Operation Flashpoint (OPF) is a bit of a genre bender. That is, while it draws much from first-person shooters (FPS), it also bears numerous features more common in the simulation community. The best label I've seen for it to date is "infantry simulator". I say this because OPF clearly aims for fun over realism when it comes to piloting aircraft or ground vehicles, but seems to me to prefer realism to fun when it comes to the "lowly" ground-pounder. OPF succeeds at much of what it attempts, and it attempts a lot. It is not without problems, however, and I'll do my best to make these clear as I see them.
Much has been said against the visuals in OPF. I've read complaints against the texture quality, the color bit-depth, the models, the animations, and every other visual element. I think it undeniably true, for example, that OPF does not look as good as Ghost Recon (GR), but I think it looks plenty good for its purposes. One of the most important goals of any game, if not necessarily the most important goal, is to entertain. As such, OPF's visuals seem entirely adequate to me for its goals. Could it look better? Yes. Would its looking better greatly enhance the experience of playing it? I doubt it.
OPF breaks some new ground in its visuals. It doesn't have the highest texture quality imaginable, but its engine allows unoccluded visibility all the way to the horizon. OPF doesn't have the most fabulous models and animations created to date. But it has a very realistic weather model, complete with dusk/dawn color-shifting effects, shadows of realistic length and so forth at sunrise and sunset as well as throughout the day. In short, while OPF is not as impressive as some of its contemporaries (if it has any) in some aspects of its visuals, it goes beyond what has come before in several others. Perhaps this is the best summary possible: if you're the type of gamer (i.e., really shallow) who just can't have any fun without jaw-dropping eye candy in every respect, then OPF is not a game for you. Otherwise, you will likely have little substantive complaint with its visuals.
The audio in OPF is a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of the sounds are dead-bang on. Several veterans have told me that the M113 sound effects are uncannily real. From my own exposure to some of the rifles, I must say that OPF's sound effects are as realistic as they come—the M16, for example, sounds exactly like firing the real thing. I've not had exposure to many of the in-game vehicles and weapons, however, so I can say only that OPF is realistic to the limits of my knowledge.
I have a few gripes with the OPF audio, and I'm not sure they're all that telling. First, the music is pretty uninteresting and seems either inadequate or out of place. Given that OPF focuses on realism in so many other aspects, having music in the background seems a bit goofy to me. If realism were the primary goal, then I would expect ambient sounds rather than music. Nevertheless, OPF provides music in the background, which seems never all that comfortable with the in-game events. This complaint may not be a good one insofar as the developers could claim they provide the music they do precisely because it doesn't distract from the realism. That is, if the music were more gripping, then it might feel too much like a video game and not enough like the real thing! Still, it seems best to me either to do something all the way or not at all. It's a Yoda thing: do or do not, there is no try.
My second gripe with the audio is that I never found it possible to achieve a good balance. If I turned up the sound effects to the point whereat tanks rumbled across the screen, shaking my keyboard, then the rifle sounds were utterly ear-shattering—even when the fire was hundreds of yards away. I've never been up close and personal with armor, but from what I've read and been told, it makes a serious ruckus when it's on the move. The armor sounds in OPF, as well as those of the other vehicles, just don't seem potent enough compared to the other sound effects. Maybe this was deliberate insofar as louder vehicle sounds might obscure gunfire, footsteps, orders or other such important audio cues.
Third in the audio gripe section is that the game has some serious problems with its use of the Creative Labs EAX standard. I found that I could hear the soft conversations of guards from hundreds of yards away, if I faced a certain direction, yet sometimes couldn't hear guards walking right up behind me! In short, it seemed that the overall handling of positional audio was flawed at best. Fortunately, this wasn't that big an issue as the game seemed to err, more often than not, on the side of giving the player too much, rather than too little, information.
