I have had a lukewarm attitude toward first-person shooters at best, and have never played Red Orchestra. However, the fact that Red Orchestra 2 deals with the battle for Stalingrad intrigues me greatly and I intend to purchase the game when it comes out.
Though I have no personal connection to the Eastern Front as does the OP, I did meet a German survivor of Stalingrad while doing contract work in Mainz in 2004. His name was Heinrich and he was 85 years old.
He told me that he had served as a heavy machine gunner in the Wehrmacht, got wounded at Stalingrad, and was lucky enough to have been airlifted out before the final collapse of 6th Army. After he recovered, he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS , eventually participating in the Battle of the Bulge (I thought he mentioned having served in the 3rd SS Panzer Division [Totenkopf], but that unit served only on the Eastern Front - our conversation was solely in German, so I might have misheard). I have a suspicion that he may have been involved with Kampfgruppe Peiper and the Malmedy Massacre, but frankly I did not have the guts to press him on the issue. At the time of our acquaintance, the siege of Fallujah was in full swing in Iraq. When I asked Heinrich his advice as to how we (the U.S.) should deal with the insurgents holed up in the town, he simply fixed me with his glacial stare and replied "Alles muss weg" (everything must go). Intrepret that how you will!
My encounter with Heinrich and my long-term interest in the Eastern Front have thus piqued my interest in this game. As previously stated, I have very little experience with first-person shooters, but it seems that this game will depict the battle for Stalingrad in a gritty, realistic, and non-cartoonish way. I also look forward to the mods that should inevitably crop up thereafter, and would love to play as an Italian or Rumanian soldier as well.
Edit: Upon further reflection, I recall Heinrich mentioning he had been in the 2nd SS Panzer Division, not the 3rd. At the time, however, I mistakenly thought that the 2nd (Das Reich) was the Totenkopf division, and continued to believe this until researching the matter for this post. Also, I discovered Kampfgruppe Peiper was formed from the 1st SS Panzer Division (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler), so fortunately Heinrich was probably not a part of the former formation.
