Unreal
In a daring move, Ubi Soft decided
to stray from the in-house game engines used by previous
Rainbow titles, and licensed Epic Games' Unreal
engine instead. As proven by Unreal Tournament 2003, this
engine is quite capable of mind-boggling graphics.
|
The
graphics in Raven Shield are, in a word, awesome.
The models are well made, as are the textures. The
most impressive aspect of the graphics is probably
the special effects, mainly the nightvision goggles,
flashbang effect and tear gas effect.
The nightvision goggles makes everything go green
and fuzzy (surprise, surprise), and decreases your
field of vision to a small circle. Bright areas
- everything from illuminated teammates to bright
lightbulbs - flare up beautifully.
Get to close to a lightsource and you'll find yourself
completely blinded. |
The nightvision goggles make
players stand out like radioactive lollipops in
a kindergarten during a power outage. |
Blinded is something
you'll also be if you happen to look at a flashbang as
it goes off. Whatever you were looking at will remain
on the screen for a short while, slowly fading away. Depending
on what you were looking at, it can be difficult telling
the "ghost image" apart from what you're really
looking at. In addition to the visual effect, your virtual
ears will ring and all other sounds will be muted.
Finally, prehaps the
most "fun" effect: The tear gas. If you walk
into a cloud of gas without a gas mask, your vision will
be heavily blurred. Everything leaves motion trails when
you move around. While it wears off relatively fast, the
first few seconds are total disorientation and the effect
is, as I said, very impressive.
Gas mask: $300. Nightvision goggles:
$500. Playing Raven Shield as a Darth Vader lookalike:
Priceless |
One
of the nice touches connected with all of these
items is that they're visible to other players.
When you activate your nightvision goggles, other
players will see your character take them out and
put them on. Extra items, such as grenades, are
visible hanging from your belt, your sidearm is
tucked into your thigh holster and if you step into
gas and start coughing, your character will bring
his arm up to his mouth and, well, cough. If you
have a gas mask on, that'll be visible too. Finally,
whenever your primary weapon is not in use, it'll
be slung across your back.
The animations are good overall. The walking/running
animations have been criticised for being too stiff,
but in my opinion, they look just fine. |
Raven Shield allegedly
supports ATI's TRUFORM, which increases the amount
of polygons and makes everything look rounder. For a comparison
of how Raven Shield looks with this feature turned on
and off, check out this
ATI page. There's also some information on other features,
such as projected textures and CubeMapping. Unfortunately,
while TRUFORM does work, it causes certain clipping
errors in the first-person weapon models, such as the
M16 and G36k magazines clipping through the magazine wells.
The First Person
Oh yes, the infamous first-person
weapon models are very present. There's been a fair amount
of skepticism towards this new addition to the series.
Personally, I've never had a problem with weapon models
- I'm quite fond of them, actually. And the ones in Raven
Shield are most impressive. They're a bit higher up and
closer to center than in most games and they take up more
space, but most of them also look really good. The animations
(holstering, drawing, reloading) are beautiful.
Of course, everybody
won't be happy with them, so there's an option to turn
it off. If you do, all you'll have is the generic reticle,
which is a bit too plain for me.
The weapons themselves
might also be a bit too plain for some. The demo contains
only a small portion of the full Rainbow armory with three
submachine guns, four assault/battle rifles, two sniper
rifles, one light machinegun, one machinepistol and four
pistols. Not enough? That's where the attachments come
in.
The demo features two
attachments, the scope and the suppressor. All the weapons
come with a 1.5x zoom level which works much like in the
previous Rainbow titles. Put on a scope and voila - 3.5x
zoom, with the added fun of actually looking through the
scope, complete with its own reticle. The suppressor is
pretty self-explanatory: You attach it and it makes your
weapon more quiet. Just like everything else, the attachments
are visible to other players.
The light machinegun
and the two sniper rifles also come with bipods which
are automatically extended when you go prone. The bipod
significantly increases accuracy and decreases recoil,
invaluable when attempting to provide any sort of accurate,
continuous fire with the RPD light machinegun.
Lastly, the sound. Not
a lot to say here either. The sounds are satisfying and
varied. Each weapon has a unique sound, from the dry "BANG"
of the M14 to the "click" of a suppressed pistol.
EAX is fully supported and sounds great.
Karma
|
Together with
the Unreal engine, Ubi Soft also use the Karma physics
engine. Remember all the cool death animations in
the previous games? They're gone (apparently) and
in place are realistic physics. Instead of playing
a pre-made animation when dead, the model will interact
realistically with the environment. This means that
if you die at the top of a set of stairs, you'll
drop and then fall down the stairs. Stand with your
back to a wall and you'll end up slumped against
it.