Fourth among audio gripes is that the voice acting is terrible, and I mean terrible. It's Vogon-poetry bad. This is the kind of bad such that your own internal organs leap up through your body cavity to strangle you in a sort of mercy killing. The "humorous" banter among soldiers could have been an effective addition to the game if the voices didn't sound like they were done by the programmers. I know OPF was a low-budget game—incredibly low-budget, in fact, as detailed in a post-mortem article in Game Developer magazine—but voice acting talent is not the place to scrimp.
Overall, I found the audio in OPF to be satisfactory. It's not cutting edge, and I think it's an utterly amateur production compared to the audio in a game like GR, but it does what it attempts well enough for the game's purposes. It also bears mention that I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to audio—you know, musician's ear and all that.
This is another department in which OPF is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it allows a great deal of flexibility in configuring controls and provides a fair amount of flexibility in terms of the information displayed on the heads-up display (HUD). All of the game's most basic interface elements are pretty darned useful, and they lend to the realism in the way that they come into play. My one complaint about the most basic controls is that the mouse inversion is troubled.
In the version of the game through which I played, inverting the mouse would also invert it when accessing the game's menus and so forth. Maybe I'm being inconsistent, but I expect that inversion to apply only when playing, as is the case with every other FPS game of which I'm aware. That may have been fixed in later versions; I was so frustrated with it at the outset that I just got used to leaving the mouse uninverted, and I haven't tried inverting it again since. I also had trouble getting the mouse sensitivity adjusted properly, but that might have had something to do with my incredibly sensitive mouse (viz., a Boomslang 2000).
On the other hand, the interface of OPF is troubling on several points. First, it seems schizophrenic. For example, for a game that focuses generally on realism, controlling aircraft is ludicrously simple. The aircraft controls strive for an arcade-style feel rather than any realism. In contrast, however, the tank control interface seems both difficult to handle and far more realistic in its clear divisions between the driver, gunner and commander. The different interfaces don't reflect a consistency in the design goals, or at least it isn't clear how they do. Personally, I would prefer the ability to select the degree of realism involved in handling the various vehicles.
A more serious problem is the command interface for OPF. The developers deserve serious kudos for attempting as much as they did. And, as I'll note later, they deserve still more praise for pulling off some of the best in-game AI seen to date. Having said that, though, the command interface in OPF is almost impossible to put to good use when the... uh... "stuff" starts hitting the fan. The interface is of a subject-verb nature; i.e., one first selects the subject, then issues the imperative verb. Selecting individual soldiers, tanks, etc. is a matter of pressing keys just as issuing the orders involves the pressing of more keys.
At a minimum, then, issuing a particular set of orders involves at least three keystrokes. And since making effective use of one's forces often involves the giving of different orders to different personnel, one can end up in the awful position of having to issue a dozen or more keystrokes within an instant. I was able to overcome this somewhat by using Game Commander 2 (GC2), which I recommended highly, to issue groups of commands in response to my spoken orders. Still, even GC2 didn't ease the burden that much. More attention to simplifying the command interface would go a long way toward making OPF more fun to play.
A third problem is that the multi-player interface is practically nonexistent. Come on, developers: at least give us the ability to find games on the Internet! I had to resort to using GameSpy to find any games at all. I realize that players can always use such external utilities, but it's a far less painless process than using an in-game browser. This is an area where I think developers really have some progress to make. If you're going to provide multi-player capability, then I think you assume the burden of providing at least some kind of in-game browser.
A fourth, though pretty minimal, problem is that there are several in-game elements whose explanation is rather obscure. In the first mission, for example, one's squad leader starts barking orders that make little sense. I finally discovered that the numeric codes he was shouting correspond to bearings and distances to which I'm supposed to move, but I didn't find that out until I was more than halfway through the game. It would have been helpful to get that information in the training mission.
Also, why must the player be referred to by a number that isn't even constant from mission to mission? The only ways to find out what number you are, it seems, are to (1) always be careful to read the relevant page of the briefing materials or (2) say something after the mission starts. Why not refer to the player by name? It's not like the player isn't always David Armstrong, James Gastovski, etc. If nothing else, it should be far more obvious what number the player is.
