My experiences with the RO2 beta.

Optimization is, hands-down, the number one problem with the game as it is. From my understand, UE3 isn't exactly a dream to work with, and you guys have done a great job with it- But when the vast majority of players that I've encountered in the game can barely scrounge 45 to 60 FPS with a top-of-the-line gaming rig, there's something amiss. In the near future, this sort of FPS drain may be chalked down to faulty coding or a memory leak- But, in my opinion, the symptoms I've experienced while playing the game best fit optimization issues. Outdoors, I get 30 to 40 FPS, with mild to severe stuttering during heavy firefights- Indoors, I get upwards of 60 constantly, and it hardly ever drains, regardless of what's going on. The biggest indicator to me that it has something to do with how the maps are optimized, however, is the fact that staring at the corners of the map gives you almost double or triple the FPS you get from staring into the center of the map, regardless of where you are. It's clear that you guys are pulling out some stops to try to get rid of this sort of thing, but if you want to attract and keep people with low to mid-range computers (and people with gaming computers that just can't seem to run the game), some heavy optimization should probably be going on, especially since you're a little over a week away from releasing the final product.

While this may be an ATI issue (I do have an ATI card, and a significant portion of people with ATI cards seem to be having problems with framerate stuttering), I doubt it, considering the numbers of Nvidia users that experience problems and ATI users that don't (and considering the fact that, almost universally, graphics options seem to have little to no effect on the framerate). The easiest way to solve all of these issues, however, is to optimize the game further. It's a surefire way to increase FPS, and it'll work for everyone. This will be the hardest thing to do, certainly, but it'll pay off in the end with increased player counts, more fluid firefights, and a "butter-smooth" first day.

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Looking at the server browser, I can see that it's hardly changed from the original Red Orchestra, which is bad. The filtering system is archaic and the overall scheme and layout is downright clunky. But once you get past the small text and repeated mashings of the "refresh list" button (when it chooses to work, that is, because a lot of people I've seen can't even get servers to appear on the browser), you're suddenly bombarded with a steady stream of numbers, figures, and names. The font varies from Russian-style new (in the case of the flashes of information such as "Allies have taken the park!" and such on your screen) to Windows 98 DOS font (in the case of players joining, leaving, and the majority of the writing on the sides of the screen). The majority of this information is, by and large, completely useless. I don't need to know who else is in the spawn queue with me. I just need to see where they're spawning and how many are spawning there. I don't need twelve different fonts and colors to designate who's my superior officer and who isn't- I just need one, and the only squad leader that matters at all is my own. It's hard enough trying to find out where that squad leader is, who he is, or what he's supposed to be doing while you're in game: Once you're dead, you've got a massive wall of sensory overload staring you in the face, and it's nigh impossible to figure out what it is that you're supposed to do with all this information.

That would be bad enough, but the majority of the garbage clogging up the screen makes it difficult for you to get into the game as well- You have to press no less than three buttons to spawn (one to choose your class, another to choose your spawnpoint, and a third to hit "ready"), and sometimes the game decides that it didn't register your click, or that you're just out of the game for however long, leaving you floating in limbo for three rounds of reinforcements until you finally decide to swap classes to something less appealing in a desperate attempt to try to actually play what you paid for. While drastic at this late stage, the UI needs to be drastically changed, cut down to its bare essentials. I don't need to navigate two menus to spawn and choose a class- Just put them on the same screen. Put the number of people spawning next to an area in parentheses next to the area's name. You guys have some talented UI designers, so put them to use- Don't rely on holdovers from the days of the original Red Orchestra to try to get by.

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My third and final complaint has to do with the penultimate gameplay gimmick- Bandaging. Bandaging is a wonderful idea in theory: You're shot by a player, you begin to bleed, and you have to spend valuable time using your limited supply of bandages to patch yourself up, often in the middle of a firefight. The problem is that bandaging takes far less time than it should, and that it poses no problems whatsoever after you've bandaged yourself. Shot in the leg? No problem- Slap a bandage on it in two seconds and you're good to go. No limping, no nothing. Just a quick, easy Band-Aid to apply to your femoral artery. If you really want to make bandaging a part of the game that people actually care or notice other than an inconvenience (most people literally just reflexively smack control to heal themselves once their screen starts flashing, and the other half find themselves killed by their attacker because the game decided to prioritize cover over bandaging), then you need to make it an actual tactical decision. Make it take longer for you to bleed to death, but make the effect more pronounced, and certainly make it so there's more permanent consequences to being shot. Taking seven seconds to bandage yourself up and still having to limp around is a lot more engaging and realistic then this arcade-style "health kit" that you carry around at all times.

By contrast, however, fatal injuries (the ones that result in you blacking out swiftly and dying soon after) are praise-worthy and an excellent addition to the game. There's absolutely nothing wrong with those, and I applaud you for putting them in. They really add a sense of tension and reward for getting payback on someone who just turned you into a "dead man walking."

Tank combat, my final gripe, is the most easily fixable of the trio. As it is now, a series of bugs and the playerbase's general inexperience with armored warfare makes tank combat a nightmare for everyone involved- Tank combat, at least on Fallen Heroes, usually involves the Panzer IV and the T-34 staring at each other from across the map and blasting AP shells at each other. Nine times out of ten, they bounce. By the end of the engagement, so many shells have been fired that it's a miracle the tanks are even holding together. "Fixing" armor penetration (or at least making it more likely, so engagement don't last forever [I'm no expert on WW2-era tank warfare, but I'm pretty sure the tanks didn't just shoot at each other for ten minutes at a time and watch their shells fly off in opposite directions]) and solving bugs like players teleporting from seat to seat without playing an animation would go a long way towards making tank combat a fun, rewarding part of an already stellar game.

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- Intel Core i5 760 @ 2.80GHz processor
- Gigabyte H55M-S2V motherboard
- CORSAIR XMS3 4GB DDR3 1600 RAM
- ATI Radeon 5870 HD GPU

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