I have bought Iron Front 1944 yesterday as i'm a long time Arma player
Honestly , it's not really a threat to RO2 because the experience is vastly different , Arma is more of a simulation of a large scale battlefield , it's much slower and the emphasis is on strategy , awareness and combined arms tactics
Red Orchestra is closer to a traditional fps with small maps and more quick action , even though it's clearly more realistic than most fps .
Everything looks more polished in RO , gameplay is more fluid , responsive and since the scope of the game is more limited , the basics (netcode , animations , performances , sounds etc ) in RO are much better .
I think only a minority of the RO community will like IF which is a game that will attract a niche of military sim fans (also you need a good computer to run it fine , whereas RO2 is more hardware friendly ) .
In RO , even though teamwork is important , a single human player can still make a difference on a map regardless of his team if he kills a lot or knows the map well , not so much in IF or Arma in general , which is a game that really shines with squad and radio comms as teamwork is absolutely necessary to achieve anything , you can spend hours in a an operation where you did not shoot a single round , and i'm pretty sure many of the RO players would not like this (also when you die , usually you have to wait for all other players to die or complete the mission , except in team domination etc.. but you still need to wait for someone to pick your team up with a heli or transport vehicle )
Also , the emphasis of Arma is not PvP , in fact the Pvp arma players are a minority as since there are so many things happening on the map which your cpu check every second (dozens of cities with every building destroyable plus all the military vehicles in motion or action etc ) , so the netcode is not great , there is some warping and occasional delays that plague long distance shooting
Anyway , i still think Iron Front will shine in a year from now , after several patches and mods will have been released . At the moment the performances are not good , there are some glitches (blue screen when joining a multiplayer game after loading the map ) and overall , even though the models are great , it still feels like a mod that includes a single player campaign rather than a full game
But Arma 2 is still in my opinion by far the best military simulation on the market when it is coupled with the stunning ACE mod , the richness and depth of the game is amazing : windage , artillery , advanceed spotting , engineers , paratroopers ops , most realistic ballistics for modern weapons , tank warfare , night fighting etc ..
So i'm pretty sure that Iron front will become a reference at some point , when the game will be properly polished and enriched , but again i don't think it threatens to take many players out of Red Orchestra as both games have only in common the WWII theme , when i play RO i'm looking for a credible and immediate action on a small scale map or urban environment , precisely what Arma does not do well as the scale of the map and depth of the game is huge
