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Top Community Questions Answered - And An AMA For Everything Else!

Yoshiro

Senior Community Manager
Staff member
  • Oct 10, 2005
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    ARVN.jpg


    Hello everyone!

    As promised, in the State of the Game post from Tripwire Producer Mike Stone, we have gathered 9 top community questions. Don't worry if you do not see your personal top questions asked and answered here below, as we have an Ask Me (Almost) Anything planned for our reddit community next week (more details at the end!). Let's get started with Red Orchestra/Rising Storm Project Lead - Alan Wilson and Lead Designer - Adam Hatch:

    Question: Will we be adding more weapons for the North Vietnamese?
    Alan: Yes, absolutely. We can go in a number of directions here. The PAVN (NVA) were fairly well equipped by their allies in Russia and China, so we can call on a good stock of modern weapons there. For the NLF (VC), we can play much more to their guerilla roots. They were generally operating on "hand-me-downs", including everything from random old rifles and shotguns, to old stocks of WWII-era weaponry pulled out of Russian warehouses, boxed up, shipped and buried in a hole in the ground before use.

    Adam: The two Northern factions are due for some new weapons. As Alan mentioned you can expect some older WW2 weapons being passed down to the NLF and more conventional weapons for the PAVN. However, we are working towards creating more different types of traps and deployables to counter Southern infantry and vehicles.

    Question: Do we have plans to make NLF/PAVN more distinct from one another?
    Alan: Yes, we actually want to make each of the factions/armies more unique. The PAVN again were equipped more along the lines of a modern, main-force army, albeit with some lighter equipment than their American enemies. The NLF had to make do with whatever they could get - sometimes light mortars, sometimes a few rockets.

    Adam: Our plans for Multiplayer Campaign really require us to make a noticable difference in how the PAVN vs. NLF are armed and how their weaponry and equipment affect the the strategy of the team. NLF for instance may have their selection of AKs greatly reduced in favour of WW2 rifles and SMGs. We will also be looking at changing Commander Abilities between the two armies or adding additional abilities.

    Question: Are we still working on a multiplayer campaign, and if so, will we be sharing any specifics?
    Alan: Yes, we're still very much working on multi-player campaign. It's a piece that has been well-loved in previous titles, so certainly going to make it in here. Before we added it in, we did want to get a wide range of other content in as well - which we've done now. We'll be looking to test it with the community in the coming weeks/months - it really needs multiple full playthroughs to get a good handle on the balance. And that will take a good number of hours of actual play, so we'll need the fans' help and feedback. We'll roll out more information before then as well.

    Adam: Absolutely. We are taking advantage of the Vietnam War's timeline to showcase how military might and technology changed throughout the war.

    Question: When will the community see more maps added to the game?
    Alan: We've got plenty planned. We're working on some internally, plus looking to work with the best mappers in the community to bring on extra maps at full production quality.

    Adam: Current maps are going to receive some love and improvements in the near future. Some maps could be more optimized or have choke points relieved/flanks widened, etc. Additional maps we create will be geared towards making Multiplayer Campaign feel complete with major battles represented.

    Question: Is bot support still being considered as an addition to the game?
    Alan: Absolutely. Clearly there's a portion of the community who want offline bots - and online. And for those who hate bots - we'll make sure that you can just blank out any servers with bots.

    Adam: Our goals with bot support is to make playing offline by yourself entertaining and good for some practice. Bots can be added by Server Admins to help seed low population servers but we intend to keep full and mostly populated servers free of bots. We may experiment with a co-op mode in the future.

    Question: Are additional vehicles coming, either helicopter or land based, such as the M113 APC?
    Alan: The focus from here will be on land-based vehicles, really. But that is still a way off - a good bit of work to be done there.

    Adam: In terms of vehicles, M113 APC is next. After that we look into early/late war support and combat vehicles for the North Vietnamese.

    Question:Will there be any additional factions added to the game after ARVN?
    Alan: "Most likely". Our plans for the rest of this year don't include any additional faction, so it will be next year before we do. We've also got work we want to do to make the existing factions stand apart from each other better first.

    Adam: ARVN will be the last of the armies for this year. Our focus post-ARVN is to make Multiplayer Campaign complete and have as much complimenting content as possible.

    Question: Are any further optimizations being worked on for clients or servers?
    Alan: Having had a big blitz on stability and performance in the first few months of the year, we were really pleased with the results. And we're monitoring both after each update, looking for anywhere else that we can improve on. So if there are specific areas that anyone in the community knows of, please make sure we're aware!

    Adam: We are going to revisit the worse performing maps and optimize those further. Hitches and momentary FPS drops during gameplay will be ironed out as well.

    Question: Are there any additional planned changes coming?
    Alan: Well, we've got lots of new stuff actually on the plans, plus a whole bunch of ideas of new things to try out. While we know everyone wants "more", part of the trick to keeping everyone entertained is to keep finding something "new" as well as just more of the same. Watch this space...

    Adam: The biggest change to gameplay coming next is to split out some of the weapons and make the PAVN and NLF more unique and interesting in their own way. Beyond that - and adding Multiplayer Campaign - we want to take some of the map's static elements and put them in the hands and control of players. This includes things like deployable heavy weapons, resupply points and defensive objects. We are also looking at other mechanics that would allow interaction between team mates and improve team coordination.

    We hope you enjoyed the answers provided here today! And as we stated at the start, if you have another burning question you would love to ask the teams from Tripwire and Antimatter Games, for three hours next week on July 7th starting at 3 PM EST members of both teams will be answering your questions on the game, its future, past, current state or even game development in general! If you aren't already a part of our Reddit community, you can join us at: https://www.reddit.com/r/rs2vietnam/

    We look forward to seeing you there,

    Tripwire Interactive and Antimatter Games
     
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