Why nobody buy this game!
- Thread starter lynx100
- Start date
Like others I am a new user as although I had heard mention of the game RO, I had never seen it physically available for sale as I tend to prefer having a disc-box to place on the shelf, rather than buying a lump of code, through an online retailer. I just happened to walk into our local branch of 'GAME' and saw it on one of the budget shelves at only
I bought this game just because i knew it wasnt arcade-style fast pace CS/COD/DOD-like crosshair game. Only reason that gave me hesitation was that the graphics would be somewhat outdated, like they are a bit. But it doesnt matter that much. Tetris might look like **** but it still rocks.
Only things that bother me atm are that it is nearly impossible to shoot standing/crouching to a target of 2 pixels and that there are too many smg's and snipers. Or is the amount of those guns proportional to real life?
Insta-minimap is kinda unrealistic too but works great for those who dont yet know the maps that well.
Only things that bother me atm are that it is nearly impossible to shoot standing/crouching to a target of 2 pixels and that there are too many smg's and snipers. Or is the amount of those guns proportional to real life?
Insta-minimap is kinda unrealistic too but works great for those who dont yet know the maps that well.
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If you have tried ArmA you will see what an slow game is...
If you try to do the movements in real life, you will se that standing or crouching takes time...
If you try to do the movements in real life, you will se that standing or crouching takes time...
That was the exact reason I bought RO few weeks ago. If u want to play arcade type fast paced games, well, look for something else...
I don't know what's with those achievements but they're screwy.... since I have been playing I know I have killed well over 100 enemies on servers with more then 16 players, and yet it still only tells me I only have up to 50 kills.
I also sniped a tank commander for the "Whack a Mole" award, in fact I took out a couple so far, and I still haven't gotten that one yet for whatever reason.
I know in Team Fortress 2, the achievements seem a heck of a lot easier to get..... still a challenge, but at least I can get them.
So I wouldn't sum up by using the achievements as a reference because they're sure as heck not working for me. I've played at least an hour a day since I got the game and I only have two achievements so far.... 10 kills and 50 kills... whoopty do.
I know I fausted well over 20 tanks and got nothing for that either.
To me, the Achievements in RO Ost are pointless and a waste of time, that I don't even bother to check anymore.
Hang on, let me check now:
Nope... still only two.
That is the primary reason why the population isn't that big and didn't last that long..... lack of decent marketing compared to big wigs like Call of Duty and BF2.
I probably sound like a broken record, but if you just stick to Steam, your own forums and a few gaming magazines here and there for your marketing, you're never going to make it with the big leagues.
Gotta spend money to make money, and I think if they put forward a better marketing program then in the past that touches base with perhaps TV commercials, or Commercials that play in video game stores on their TV's on the walls, or at the very least, banner ads for big web sites, along with easier access to the game in retail stores via Physical Hard-copies for people to pickup, read and buy.... the community would sky rocket.
I know there was nowhere in my province that you could buy a hard copy of Red Orchestra, most game stores never heard of it, and every single person I have talked to about the game where I live and elsewhere in Canada online, etc.... not one of them have heard of Red Ochestra before until I explained it to them.
That's not good marketing if you ask me. I don't think it has to do with the game-style of play, or how slow or fast it is.... it's about knowing the game exists in the first place and that there's a good healthy and strong community that will be around for a long time.
Sure we're all here still playing and enjoying the game, but compare our community to BF2's community, which BF2 has been around about as long as RO Ost and you'll see they have three times the amount of servers and plenty more people playing then RO. Sure they have the handicap of having BF 1942/Vietnam before hand to get heard and known about..... but they also had a better marketing program and I seen ads and such all over the place.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind.
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You need to play on server with with a star infront of their name in the serverbrowser those have stats enabled.
Most of them work the only ones that dont afaik are:
Hero of the soviet union
Iron Cross
And the sniper ones
Most of them work the only ones that dont afaik are:
Hero of the soviet union
Iron Cross
And the sniper ones
I totally agree, but do remember that ROost was a self-funded title, at the time from an unproved company.
I totally approve of the self funded (disclaimer: I got a bit of that as I worked on Ostfront), as it let TWI keep rights to everything.. but as you pointed out, it meant lack of big marketing like TV promos, etc.
A quick factual point, ROOst was available via Brick-and-Mortar; Bold Games handled the (US) publishing for stores iirc. I know European publishing were handed by seperate publishers, so YMMV.
Overall, I think everyone considers ROost a success though.. TWI has gone on to release KF (with better sales then ROost I'd image? I don't know, i think Alan publicly said something somewhere once..), and both communities and they are working on Rojos..er.. RO:HOS.
Heres to hoping ROHos will be a popular title.
