring with you with missions.
The more times you go on missions with the same ones not only should they *level up* and get better, but you should be getting to know them much more strengthening your nakama with them.
Finally don't allow for characters to be killed off during a mission and then respawn them with the same names. It kills immersion and for me required my flexible sense of humor to make work in game. "YOU KILLED BELLATO! YOU BASTARD!"
Solution? Make it so that while characters can be incapacitated and knocked to the ground (making them useless for the current firefight) they can't be outright killed only wounded forcing you to revive them with the medkit. This way they stay alive and your immersion isn't destroyed with a bang and is a cheap way to get you to care more directly about them.
And on harder difficulties actually outright kill them off and let the story compensate and reflect this, make peoples conversations become more somber as the body bag count goes up.
Make the AI Better Even if Slightly: The AI generally had poor coordination and seems to only be a threat to the player with pure numbers or when the mission calls for it (or pure luck). The enemies were either too few and thus their poor coordination was extremely poor or so many that it became rather egregious to so easily gundown dozens of PLA troopers without a casualty. The enemy should take and make better use of cover, fire team support, and support weapons to force you from your position.
In general fire arm accuracy seemed at the right position, "close calls" and tracers flying right by your head gave the experience of being in a firefight and giving a sense of danger without getting frustrating by injuring you egregiously from just playing the game.
Give the Player a Higher Stake in the Outcome: Chinese invading Tajikistan and you having to do guerilla missions sounds cool but each mission is just tedious block in the story if you actually have no real effect on the wareffort. This is war the game squanders its open world aspect by having everything being scripted.
The enemy on a strategic and tactical level should be responding to you and your actions, destroying supply trucks should have a real ingame effect, in real life high intensity local conflicts use up insane amounts of ammunition and even destroying a few supply trucks could lead to disruptions in operations. By having it so that destroying a convoy resulted in a victory somewhere becuase the enemy had to break off the assault for lack of munitions would be awesome case of emmergant gameplay.
Which should result in the enemy AI trying to counter your moves by for example gradually beefing up its defense of its supply columns forcing better tactics and preparation from you. While your own commander AI could be working on following up your successes with an offensive of its own.
So much potential and I hope game developers can make proper use of this.
Beef Up The Story: What Modern Warfare and similar presents us is that there's a major war where the player actions matter, combine choose your own multiple choice mission gameplay with epic high brow story telling. Take the game to different settings and locations, introduce conflict not just the conflict conflict but STORY and character conflict between factions that the player has to navigate around. Present an engaging story that they can effect.
Now the game was ultimately playable enjoyable experience but its hard to ignore that so much more could have been done; however this works for them as it does against them. It is very clear that the developers know their own limitations and obviously came up with the best story and game combination they could while making improvements to the engine. But they have a long way to go and they, and developers like them really need to step up their game. Pun Unintended.
In more detail the game traces the on going operations of US Marines in Tajikistan versus a Taliban-Lite militant outfit before finally a border skirmish with PLA border troops result in an escalation as PLA mechanized forces intervene in Tajikistan in retaliation for murdered athletes in the 2012 Olympic Games.
In contrast with Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising which was a linear string of American missions with little story or characterization the new OFP takes a more narrativist route and attempts to present a more engaging and immersive experience. There's characterization and heavy dialogue that makes one wonder how many times the game developers must have marathoned Generation Kill. While at the same time cleverly merging gameplay and story segregation by much more fluidly combining gameplay, story, and tutorials into a more fluid experience.
This is a boon for them characterization-wise as the Master Sgt,. In charge of your fire team is quick to remind of important gameplay tips and tactics through the guise of "His Rules" ("Don't Forget Rule one, if your in over your head fall back.") cleverly combining the Drill Sergeant Experience with gameplay to keep the player immersed at all times, I was never jarred from my engagement with the game and felt that the game maintained its verisimilitude at all times, in ways any casual viewer or reader of military fiction would appreciate.
The dialogue is funny and contains genuine charm that grows on you as you interact with your teammates, but unfortunate this is where the game developers show their inexperience. The charm it does show, shows how lacking it tends to be. Your limited in your interaction, the characters are roughly just walking marine stereotypes munching on an endless stream of one liners when they're not funny and no amount of replaying or awkward fumbling with the keyboard will allow you to learn anything more about Coto, Belatto or the Sgt then you did in the first 5 minutes. The Sgt is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold Hard Ass who cares about keeping you guys alive, the marines with you have foul mouths who live just for conflict and an endless game of oneupmanship epeen contests with each other of who espouses the most machismo before dying to enemy fire like a suicidal penguin.
The story itself has for the length of gameplay and for its intended tactical shooter experience has few flaws. The mission briefings are genuinely entertaining and creative with the usage of intense graphical visuals to the point that never before has map reading been more avant-guard. The game insists on not wasting too much of your time walking around point A to point B and for longer segments gracefully provides vehicles that would otherwise frustrate even the most committed tactical gamer.
