Red Orchestra 2, so far have been the worst experience for me in gaming.
Having been playing the series since the release of Ostfront, I was kind of turned off by the some different approaches that the sequel took but Ive learned to live with them. Although there are some really crazy design flaws:
Shift Zoom: The introduction of a better zoom on iron sights had a warm welcome on my part until i saw the "Additional zoom" This zoom is quite ridiculous considering that the maps are noticeable smaller this time around and the farthest range of engagement is about 170 meters as far as infantry combat goes. This zoom is close to the optics zoom of the marksman. In fact, it is much easier to pick off targets at long distances with the regular bolt because of the larger field of view in iron sights which allows much better leading on targets than optics and a noticeably higher fire rate at the expense of a slightly lower zoom.
The "zoom" resets the field of view so that things appear as they would with your eye naturally - instead of being stretched by the FOV.
Suppression: Suppression is utterly useless. Aside the blue screen, it doesn't affect your accuracy AT ALL. Sometimes you get suppressed by bullets that are randomly shot at a house that you are in but far away from them, sometimes you get perma suppressed and sometimes you get suppressed from falling.
Suppression works. Whilst under MG/Arty fire the aim is dramatically affected...
There might still be bugs in the system - but that is because this is a beta, not an "it's secretly finished PR exercise beta", but an actual "we need to test our game beta"
Tank balance: The panzer four seem to be comfortably one shooting t-34's from 1200 meters to frontal plate while the t-34 needs about five shots to score a kill from such distance. Not to mention that the amount of ammunition in the t-34 is noticeably lower. Often than not, i get the feeling that i'm combating a Panther and not a Panzer 4 F1.
I suck with the T-34, even putting countless rounds at Pz4s - so I'm kind of with you there.
Mp40: This gun have sniped me countless times at ranges of 150+ meters from windows in a matter of a second not to mention that it penetrates brick walls at that distance.
If you could let TWI know where the MP40 is penetrating that type of wall I'm sure they'll look into it..and 150m+? Really?
Hit detection: the hit detection is awful, numerous times have i depleted half of the dp drum mag into a german in close quarters combat to no effect. It is as if the bullets magically dissipated.
See above about
beta
Machine gunner class: 80% of time playing the machine gunner class, you will be greeted by "cannot prone here" message or be deployed under the floor texture while trying to deploy to a window, then after you do manage to deploy, you will notice the horrible recoil that deployed machine guns have and will be sniped by the bolt extra zoom snipers and mp-40 heroes in a couple of seconds. Sometimes when you shoot trough a window, you see the bullets hitting a wall near you as if the machine gun was magically spitting bullets about 20 centimeters to the side of the barrel.
"Cannot prone here" is to stop being going prone and having their legs/arms etc clipping through the scenery.
If there is not enough room for you to prone there...what did you want to happen if you tried to prone?
As for getting picked off by riflemen, that is down to you as a Machine Gunner, pick better spots, or get better. It's very easy to dominate an area with an MG if you are in the right spot.
Artillery: The artillery is capable of being deployed at an enemy spawn point. Making your spawn ending up in a death the moment you spawned.
The game will feature spawn protection from arty just like RO did...again, this is probably down to it being a
beta.
Performance: I am running an I5 2500k 4.1ghz 8gb ddr3 1600mhz ram and an overclocked GTX570. The result? 17-20 FPS on the highest settings. Giving how this machine ran Crysis 1 silky smooth at maxed settings and 16xAA together with Crysis 2 maxed with DX11 patch, I am finding it hard to believe that it is a problem with my system.
Don't compare RO2 to Crysis 2. There are significant differences in the engine, and what your computer is processing.
There are however several performance issues that have been highlighted during the beta that TWI are trying to fix.
Latency: Simple test here. Pinging TF2 32 players UK server: 93ms
Pinging RO2 official TWI UK server: 250ms.
I live in the UK and have a 5mb DSL connection, and on the official TWI servers in the UK (if they are doing an infantry map) will average a ping of 130ms...so either the server was having issues or you were.
Again, this is a beta so they are still working on server performance or network issues.
Stability: Red Orchestra 2 have been crashing on me every 15 minutes or so trough all the patches and on all settings.
Beta.
Now I know that you will say that "They will fix it, give them time"
But the thing is, the release day is two days from now and the game feels like being in pre alpha state. I am for one kinda tired of the growing tendency of the industry to release horribly unpolished products to the customers. I want to buy games and play them, not dancing voodoo dances around them to make them work or having to wait to endless stream of patches to bring them to a playable state.
Pe alpha...? Come on...
I'm sure (hope) the first retail build will be vastly improved on what we've been playing, it should be plain to see how hard TWI have been working to resolve the issues that have been highlighted since the DDE beta started - they don't have the luxury of a 400 man QA team, they are reliant up on the community.