It's not perfect,
though. Sometimes the term "rag doll physics"
are taken a bit too far and the corpses will end
up in some particulary painful-looking positions,
such as with the feet by the head and the legs bent
around the back. Apart from the overly bendy pelvic
area, the Karma engine works fine, so you won't
find anyone with their legs bent forward at the
knees."
|
The Karma engine does its job.
Also note the blood mark above the corpse. |
Evolution
So what about the actual gameplay?
Well, I played for about seven hours straight last night,
so I guess I like it. In short, it's a combination of
Rogue Spear, Ghost Recon and America's Army: Operations.
It's slower. Much like
in Ghost Recon, the old Rogue Spear tactic of strafing
back and forth maniacally while firing on full-auto won't
cut it, it'll kill you. Accuracy on the move is pretty
bad, so most of the time you'll want to slow to a walk
or stop alltogether before firing. The end result is more
tactical movement, less running around at full speed and
extended firefights as people peek around corners, let
off a few rounds and jump back behind cover. The old reticle
bloom (reticle expanding to simulate recoil) is gone and
instead we now have "real" recoil where the
entire screen shakes and the weapon moves upwards. The
weapons are also more lethal than ever before. Just a
few rounds from the MP5, or even a pistol, is enough to
end your life - especially if you're clipped in the head.
The high-powered rifles, like the M14, will take you down
with one shot to the chest. If you get shot, your vision
will be temporarily blurred. Get hit in the leg and you'll
have to limp around for the rest of the round.
To help you avoid getting
shot, you have several new moves at your disposal. For
starters, you can now go prone, thus presenting a smaller
target while increasing accuracy. As mentioned, it's also
required to go prone in order to utilize bipods. You can
also control your posture "manually" by pressing
the Ctrl key and moving the mouse around. This is the
so-called "gradual peek", allowing you to lean
around corners and duck behind cover as fast or slowly
as you'd like.
Speaking of gradual,
there's also gradual opening of doors. If you're not happy
with hitting Space and slamming the door wide open, you
can use the mousewheel to open it slowly. During a fast-paced
multiplayer game, it's arguably better to just get the
dang thing open as fast as possible, but this feature
will definitely be of use in some situations where one
player opens the door slightly, another one tosses in
a flashbang, the first one closes the door and then they
both barge in after the flashbang detonates.
Finally, you have a new
and very entertaining way of decending ladders. By pressing
the right mouse-button while decending, you will place
your feet on the sides of the ladder and slide down at
mind-boggling speeds. This can be very useful since you're
completely defenseless while climbing ladders.
Since the flashbangs
are quite effective now, they're used a lot more often,
and the gas grenades are pretty popular too until the
opposing team wisens up and starts wearing gas masks.
The fragmentation grenade, however, is somewhat disappointing.
It's still very deadly, but the range has been decreased
so much that you can almost stand on top of it and still
escape without a scratch.
The heartbeat sensor
is also in, with a makeover. Instead of being a handheld
device that makes enemies pop up on the map, the heartbeat
sensor is now a pair of goggles which make heartbeats
show up as pulsing circles. The sensor is less accurate
than it used to be, but still very useful when tracking
down hostiles or scouting ahead.
Shackled Time
|
The demo comes
with a whopping two maps. The first one is a pretty
large prison map. It has several multi-story buildings,
a big basement, a load of routes and a somewhat
tall "sniper tower" (with one of the longest
ladders I've ever seen in a game).
The other map is
a remake of the old City Street Large. It's pretty
much the same, but it's larger and has more cover.
There are also
some small, low holes here and there where you can
only get through when prone.
Both maps provides
the teams with plenty of ways to get to the enemy
and both are quite balanced.
|
Equipment and weapons are visible
to other players. |
Red & Green
The demo offers two gameplay styles, Survival and Team
Survival. Anyone familiar with the Tom Clancy shooters
should know what these are, for everyone else it's Deathmatch
and Team Deathmatch. In Survival, everyone's spawned randomly
around the map and has to hunt down the rest. In Team
Survival, the two teams - Red team and Green team - start
at pre-set locations and the last team standing is the
winner.
To help plan the assault
on the opposing team, Raven Shield has a so-called drawing
tool. Hitting F4 will bring up a full-screen, top-down
photo of the current map. Here you can simply click and
drag on the map to draw a line. On the left side of the
screen are several colors to chose from, and at the bottom
you'll find a bunch of icons that can be placed on the
map with the right mouse-button. Whenever someone on the
team interacts with the drawing tool, the entire team
will be notified, and everybody can see what the other
teammates are drawing. In this age of voice communication
software and well-trained squads, this might not be incredibly
useful, but it's a fun addition nonetheless.
