I voted "Other" above and left it at that, but after reading your post, I figured I'd explain a bit more on what brought me into RO:
Prior to RO coming out as a mod for UT2k4, my previous WWII FPS experience was with Day of Defeat, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Wolf3D if you'd count that. Other FPS's at the time for me were Quake I, UT99, Soldier of Fortune 2, Team Fortress Classic and Half-Life 1.
I liked Quake/UT's fast paced action, I liked Soldier of Fortune 2's realistic weapon physics & injury system, I liked Team Fortress Classics's unique classes and their individual abilities, as well as the team work involved, I liked DoD's semi-realism of no health packs, critical hits caused critical damage & it had the TFC style class selection for unique team play.... and I loved HL1's attention to detail & immersion.
I got UT2k4 after playing the demo of Torlan and loved the evolution of the franchise with huge open maps with air and ground vehicles.... it almost felt like a giant TFC with vehicles and the team play was pretty fun.
Then the Make something Unreal contest came out and I started looking for some interesting mods to expand with. I looked around at the available mods and the one that peaked my interest was Red Orchestra.
It seemed to have everything I liked in all of the above games and took them a step further still. It was fast paced, but not so fast as being like UT or Quake, no crosshairs.... you used the actual weapon in your hands to aim, where in many other games, you relied on the weapon resting by your hip and shooting using some crosshair in the centre of your screen.... each weapon had a pro and a con, team play was essential, far more than in any other game I played at the time, the maps were huge compared to DoD and the objectives were actually objectives, rather than some flag pole sticking out from a heap of rubble that was of no tactical advantage for either team...... and then there were the Tanks and Transports which were now possible with UT2k4.
The Vehicles needed a lot of work, especially the tanks and the soviet trucks, where if you were moving at full speed and suddenly had to turn, you'd flip the truck and the tanks very easily. There were a few other things here and there that needed to be tweaked and were tweaked over time..... but I was hooked. The vehicles didn't have health bars which determined who would die first based on who shot first.... it was about where you shot the vehicle and with what you shot them with.
The community was also friendly and worked together very well..... when someone was killed, most didn't rage and freak out, they laughed and complimented you on taking them out. You'd join a server and people knew you and you knew them. You knew what to expect.
I liked how your character moved. By today's standards, it's pretty clunky and stiff, but everybody was on the same playing field and yet was still fast paced. You could get away with hip shooting in a pinch, but did far better using iron sights and taking your time.
Grenades moved like real grenades, they didn't bobble and float in the air like in HL1, they didn't bounce around like a tennis ball either and they didn't fly halfway across the map.... they were like tossing a big rock and aiming them was pretty easy once you figured it out.
When I first started playing, I didn't do very well and couldn't tell who was on what team, where people were, how to decently aim my weapons, how to keep my tank from blowing up in one hit, where not to go and what not to do on each map.... but within a week I got a good grasp on the game.
I've probably played the Mod more than I played RO1 & RO2 combined.... but by the looks of things, I'll eventually surpass that with just RO2 in another month or two.
When RO1 came out, I didn't pick it up right away because it wasn't in any retail stores where I lived, had no credit card to purchase off of Steam and didn't figure out how to get PayPal to work until about 2 years after release..... but I did eventually pick it up and jumped right in.
But something was different with RO1 from the Mod. There was a lot more content, there were bigger maps, the tanks had more going for them than in the mod, but there were some critical game changes in RO1 that I wasn't too fond of.