Well, the game pace being slow is fine...
however the amount of time you need to run (including the covering/resting parts) difference between urban warfare and rural area fighting is too high :
- on Leningrad, Stalingradkessel or Danzig you need less than 30 seconds of running before meeting an enemy
- while on on Arad or Barashka (or even Kaukasus or Berezina), you need to survive and walk for minutes before reaching a capture zone, and because you walk for about minute you tend to be less careful, and get shot stupidly by the same camper : extremely frustrating, you waited all that time for NOTHING (that stuff happen a lot to new players, when I mean a lot it's like 4 times in a row : who could survive that ?!).
For experienced RO players, it's ok you know it's the price for an "authentic" FPS experience, however in my opinion the gap between these 2 type of maps is too big.
=> We need more transport vehicles (or some heavily reworked maps), maybe some slow trucks (slowing down a lot when in the mud/outside the road, so it would work only on a defined path aka roads, to avoid clowncar-ism in the field) without any MG, becaue sometime it really feels like it's a disguised tank map :/
I'm saying BS ? launch Red Orchestra, search for servers.
The 5 servers with more than 10 players and less than 200 ms ping will run short-range maps 80% of the time, all the 24/7 servers will run urban short-range maps. (well, that's the case on the european side)
- - - - -
Frustration is OK, it's a part of the game, but you shouldn't let it take a bigger part in the game experience than your primary "experience" : soldiers fighting with weapons.
When you make a game about air combat, you just have the lift-off (opt), moving to your objective for a short amount of time, fight, get back to base (opt) and land (opt). You don't need to refuel the plane, check and repair every single parts, reading intels, having hours of briefing, patrolling without any fight, etc...
Moving to the front in a FPS shouldn't be the bigger part of the game, because it is not fun : there's no driving/piloting (vehicle), you just push a button and it moves forward, and there's no difficulties in your task (once you know where you can move on to the front quite safely), its role is preparing you for the incoming action : you choose where you're going to go, you follow that path, then fight => the final objective is fighting.
When I spawn and see that I have to walk for 30+ sec, only to get shot after 5 or 10 sec of gunfight ("finally, some action !"), something is wrong.
"It's realistic ! It's realistic !"
=> I have yet to find someone who can enjoy walking for days without firing a single bullet, patrolling for hours without seeing an enemy, and staying at your position "because it's an order". There is limits to "realism".
Spending more time in moving to the frontline rather than fighting enemies is one, in my opinion.
If you don't take that into account, gamers will take it themselves : less sales, servers running only the shortest maps.
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edit :
Everyone remember that mission in Operation Flashpoint where all your squad teamates are dead, you're the only one surviving, the russian are looking for you, so you have to escape through bushes and forest, avoid tanks and patrols to get to a evac zone, only to find it was canceled and your radio is dead too, so you move to a secondary evac zone... (and get captured if I recall correctly)
this mission is one of the most impressive, with the best immersion in OFP (imo) : you are alone, you are just beginning the game so it's not like a spec ops mission, and you have to run, read a map and pray, it's a lot of tension, fear and stress.
This mission doesn't have a shooting part at all (there might be few exceptions, like killing one or two patrolling soldiers), all you do is running, hiding, running.
So why this running thing couldn't be a part of the multiplayer gameplay ?
=> because this experience is one-use only.
Consequences : it's only working well on the single-player side if that kind of mission is not repeated too much during the campaign, else is just wrong.
=> How many times would you replay that mission over and over ?
=> The 3rd time you play that mission, don't you think it's going to be a little boring ?
Once every week is tolerable, once every month is okay, but on the online multiplayer it's 30 times per game session, you simply can't force the players to endure that experience just because you didn't adapted your map to its size (dynamic spawn points, vehicles).
however the amount of time you need to run (including the covering/resting parts) difference between urban warfare and rural area fighting is too high :
- on Leningrad, Stalingradkessel or Danzig you need less than 30 seconds of running before meeting an enemy
- while on on Arad or Barashka (or even Kaukasus or Berezina), you need to survive and walk for minutes before reaching a capture zone, and because you walk for about minute you tend to be less careful, and get shot stupidly by the same camper : extremely frustrating, you waited all that time for NOTHING (that stuff happen a lot to new players, when I mean a lot it's like 4 times in a row : who could survive that ?!).
For experienced RO players, it's ok you know it's the price for an "authentic" FPS experience, however in my opinion the gap between these 2 type of maps is too big.
=> We need more transport vehicles (or some heavily reworked maps), maybe some slow trucks (slowing down a lot when in the mud/outside the road, so it would work only on a defined path aka roads, to avoid clowncar-ism in the field) without any MG, becaue sometime it really feels like it's a disguised tank map :/
I'm saying BS ? launch Red Orchestra, search for servers.
