Ah, you have to love shakeycam vids. So having been standing there when this was recorded, I will first say that the game looked nothing like this on the screen when it was shown. The video makes everything look super contrasted and all the colors "blown out". That and obviously the video is very low res, so things won't look even 10% as good as they do in person.
Anyway, there is an old saying in the air force - "If you aren't catching flak, then you aren't over the target." I guess we are right on top of it
As I have been saying all along, we're making the actual gunplay, gameplay and combat more realistic, but we're also giving players more information about the tactical situation and what is going on in the game world. This will make the game more accessible while still keeping the core realistic gameplay. I see a lot of posts in the RO forums saying "we want a bigger community", "you should advertise more" etc. No amount of advertising will keep the community for the new game growing and together if more people can't get into and enjoy the game. We have had to find creative ways to reduce the learning curve, and make the game appealing to a broader audience. Otherwise you'll end up with a community the same size as RO:Ost (which was still pretty big, but not massive like BF or COD). That, and ROHOS will end up costing about 30x more than RO:Ost to make, so we have to sell a few more copies this time around
Another thing to point out, is that the game will have different stock server setups, which will be "relaxed realism" and "realistic". Relaxed realism will be what you have seen in these videos, and will include all of the new interface helpers that we have added to the game. With that said, "relaxed realism" will still be 10X more hardcore and realistic than COD or Battlefield (its actually much more hardcore than COD's "hardcore" mode). "Realistic" will be for the more hardcore players, and will have some of the new interface helps, etc disabled. Beyond this, server admins will be able to set up a custom configuration that picks and chooses which features to have. All of this adds up to a game that will have a much bigger community than the first game, and be a lot of fun to be a part of.
So next I'd like to clear up some misconceptions I've seen in this thread:
1) Low quality textures - the textures look great in person and are very high quality and high resolution. This is a shakey cam vid, so expect everything to look odd. A shakey cam vid of Crysis 2 would have the same problems.
2) Is he playing with a console controller? No I'm not playing with a console controller. This is a PC game, through and through. If/when it would show up on the consoles, it will be a great console port of a PC game, not the other way around (i.e. we're not going to do a crappy PC port of a console game).
3) FOV Zoom - those of you that have been around long enough know that I was VERY against having any type of FOV zoom in Red Orchestra. There have been some very heated discussions between myself and people in the community, and even between me and other members of the dev team. As hard as people tried, they could never make a compelling argument for FOV Zoom being realistic, since all their arguments were based on personal interpretation (i.e. when I look at something it gets more in "focus") rather than factual evidence.
When doing research for ROHOS, we decided to do a scientific investigation into how the human eye works, and how large objects would need to appear on screen to be the same size as they would be in real life. We used as a baseline a 19" monitor (standard aspect ratio) and a 21" monitor (widescreen aspect ratio). We went out to a football field and measured with a pair of calipers placed a standard distance from a persons eye how large a person appeared to be at different distances (out to 100 meters). To sum up our findings, to appear to be "real life size" on the player's screen, you have to decrease the FOV (zoom in) a little over 2x. In other words, in RO:Ost, somone 100 meters away in game appears 2x smaller than they would in real life, thus making it much HARDER than real life to shoot them. This lead to what many refer to as "pixel hunting". Now in ROHOS, with the FOV zoom when using controlled breathing objects in the world appear their real life size. This not only has made the game more realistic, it has also both made the game easier, and made long range firefights a lot more fun and practical.
So in conclusion, I was the biggest hater of FOV zoom going into our research, but the facts proved me wrong.
4) They are showing the ammo count - no we are not. We are only showing the magazine count. And when you reload you get the message about the weight of your mag, just like RO:Ost. One more realistic feature we have now though, is you can actually press a key to check the weight of your mag without doing a full reload (the player quickly removes the mag, feels the weight, and puts it back in). Not only that, but the mag count isn't even on the screen all the time like on Ost - it only appears when you reload or hold down the tactical key.
5) The game has "radar" - the game doesn't have radar. You only see your squad mates that are within a very close radius. Right now we've got two different settings for this - one where they only show up on the minimap when they are actually within sight of the player, and one where they show up if they are in line of sight or not within the short radius. One of the main goals of ROHOS is to give players the tools they need to easily stick together and play as squads. Being able to easily find your squad mates is a big part of this. I personally think both of these methods are realistic. In real life, even if someone is just in the other room, you can hear them moving around, and you can talk back and forth to each other and hear their location. That is what this system simulates. It might "seem" unrealistic on the surface, but actually gives the player the tactical awareness they would have in real life, while improving team play.
6) Hit direction detection - there is nothing unrealistic about this. If a person takes damage from one side of their body they know which general direction it happened from. Also, generally in RO (HOS or Ost) you die very quickly, so unless you got shot in the arm, you usually find out which direction you are getting shot from just in time to watch the person shooting at you kill you
7) Bullet whiz indicators - these don't show up just anytime someone is shooting at you, the bullets have to pass very close to you. In real life, you could both hear the gun fire, and hear the general direction a bullet whizzes by you from. In game this can be somewhat represented with sound if you have 5.1 surround, but if you don't then you couldn't really tell. So this actually gives you an awareness of what you could sense in real life. Additionally, this only gives you a general idea of the direction a bullet whizzes from. It is divided into 8 directions, so you know it came from "forward-right" but not exactly which direction. This could well be one of the things we may turn off for the "realistic" mode.
8) A mic is as good as "tactical view" - nope, not even close. Ever stood there with a mic right next to another player trying to explain to them where to go? "Umm yeah walk around this building then go up the stairs and uh, just screw it follow me." Don't you ever wish you could just point at something and say "go there"? That is essentially what tactical view does. There is a LOT of additional functionality that tactical view provides which we haven't gone into yet, but suffice it to say that it is a key element of the teamplay and squad functionality in the new game. And in reality, it does the same job as the overhead map, it just does it better.
9) AI on easy mode - yes in the demo the AI was set to easy mode, so I wouldn't get pwned while showing off the features. The AI is more than capable of owning any human player on the higher difficulty levels, and is actually probably too good right now
It is LIGHT years beyond the AI in Ostfront, the two don't even compare.
And if you think this looks terrible:
http://www.heroesofstalingrad.com/wp-content/gallery/rohos-august-screenshots/rooftop_battle.jpg
then you need to get you're eyes checked