Thread: Lessons from OFP

Originally Posted by John CANavar

I didnt say "game isnt about killing". I hope you can see the big difference.

The impression I got was that you were more interested in setting up tactics for tactics' sake, without regards to what the actual impact on the game would be. I'm cool if you want to try that sort of stuff out, but as far as I'm concerned it really would not aid teamplay much.

Originally Posted by John CANavar

All that matters to you might be to win a game but please dont assume that it is the same for others. There are many people here who enjoy playing a tactical game no matter what the result is. It is the experience itself NOT the result. It is a stupid game in the end. I dont remember how many games I won or lost but I remember many great gaming moments.

I think YOU need to read the primer again. It is saying that we don't exploit things in the game engine that are unrealistic or unsporting just to win. What I'm trying to communicate is that more tactics do not equal BETTER tactics. You can organize until the cows come home, but that's not realistic. There's 2 reasons they organize so much and spend so much time on drilling in the military: they HAVE time, and they NEED the time. The military is a full time job. They spend all day thinking up ways to win skirmishes, battles, wars. If they mess up, people DIE. In Red Orchestra, nobody dies. In real life, it is certainly worth the time it takes to set up things like pre-determined contact reports and stuff like that, because you're working with disparate groups within an organization that depends on standardization. In Red Orchestra, it doesn't matter. I can say "tank onna hill at 11!" and it's going to work out just fine. That doesn't mean your way is BAD. It just means it's not entirely neccessary, and what's more, it's time spent doing something that could be better spent on, say, shooting people.

Originally Posted by John CANavar

According to your argument, a 12 yrs old with good reflexes and FPS experience is the best Tactical Gamer because he can kill you easily when the bullets start flying.

Nah. I said (or at least meant to communicate) that if I got to choose between someone who had all his cc macros set up but couldn't remember how to reload his gun or someone who listens to every command I give and follows every order to the T and can take out 4 enemy soldiers with his pistol but says "Fandango" instead of "Foxtrot," I'm gonna go for the pistol guy. Because that's what you'd do in real life. It's not the difference between SirFr4gsalot and Lt.Cmdr.TacticsAhoy. It's the difference between someone who follows orders and shoots the enemy, and someone who ignores your acknowledgement because you said "roger" over a completely empty voice com instead of using a cc macro.

I realize we're here to use tactics, not to mow down Germans. But these games have guns for a reason. There ARE games, like X-Com or Jagged Alliance, where nobody cares how accurately you can shoot, or whether or not you realize you only have 1 bullet in your clip. Red Orchestra is not that game. Tactics are not created just for fun. They're created to serve a purpose. If you try to come up with strategies and predetermined reactions to situations that really don't demand it, that's not tactics. It might be what happens in real life, but it's not what happens in the game. There should be a REASON for every tactic, or else it's just silly.

I'm not sure how to make this clearer. Tactics are a means to an end; they are created so you can achieve a goal. Here at Tactical Gamer, we gravitate towards games that let us use tactics to win, not our ph4t reflexes and twitchy trigger fingers. To take a game that relies on tactics, like Red Orchestra, and to add on top of that all sorts of things that only make it HARDER to fight the enemy, does not seem to me like what we ought to be doing.