The 5 servers with more than 10 players and less than 200 ms ping will run short-range maps 80% of the time, all the 24/7 servers will run urban short-range maps. (well, that's the case on the european side)
- - - - -
Frustration is OK, it's a part of the game, but you shouldn't let it take a bigger part in the game experience than your primary "experience" : soldiers fighting with weapons.
When you make a game about air combat, you just have the lift-off (opt), moving to your objective for a short amount of time, fight, get back to base (opt) and land (opt). You don't need to refuel the plane, check and repair every single parts, reading intels, having hours of briefing, patrolling without any fight, etc...
Moving to the front in a FPS shouldn't be the bigger part of the game, because it is not fun : there's no driving/piloting (vehicle), you just push a button and it moves forward, and there's no difficulties in your task (once you know where you can move on to the front quite safely), its role is preparing you for the incoming action : you choose where you're going to go, you follow that path, then fight => the final objective is fighting.
When I spawn and see that I have to walk for 30+ sec, only to get shot after 5 or 10 sec of gunfight ("finally, some action !"), something is wrong.
"It's realistic ! It's realistic !"
=> I have yet to find someone who can enjoy walking for days without firing a single bullet, patrolling for hours without seeing an enemy, and staying at your position "because it's an order". There is limits to "realism".
Spending more time in moving to the frontline rather than fighting enemies is one, in my opinion.
If you don't take that into account, gamers will take it themselves : less sales, servers running only the shortest maps.
---
edit :
Everyone remember that mission in Operation Flashpoint where all your squad teamates are dead, you're the only one surviving, the russian are looking for you, so you have to escape through bushes and forest, avoid tanks and patrols to get to a evac zone, only to find it was canceled and your radio is dead too, so you move to a secondary evac zone... (and get captured if I recall correctly)
this mission is one of the most impressive, with the best immersion in OFP (imo) : you are alone, you are just beginning the game so it's not like a spec ops mission, and you have to run, read a map and pray, it's a lot of tension, fear and stress.
This mission doesn't have a shooting part at all (there might be few exceptions, like killing one or two patrolling soldiers), all you do is running, hiding, running.
So why this running thing couldn't be a part of the multiplayer gameplay ?
=> because this experience is one-use only.
Consequences : it's only working well on the single-player side if that kind of mission is not repeated too much during the campaign, else is just wrong.
=> How many times would you replay that mission over and over ?
=> The 3rd time you play that mission, don't you think it's going to be a little boring ?
Once every week is tolerable, once every month is okay, but on the online multiplayer it's 30 times per game session, you simply can't force the players to endure that experience just because you didn't adapted your map to its size (dynamic spawn points, vehicles).
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I love RO, but I can understand why new players can be turned off by it. When I first bought RO 4 years ago , I was playing the fast paced Day of Defeat: Source, so the change was brutal.
The RO controls are slow and clunky, everything looks like it's made of cardboard and some of the larger maps will waste 95% of your time walking or rolling from A to B without seeing any action.
The RO controls are slow and clunky, everything looks like it's made of cardboard and some of the larger maps will waste 95% of your time walking or rolling from A to B without seeing any action.
Just throwing this in there, if you already know, disregard, there are free mod(s) for RO: Darkest Hour, Mare Nostrum, Carpathian Crosses (sp?), last two not very active any more. Like I said, just in case you didn't know. TWB*SlowBull
RO sold very well actually for this style of game, and had good advertising through Steam and good word of mouth due to the gameplay. For me tho I think the main reason player numbers stopped growing was mostly the switch to larger servers. This made it more difficult for smaller clans to keep an active server running as people don't want to play in a server that seems underpopulated, and there just weren't enough players for several 50 player servers to exist along side the small clan servers (so also less choice for players in terms of maps to join). 50 player servers were new and people wanted to play the big new servers also, and they were the ones that tended to stay active all the time. Added to that was the more appealing gun selection for newer or more casual players
Compounded with often having to join a 50 player server (or play on an unpopulated server) was the change in gameplay that came with them. More nad spam. Higher ratio of auto style guns compared to bolts. Less "community" feel as its less tight nit and the servers have a high turn over of players (people come and go fast). Less teamplay + you actually needed more players working as a team than before, so it felt more like a jump in, run around fragging, loggoff type game than team orientated like before. The attitude of players went down imo with the larger player numbers. Single map server also drew a lot of the players away from smaller community servers..24/7 Danzig or Arad etc
That was the beginning imo. So smaller clans servers went empty, then came three mods which further split the community. If they were integrated into the main game then it would have been fine, but people don't want to play more than one or maybe 2 versions of the game..they don't want to have to change settings or get used to different gameplay between the two. They also definitely don't want to have to patch their game in this day. The game wasn't really booming with one version..splitting the community into 4 was just never going to help imo, although I respect what the modders were trying totally and all their hard work. It was just doomed from the start without either integration into Steam (bare minimum) or integration into the main game with servers being able to go from Darkest hour maps, to Mare Nostrum, Vanilla, CC etc. It just wasn't going to work as 4 separate entities tho (and I know CC was downloadable from a server, but you still had a huge download before joining a server as it wasn't properly integrated into RO and dl'd by Steam).
