A long railroad bridge, scattered buildings, bunkers facing each other across a long gully. Sound familiar?
For long time Red Orchestra fans it should, because I'm talking about Barashka, the next official map for Red Orchestra 2. Featuring combined arms gameplay and thrilling cat and mouse chases between infantry and armor as they duel for control over territory, we are bringing this classic RO map back to life.
While its full facelift underway to bring it up to RO 2 standards, we will shortly be adding it to the stand alone beta so players can help us with feedback on gameplay. We look forward to playing this classic map with the community again (and it is quickly becoming one of my favorites)!
A lot of community members have been asking when we'll be adding more vehicles to the game, particularly troop transports. The short answer is that we've shifted around our plans a bit and additional vehicles are something that we're still looking to add, but won't be coming in the really near future. This is partially due to Rising Storm catching us by surprise - in a good way! Once we played the early versions of Rising Storm we knew it was going to be awesome, and decided to turn it into a full product. This means a lot of the Tripwire team have been cranking away working on Rising Storm along with the Rising Storm team to get the game ready for release. We've also been hard at work supporting the RO2 mod community by working on SDK updates and Steam workshop support which we're very excited about. Steam workshop should really revolutionize the way community mappers distribute their maps and make it much easier for players to find the cool content mappers and modders are working on.
We've also heard the murmuring in the community with speculation about how Rising Storm will be priced. While we aren't yet ready to release the exact pricing, we will clarify something right now. We will not be throwing the current RO2 community under the bus!!! Our current plan is to allow existing RO2 owners to upgrade to Rising Storm at a significant discount compared to someone that just buys Rising Storm outright. Additionally, we will not be splintering the community by keeping players separated. Servers will be able to run RO2 and Rising Storm maps back to back on the same server. Finally, while we're not quite ready to release the details of exactly how it will work, RO2 players that don't own Rising Storm won't just get booted off the server when a Rising Storm map comes up. Rather RO2 owners will be able to play Rising Storm even if they haven't purchased the add-on, likely with some limitations on weapon/class selection. So to summarize, RO2 owners will get a discount on Rising Storm, and everybody will be able to play together on the same servers!
Speaking of additional content, I'd like to take this time to highlight the works of Coin-goD who is working to bring anti-tank guns to the game and Blitzk.-Bob who is has a team working on new vehicles. If there are any other awesome projects I have missed be sure to let me know in the comments below! Judging is also getting underway on the following maps that were submitted to Phase 1 of the Counterattack mapping contest: Arad 2, Bridges over Druzhina, Butovo, Coldsteel, Gumrak Station, Kursk, Moscow Highway, Ogledow, Otpy3kab2, and Univermag. If you haven't yet, make sure to check them out!