As always when playing
with a team, there's the possibility of 'blue-on-blue'
- friendly fire. To help counter this, Raven Shield has
several new features. One is a Ghost Recon-esque IFF (Identify
Friend or Foe) system. Whenever you aim at a teammate,
the reticle goes green and the player's name is displayed.
If you're the kind who prefers to shoot first and IFF
later, there's the radar. The radar displays all teammates
in your vicinity and what level they're on (higher, lower
or same). If you still catch a bullet from someone on
your team, a small window will pop up asking if you want
to penalize the player. By hitting 'Yes', the offending
player will be forced to observe the next round. If you
think the teamkill was accidental and don't feel like
punishing the player, you just click 'No' and everything
continues as normal.
The game is played in
rounds, just like the past titles. The difference, however,
is that there's no chat screen between the rounds. Instead,
a transparent menu appears on the screen where you can
chose your gear, watch the scores, switch teams and so
on. There's a ready button, and the game launches when
all the players are ready. If not, it will still launch
when the count-down reaches zero.
This is one of the downsides
about Raven Shield. The Rainbow games have always been
about socializing for me, and I've probably clocked up
more time at the chat screen that in the game itself.
In Raven Shield, there's no way to turn off the count-down
between rounds, and it doesn't go higher than 60 seconds.
This leaves little time for chit-chat. In addition to
this, the text can be hard to see sometimes as it overlaps
with the transparent menu.
Other than this little
annoyance, the new system works great and eliminates the
need to load the map prior to every round.
Ubi.com
Before you get this far, you have to find a server to
play on (or host one yourself). New hosts will find themselves
looking at a DOS-like command prompt until they realize
that the 'Dedicated Server' option is on by default. Did
I say dedicated server? Ah yes, Raven Shield is the one
and only Rainbow Six game with dedicated servers. The
host has a plethora of other options to set up as well,
including a 'Force First Person Weapon'. Since the new
first-person models both decrease the framerate slightly
and block your vision, the host can opt to force everybody
to use them to avoid players gaining an advantage.
| The promised in-game
browser is also present, but this is also where most
of the problems appear. Not surprisingly, the browser
uses the Ubi.com matchmaking service. You don't have
to download the Ubi.com software, but unless you're
playing a LAN game, you have to have a Ubi account
and log in. Naturally, this means that if there's
trouble with Ubi, there's trouble with the game. This
was obvious the day the demo was released, when there
were some server problems and several people had trouble
getting into servers - me included. The following
day, however, it all worked. The readme states that
56k modems are "supported, but not recommended",
and that high-speed internet access is best. Still,
I've had no problems playing with my 64k ISDN and
the lag is no worse than in other games I play. When
you first start playing, it might still appear laggy,
though. Most games have client-side animations, that
is, when you hit the fire button, the gun on your
screen fires. Then that information (you firing) is
transmitted to the server. |
The tear gas effect is truly
disorienting |
In Raven Shield, it's
the other way around. When you hit the fire button, the
information is sent to the server first. Only when the
server gets this information does the gun on your screen
fire. This means that there will almost always be a small
delay between hitting the fire button and actually firing.
In return, when the weapon goes off on your screen, there's
no delay between firing and hitting something, preferrably
an enemy. The delay is also so small on any decent server
that you'll quickly get used to it and eventually not
notice it at all.
Some people still have
problems with Ubi.com and the occational "Cannot
log in" bug still appears. In Ubi's defense, this
is one of the very few games where you can hop on a public
server with total strangers and still get a fair amount
of good teamwork, rather than a bunch of guys playing
Rambo. I guess that says something about the Rainbow Six
online community..
Mission Complete
Some hate it, some love it. There
have been a fair amount of complaints about Raven Shield
not being similar enough to Rogue Spear. I'm thankful
this isn't what we got. While Rogue Spear was, and still
is, a great game, I don't care much for sequels if they
just feel like mission packs with better graphics.
I see Raven Shield as
a new chapter in the long line of tactical shooters with
Mr. Clancy's name on them, and I love it. It has enough
of the old Rainbow in it for me to feel right at home,
and at the same time it has so many new things to keep
it fresh and interesting. The feel of the game is still
Rainbow, but it's also darker, grimmer and heavier - more
mature and less run-and-gun. Slower, without being too
slow. This very small multiplayer-only demo has been out
for just a bit over a weekend and I can already tell that
this will be my favorite game of the year 2003. It gives
me that warm and fuzzy feeling, heck, playing it with
some friends for the first time the other day was just
like the very first AGR-S Rumble, complete with shaky
hands and lots of fun. If you're a fan of tactical shooters,
I suggest you give the demo a go.