Got to say though TWI did a great job with RO. Great updates and bug fixes, great communication with the fans, and really helped support their game by valuing their community mappers and even integrating some maps as stock. This is what indie devs should do, and definitely should stick to their guns with gameplay - you can't please everyone - try to go too easy style and you lose the core players, too difficult and servers won't fill up..RO was a great balance and awesome fun while it lasted for me. I did get bored eventually but I did play solidly for years and ofc all the points I put above didn't help
Compounded with often having to join a 50 player server (or play on an unpopulated server) was the change in gameplay that came with them. More nad spam. Higher ratio of auto style guns compared to bolts. Less "community" feel as its less tight nit and the servers have a high turn over of players (people come and go fast). Less teamplay + you actually needed more players working as a team than before, so it felt more like a jump in, run around fragging, loggoff type game than team orientated like before. The attitude of players went down imo with the larger player numbers. Single map server also drew a lot of the players away from smaller community servers..24/7 Danzig or Arad etc
That was the beginning imo. So smaller clans servers went empty, then came three mods which further split the community. If they were integrated into the main game then it would have been fine, but people don't want to play more than one or maybe 2 versions of the game..they don't want to have to change settings or get used to different gameplay between the two. They also definitely don't want to have to patch their game in this day. The game wasn't really booming with one version..splitting the community into 4 was just never going to help imo, although I respect what the modders were trying totally and all their hard work. It was just doomed from the start without either integration into Steam (bare minimum) or integration into the main game with servers being able to go from Darkest hour maps, to Mare Nostrum, Vanilla, CC etc. It just wasn't going to work as 4 separate entities tho (and I know CC was downloadable from a server, but you still had a huge download before joining a server as it wasn't properly integrated into RO and dl'd by Steam).
Got to say though TWI did a great job with RO. Great updates and bug fixes, great communication with the fans, and really helped support their game by valuing their community mappers and even integrating some maps as stock. This is what indie devs should do, and definitely should stick to their guns with gameplay - you can't please everyone - try to go too easy style and you lose the core players, too difficult and servers won't fill up..RO was a great balance and awesome fun while it lasted for me. I did get bored eventually but I did play solidly for years and ofc all the points I put above didn't help
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I find RO to have perfect pacing, a nice balance between realism and getting you into action quickly. Simulator-type games like ArmA are simply too slow for me to play; I want to spend my time fighting, not hiking kilometers to find someone. Same reason I never, ever play big tank or combined arms maps in RO. Travelling isn't all that fun for me, shooting the enemy is.
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+1 An accurate and fair assessment of why ppl stopped playing this game, the playerbase went downhill fast right after they introduced the 50 player servers.
Well, I wouldn't nesecarily say that. Project Reality is a bit slower simply because the objectives are very broad and the game is very long. However, when there is a major piece of action, it gets very intense. Red Orchestra represents a single section of a battlefield with a (seriously understrength) platoon fighting against another (seriously understrength) platoon, whereas Project Reality has the operation area of what would probably be at least a company for a smaller map, and maybe two partially reinforced companies for the larger ones being covered by a platoon.
If you're talking about action per minute/second/whatever however, I definitley would agree.
Clunky? How? I find the controls to be very fluid. As for walking: don't. Transport is there for a reason. I guess you need some team coordination for that though.
Other than that, most of the larger maps (I.E Krivoi Rog, Black Day July) are made to be almost exclusivley tank maps. Arad is an exception, but there is ample transport for that, and if the infantry stay where they should be (in the towns and the nearby woods) it's not that big.
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I must agree that controls feel clunky to me too, from walking through a door and sometimes bumping on the wall instead, especially when there are other players trying to get through and you get that annoying shake on your screen instead of just stopping, to how strangely you are lying (or actually flying) on the ground when prone behing cover. Also the lack of the ability to do something else when reloading or bolting can be quite nerve breaking.
Furthermore the running animations of other players are quite horrible too... But all of these are most likely to be fixed in HOS, depending how they implement functions like interuptable animations etc.
Furthermore the running animations of other players are quite horrible too... But all of these are most likely to be fixed in HOS, depending how they implement functions like interuptable animations etc.