Fifth, and I harp on this more and more it seems as new games are released, not all of the cut-scenes can be skipped. The "movies" at the start of various missions all can be, but the "humorous" banter among soldiers, briefings from one's squad leader and so forth cannot be skipped. Do developers not realize how incredibly irritating this is? There's nothing worse, after taking a bullet in the head by complete surprise, than to have to sit through the awful voice acting in OPF for a second time. Seriously, my kidneys have been eyeing my throat throughout half the game.
Developers Take Note: The player must be able to skip all and I mean ALL cut-scenes. Not some cut-scenes; not just those cut-scenes that don't include necessary information; ALL of them. Each and every cut-scene, regardless of length, importance, cool-factor, etc., must be capable of being skipped. Am I making my point yet?
The game mechanics of OPF deserve special mention. For some reason, this game just feels right for the most part. Movement seems natural and at roughly the correct speed. It seems ridiculous to me that soldiers can sprint for... well... forever, but perhaps I've just never been in good enough shape to know? At least some limitation on sprinting (ala Return to Castle Wolfenstein) would seem far more realistic. What I like most, oddly enough, is the handling of weapons. One head-shot really does kill. Hitting the legs or body is similarly realistic. Make no mistake: OPF is not a run-and-gun kind of game. If you go charging over the hill, then you're going to get whacked, and fast. Oh, and jumping around like a bunny rabbit (ala Counterstrike) isn't an option. The developers also deserve kudos for getting the bullet physics right; i.e., the player must learn to lead his targets in a very realistic way.
On a similarly basic level, OPF is one of the few games that supplies all of the stances I expect a soldier to adopt most often. One can crouch, lie prone, move slowly, run, etc. Additionally, the iron-sights view for the weapons is a feature I wish other games would adopt. The standard reticule is pretty useful, of course, but I found myself most often using the iron-sights view simply because it reminded me of my own real-world experiences with various rifles, pistols, etc.
Equally wonderful as regards the weapons is that a soldier can pick up and use pretty much anything. Games like GR, in which only certain specialists can fire a given gun, really irritate me. I do understand that a specialist trained specifically with, say, a sniper rifle will always be more proficient than someone who hasn't had that training. But how hard is it really to pick up a bloody sniper rifle and fire it? GR's soldiers are apparently too stupid to find the trigger unless they've been trained as a sniper, whereas OPF assumes that any soldier competent to fire a rifle can pick up any other rifle and make it work. That strikes me as far more realistic and is certainly far less irritating in terms of gameplay.
The mission structure is gloriously open-ended. Mission objectives change on the fly, being added or subtracted depending on circumstances as they develop. Further, mission objectives may be accomplished in a multitude of ways. If the goal is to destroy a given group of armor, then the player can destroy them by laying mines and luring them over said mines, by shooting them outright with anti-tank weapons, by commandeering a nearby helicopter and blowing them away from above, by commandeering one of the tanks and using it to destroy the others or pretty much any other way the player can find to get the job done. In this sense, OPF is a blast to play, particularly because the terrain is so open and inclusive; i.e., there are usually other paths available if only one will explore a bit.
Despite the comments made previously about vehicle-control interfaces, I must admit to an enduring fondness for driving tanks in OPF. The interface strikes me as a needlessly complex business, of course, but after a fair amount of practice, I found myself rocking along in an iron behemoth, blasting the bad guys to bits with the big gun. Who could possibly not enjoy that? There are few video-game experiences that compare with it. Though the tank-control interface is not simple to master, the overall mechanics of using armor are of special distinction in my estimation.
The only truly glaring complaint I have about the game mechanics is the limitation on game saves. From what lower plane of hell has the one-save-per-mission limitation emerged? If this is a trend in gaming it needs to stop, right here, right now. Yes, OPF does a nicer-than-average job of providing retry positions during a mission, but this is insufficient. OPF is bloody hard at various points, if not darned near impossible, given the ridiculous accuracy of the enemy AI. Saving a game whenever the player so desires is one of the most basic features any such game should provide, and this is a major failing in OPF.