The game takes a fairly realistic look at unfolding escalation, since your a fire team led by a Sgt your hardly going to have the most up to date geopolitical information at your disposal and information is withheld and furiously rumored upon by your squadmates, again; increasing immersion. The Mission briefings lets you know the pertinent information with just enough foreshadowing and decent writing to pull off a narrative.
So in the end what does the game accomplish? Well it is an improvement over Dragon Rising, it does decently combined story and realist gameplay elements together and provides excellent hope for future titles. But the lack of a mission editor, competitive multiplayer or an SDK severely limits the games applicability and ultimately rather forgetable. It would have done better as a console release. The game's story is certainly no Modern Warfare.
What can they do to improve?: The game has an indentity crisis, on one hand they seem to want a story to justify the gameplay but don't give much effort to it, they have a low bar and they meet it but never has it been more painfully obvious that the bar was set low.
Their next title they need to aim big, they need a much larger concept, a larger emergent story directly affecting and affected by your choices and success as a player.
What I would suggest is work on expanding the open world game play, have the huge map and then give multiple choose-your-own-adventure multiple choice missions where you can go to different places to do the mission (while locking other mission story paths as now closed) progressing the story and have your success and choices affect the story allowing for different endings (Chinese Victory, US Marine Victory, Taliban Victory, Minor, Major, Decisive, Stalemate etc).
Write Better More Indepth Characters: I liked the Sgt in this game, he was genuinely helpful in an immersive way and had solid characterization but we know nothing nothing about him. The other teammates and numerous other marines seen in the game might as well be red shirts for all we know about them. It should be possible to have conversations with them and learn more about the motivations, strengths and weaknesses and the personality of every marine you contact. The CYOA gameplay suggested earlier can help with this by giving different marine outfits you need to interact with a FOB or some kind of base you can hang out in between missions to get to know marines, and letting you choose which marines you bring with you with missions.
The more times you go on missions with the same ones not only should they *level up* and get better, but you should be getting to know them much more strengthening your nakama with them.
Finally don't allow for characters to be killed off during a mission and then respawn them with the same names. It kills immersion and for me required my flexible sense of humor to make work in game. "YOU KILLED BELLATO! YOU BASTARD!"
Solution? Make it so that while characters can be incapacitated and knocked to the ground (making them useless for the current firefight) they can't be outright killed only wounded forcing you to revive them with the medkit. This way they stay alive and your immersion isn't destroyed with a bang and is a cheap way to get you to care more directly about them.
And on harder difficulties actually outright kill them off and let the story compensate and reflect this, make peoples conversations become more somber as the body bag count goes up.
Make the AI Better Even if Slightly: The AI generally had poor coordination and seems to only be a threat to the player with pure numbers or when the mission calls for it (or pure luck). The enemies were either too few and thus their poor coordination was extremely poor or so many that it became rather egregious to so easily gundown dozens of PLA troopers without a casualty. The enemy should take and make better use of cover, fire team support, and support weapons to force you from your position.
In general fire arm accuracy seemed at the right position, "close calls" and tracers flying right by your head gave the experience of being in a firefight and giving a sense of danger without getting frustrating by injuring you egregiously from just playing the game.
Give the Player a Higher Stake in the Outcome: Chinese invading Tajikistan and you having to do guerilla missions sounds cool but each mission is just tedious block in the story if you actually have no real effect on the wareffort. This is war the game squanders its open world aspect by having everything being scripted.
The enemy on a strategic and tactical level should be responding to you and your actions, destroying supply trucks should have a real ingame effect, in real life high intensity local conflicts use up insane amounts of ammunition and even destroying a few supply trucks could lead to disruptions in operations. By having it so that destroying a convoy resulted in a victory somewhere becuase the enemy had to break off the assault for lack of munitions would be awesome case of emmergant gameplay.
Which should result in the enemy AI trying to counter your moves by for example gradually beefing up its defense of its supply columns forcing better tactics and preparation from you. While your own commander AI could be working on following up your successes with an offensive of its own.
So much potential and I hope game developers can make proper use of this.
Beef Up The Story: What Modern Warfare and similar presents us is that there's a major war where the player actions matter, combine choose your own multiple choice mission gameplay with epic high brow story telling. Take the game to different settings and locations, introduce conflict not just the conflict conflict but STORY and character conflict between factions that the player has to navigate around. Present an engaging story that they can effect.
Now the game was ultimately playable enjoyable experience but its hard to ignore that so much more could have been done; however this works for them as it does against them. It is very clear that the developers know their own limitations and obviously came up with the best story and game combination they could while making improvements to the engine. But they have a long way to go and they, and developers like them really need to step up their game. Pun Unintended.