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[Ioric Kittencuddler]

They're saying all those things listed above "create WWII weaponry that has no equal."

[Virtz]

Oh... I read that wrong, then. :S

[Ozyton]

It's going to be sweet, is what it's saying =p

[nenjin]

Wow! this looks so good!!, anyone have an idea on a release date?, and is there gonna be a beta?

The fan rumor mill expects beta sometime in Q2, and hopefully a release in Q3 or Q4 of this year.

Here's a nice fan-made trailer someone created, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQpfXKCfmo8&feature=player_embedded

[nenjin]

Here's some tidbits from that PCGamer article. It's a good read, I recommend going through the whole thing yourselves.

“PC shooter fans have come to expect less than we have in the past,” says Gibson. “It’s kind of sad—there’re either no mod tools or all these strange restrictions. So, in a way, players have higher expectations for polish, but lower expectations for feature sets. They aren’t bad games—they’re not. All these games that are being developed right now are great achievements for a console, but they’re not pushing what’s possible on the PC.”

In cover behind some steel rails and debris, I check the magazine on my Russian SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle. There’s no on-screen counter for bullets; you hold the R key to swipe the clip from your weapon, and a message reports if the clip feels heavy or light. This might sound like realism for realism’s sake, but in practice, it simply means that reloading is a tactical decision. Gibson chimes in over my shoulder when I ask about the design.

“You never know exactly how much ammo you have in your gun, so you end up having those ‘oh crap’ moments where you run around the corner to shoot at enemies, pull the trigger, and nothing happens. It gives the player a brief moment of panic.”

The mechanic is in place, Gibson says, to generate tension. “Little moments of panic are the why we enjoy being scared by movies or amusement park rides. For too long I feel that multiplayer shooter designers have only been trying to give players joy. Now is the time to stop feeding FPS players only cotton candy, and give them some steak and potatoes along with the sweet stuff.”

Germans are rounding the city hall perimeter in packs. And somehow, they don’t see me. I can’t put them down fast enough; I clip a kneecap, pop one in the stomach, and—squinting at the death animation—yep, I pinged one of their helmets. This single streak sells me on RO2’s gunplay: kills demand precision—bullets feel small, and leading moving bodies (accounting for bullet drop) makes firing easy, but hitting moderately hard.

More subtly, I love the delay RO2 introduces between death notifications. It sounds absolutely simple: if you kill someone, a pop-up won’t appear until five or six seconds after they’ve expired. That gap in immediate feedback stirs drama—even when you’re sure you’ve tagged a German between the lungs, there’s a bit of breath-holding after every kill. You forget how much organic tension you’ve been missing out on when a bright “+10” isn’t stamped on the screen to pat you on the back every time you shoot someone.
That raw, scrappy-feeling gunplay strikes a compromise I’ve been waiting for for years: a nuanced multiplayer shooter that doesn’t place success at the top of its learning curve like an out-of-reach peanut butter jar.

Less isn’t always more—a first-person cover system, believable recoil, unapologetically huge maps, and being able to vault over almost anything are all ways of letting players express themselves. More importantly, these strides toward realism rarely felt at the expense of playability. It’s delightfully counter-intuitive that the real innovation in first-person shooters isn’t coming from the modern battlefields of 2011 and beyond, but from those of 1942.

It's like they've been reading my internal thoughts on FPS for the last 5 years. It all sounds almost too good to be true. Realism that's fun and engaging without being tedious or catering to the rivet-counters? A return to feature-driven development? An emphasis on evoking emotions from the player with something other than an artillery strike?

It would be amazing if HoS really lives up to its own hype, and manages to make the other FPS giants at Activision and EA finally take notice of an alternative path toward fun. The fact TWI has done all this with a team 1/20th the size of a single team over at EA, and probably 1/20th of the available funds, should be a good reason for them to pay attention.

[ScriptWolf]

Wow! this looks so good!!, anyone have an idea on a release date?, and is there gonna be a beta?

The fan rumor mill expects beta sometime in Q2, and hopefully a release in Q3 or Q4 of this year.

Here's a nice fan-made trailer someone created, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQpfXKCfmo8&feature=player_embedded

I still don't get the Q1, Q2 thing :S

[Tilla]

Wow! this looks so good!!, anyone have an idea on a release date?, and is there gonna be a beta?

The fan rumor mill expects beta sometime in Q2, and hopefully a release in Q3 or Q4 of this year.

Here's a nice fan-made trailer someone created, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQpfXKCfmo8&feature=player_embedded

I still don't get the Q1, Q2 thing :S

Financial quarters. They're a bit off from calendar time. Going by the US, the Fiscal year is thus: 1st Quarter: October 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010
2nd Quarter: January 1, 2011 - March 31, 2011
3rd Quarter: April 1, 2011 - June 30, 2011
4th Quarter: July 1, 2011 - September 30, 2011

[nenjin]

What he said, except I was counting the fiscal quarter starting in 2011.

[Virtz]

Huh. I always thought Quarters at release dates just meant quarters of the year, like starting from January.

And just to make certain, I've checked Gamespot's chronology. They put Q1 releases around March. Like at the end of the given year quarter.

[nenjin]

That's SOP for retailers. They need to have a date listed, but rather than risking a stated date that gets missed because of whatever....they just pin it to the end of the quarter until they get confirmation from the developers.

[Virtz]

Gamespot's not a retailer, though. Just a gaming site. They list whatever newest date they get.

But either way, I just found it confusing that Q1 would actually mean the end of the year (as Tilla put it) rather than the start.

[nenjin]

Gamespot's not a retailer, though. Just a gaming site. They list whatever newest date they get.

But either way, I just found it confusing that Q1 would actually mean the end of the year (as Tilla put it) rather than the start.

Pretty sure they're all part of the network that is connected to Gamestop. I could be wrong though, I haven't researched their corporate affiliations. The same thing still holds for review sites though. They don't want users coming to the site for information and finding a blank spot for the release date. So they just pencil it in based on rumors or annoucements.

[Sowelu]

Duuuuuuuuuude.

Do want.

I have some reservations about the "Hero" thing though.  Unlockables?  In my online multiplayer FPS?    It's more likely than I wish.

[nenjin]

Well it's kind of two tiered.

Highest level players get access to the rarest weapons available,

and the highest level players become heroes, who in addition to providing passive bonuses to players around them, might do stuff like suffer less due to suppression.

Normally I'd be concerned too. But TWI was pretty conscious of this throughout KF's development and beyond. They know people like a level playing field. So I expect them to balance it pretty stringently.

Plus, they learned from KF that people max out very fast. As in, they thought 3 months, players maxed in 3 days in KF.

So for ROHOS they're planning a very, very long upgrade chain. The likes of which we probably haven't seen since Battlefield 2. In BF2, I had friends playing 35 hours a week for three months and not even get close to max rank. (Of course they had all the unlocks long before, so the ranking was all cosmetic.)

I'm hoping for the same kind of long-term commitment out of ROHOS. We'll see. Bottomline, with no way to regain HP in Red Orchestra, it's only a matter of time before even the guys with sweet equipment and passive bonuses go down.

I'm also pretty sure that heroes will be a limited sort of thing. As in, everyone gets on the server, it compares points, and the highest ranked people of either side will be the heroes. So, you won't have the "Jedi" problem of everyone being heroes, because it's more than just a threshold.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

So basically some people will never get to be heroes because the highest ranked person is always the hero?  That seems like sort of a design flaw.