The story for OPF is best described, I think, as a good attempt. Maybe I'm jaded after playing so many other games that rely upon some ultra-nationalistic Soviet menace to provide the fodder, but I just couldn't escape the "ho hum" feeling where the story was concerned. I wasn't two missions into the game when I decided there were only two possibilities for the game's climax: (1) fighting side by side with "standard" Soviet forces against the bad guys in a warm and fuzzy display of UN-style internationalism, or (2) stopping the bad guys from launching a nuke. I wasn't sure which of those two possibilities I liked least, but I was pretty confident a scant mission or two later that (2) would surely be the case. Imagine my "surprise", then, when it was revealed that Guba had acquired a nuclear weapon! Wow! I sure didn't see that coming! In short, ho hum.
If I've learned anything from contemporary media, it's that everybody from intelligent and otherwise perfect examples of humanity drawn to evil only by U.S. foreign policy (e.g., The Peacemaker) to deeply-committed Islamic fanatics (e.g., The Sum of All Fears) to Dr. Evil can get his hands on a nuke these days. But haven't we done that to death already? Are contemporary writers really so impoverished that they cannot come up with anything more interesting? For crying out loud, if I have to sit through one more if-you-fail-this-very-well-could-be-world-war-three briefing, I think I'm going to puke.
Still, I must give credit where it's due. OPF attempted to handle this by-now-incredibly-cliched storyline in a very realistic fashion. I particularly enjoyed the dialogue at the outset, in which the colonel is forced to admit to his men that nobody has a clue what's going on or even who the enemy might be. That was a refreshing change from "Our long-time nemesis, the evil [PSYCHOTIC-DICTATOR/NATION-STATE/ALIEN-RACE], are again attacking target x, which as we all know is only the first step in an n-mission campaign which will play out pretty much the way it did in every other game in this genre." In summary, the story is well done for what it is; I'm just tired of what it is.
As if I haven't written enough already, there remains much to say about the overall content of OPF. On the one hand, this is the first game ever to provide such an utterly huge arena in which to play. It really doesn't hit home how revolutionary this is until the player has to hop into a jeep and drive somewhere several kilometers down the road. I didn't even notice it at first until it occurred to me that I wasn't expecting the fade-to-black. In other games, after all, when the character gets in the plane, steps into the jeep, climbs aboard the tank, etc., the scene fades to black and generally resumes with him then getting out of it at his destination. OPF keeps the player grounded firmly in the situation with its incredible scope. Knowing that I could hop into a vehicle and fly from one end of the island to the other if need be really added a lot to the game.
This vastness was complemented nicely, by the way, by the inclusion of so much stuff. I've played so many FPS games that I guess I've just grown accustomed to running around environments without a single bush or tree. While leaving some room for improvement, OPF is the first game I've played that provides entire forests with detail down to the level of individual trees, brush, scrub, houses, cars, junk, and all sorts of stuff in the world that makes it believable. It really enhances the realism of the game. The only such thing that was noticeably absent, I thought, was people. No matter where I drove, there were plenty of trees, bushes, houses, cars, etc., but I never ran into any people outside of those whom I should obey, command, shoot, or save from the bad guys. I'm sure the developers made this choice to avoid the huge can of worms that such non-player characters (NPCs) would provide, and I can hardly blame them for it; they just made such great progress with the other stuff that the lack of people seemed odd.
The OPF missions are many and varied. Just as I was starting to get kind of bored with the infantry, I found myself driving a tank. About the time that grew stale, I found myself running special ops. All of these transitions (and others to helicopters, planes and so forth) seemed quite nicely timed. It really helped keep the game fresh, if a bit daunting at times because of the radical shift in control interfaces. The player sure gets his money's worth with OPF in terms of the number of missions and stuff to do therein. The only glaring omission I noted were naval missions, but this was rendered quite plausible, I think, by the nature of the campaign's logistics.
It also bears mentioning that the developers are doing a great job at supporting the game. They've already issued patches fixing a slew of problems and, more praiseworthy still, providing additional goodies to play with. The developers have added new vehicles, new weapons and so forth, all of which give the game greater longevity. While the expansion pack is not free, it might as well be for the complete, second campaign it offers for a mere $9 in stores near me. In short, OPF and its expansion pack are a seriously good gaming value.
The AI in OPF is particularly praiseworthy. It has some problems, but it's overall the most impressive demonstration I've seen in a game to date. One's fellow soldiers seem to react, for the most part, like soldiers, not idiots. When enemy fire erupts, they hit the deck! They take advantage of cover, and they use it when moving from point to point. The only thing I haven't seen them do that I really missed was provide covering fire for each other when moving. If that's part of the game, then I didn't see it. I was particularly impressed with the way the enemy AI didn't run straight at me stupidly as they do in, oh, almost every other game I've ever played. In one mission in particular, I took a shot at a couple of enemy soldiers near the tree line, and they vanished into the woods. To my complete surprise, they emerged from two different angles near me a few minutes later and flanked my position perfectly. That's something you won't find in any other game to my knowledge.
Still, even with as good as the AI is, I do have I have a couple of complaints. First, the AI-controlled soldiers all shoot well enough to blow the left, and only the left, testicle off a gnat at hundreds of yards away in the dead of night. One of the covert ops missions was particularly egregious. I was sneaking toward an enemy compound in the black of night when I saw a group of guards at least a couple of hundred yards off, walking toward a helicopter. Since I didn't want them to get that potential eye in the sky off the ground, I dropped prone and pulled out my sniper rifle. I figured there were only three of them, and I should be able to drop them all before they could get to cover. I lined up my first shot and fired. I was rewarded a moment or two later with the lead soldier falling to the ground. The other two, however, dropped prone and returned fire, nailing me right between the eyes maybe two seconds later. I wish I could say this was a fluke, but it wasn't. That kind of thing happens all the time in OPF. The enemy AI really needs to be more realistic in its aim and ability to detect the player.
The second complaint I have is that the AI doesn't work that well where stealth is concerned. The AI works quite well for regular soldiers, but on those occasions when I was leading special ops forces on covert missions, it was pretty useless. The ability of the enemy to detect silenced fire, the relative lack of stealth with my fellow operatives and so forth led me ultimately to leave my colleagues behind. They just weren't worth the trouble to bring along. Every time I tried, they either stupidly opened fire when they shouldn't, didn't open fire when they should, got themselves detected and killed, or did other stupid things. That was kind of disappointing in light of how well the AI worked in other circumstances.
The multi-player aspect of OPF can be best summarized, I think, by saying its potential is enormous. I think OPF could be the ultimate infantry simulator, for the time being, with its multi-player capabilities. But the multi-player interface is essentially nonexistent, and the number of available games through other means seems far too small. To date, I've been able to find only a handful of decent games, and while those were a lot of fun, hooking up is just too sporadic to make the multi-player game a big selling point. At this very moment, for example, GameSpy Arcade reports a total of 60 dedicated servers, roughly 20 of which would be playable in light of the pings. Further, of those 20 only 2 have anybody playing. That's not a lot of opportunity for gaming.
My conclusion is necessarily a mixed one. On the one hand, OPF packs a lot of fun into a nicely-priced package. For those willing to overlook a few warts here and there, it provides a very compelling single-player experience. It also provides a pretty compelling multi-player experience, though it's just bloody hard to get connected to a good game. If you're the kind of player for whom the single-player aspect is a largely unwelcome training ground for multi-player gaming, then don't buy OPF. If you're more like me in placing great emphasis upon an entertaining single-player game, then OPF might be the right game for you. If an open-ended campaign, few restrictions on what weapons and vehicles you can use, a huge map and generally quite good AI also appeal to you, then OPF is clearly a good game. For those unwilling to be a bit patient and spend a little time getting accustomed to the OPF way of doing things, I suggest you avoid the game altogether.
02/05/2002