Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45: Ostfront 41-45 is yet another First-Person Shooter that is based around World War II. However, there are two key differences: it focuses entirely on the Eastern Front with conflicts between the Germans and Soviets (a setting usually forgotten by WWII FPS, probably because of the usual America Wins the War portrayal); its focus is entirely on realism. There are no crosshairs, no health kits, and bullets follow the standard laws of physics (mostly).

It started out as a mod of Unreal Tournament 2003. As an infantryman, you have the choice of playing several different classes: an assault trooper with a sub-machine gun; a sniper with a scoped rifle (the rifle shakes like crazy unless you're bracing it against something, and you have to account for bullet-drop when firing a long distance); a machine gunner (depending on the type, the barrel can overheat and you will have to manually replace it with another barrel); a bolt-action rifleman (the only class which has unlimited slots); a semi-automatic rifleman; and the squad leader, who is basically just an assault trooper with smoke grenades. On maps where there are tanks, you also have the option of playing as a tank crewman, a tank commander (the only classes that can drive tanks), or an anti-tank trooper who starts out with a gun that can destroy tanks with one or two shots to less armored areas. Tanks are also handled realistically in that you either need at least two people to drive them (one to drive, one to fire and reload the gun), or one person who switches very fast between the two positions (which is an Acceptable Break From Reality, since waiting 30 seconds to switch from the driver's seat to the turret does not make for exciting gameplay).

Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 is a tactical first person shooter created by Tripwire Interactive.It is developed on the Unreal Engine and won the 'Best Mod' award in the 'Make Something Unreal' Nvidia contest; it was later released on Steam in March 2006. Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 - Darkest Hour Mod Full Client Beta v1.2. Darklight Games is proud to unveil Darkest Hour Beta 1.0 a modification for Red Orchestra: Ostfront. After 18 months of develoment Darkest Hour brings the European Theatre of Operations to Red Orchestra focusing on the Normandy Campaign post D-Day. Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos News Guides Reviews. Jk Red orchestra osfront is beter ro2 sucks in my opinion because it hase campaign instead of practice which dissapointed me a bit #7. The 4th Earl of Derbyshire. Sep 8, 2012 @ 7:09am.

Maps consist of either pure infantry battles, pure tank battles where everyone has to play a tank crewman/commander, and combined arms battles which use both infantry and tanks. Strategy revolves around capture points, where one side has to capture a certain amount of area in a given time and the defenders have to stop them. Each side is also assigned a number of 'reinforcements,' which indicate how many times a player can respawn after death. Once they reach zero, no one can respawn anymore. If any side is at 0% reinforcements and has all of their members killed, then they lose regardless of any other factor.

The game itself, as a mod, was released in the Editor's Choice Edition of Unreal Tournament 2004, (alongside Alien Swarm, itself another Ascended Fanfic) and sprang from an entry in a mod contest held by Epic Games, with first prize being a million dollars and free Unreal Engine 2 licenses. They won, and founded Tripwire Interactive on the spot. There are two mods for Red Orchestra called Darkest Hour, which focuses on the Western Front after D-day, and Mare Nostrum, which focuses on the battle in the Mediterranean and features Italian troops.

The sequel, Heroes of Stalingrad, was released in September 2011. A standalone expansion, Rising Storm, moves the setting to the Pacific Theater and was released in 2013.

This game took its name from the Soviet Union's espionage network during the war, which was called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. This game otherwise has no connection to spying.

• Artifact Title: Inverted in regards to the 'Orchestra' part at least. The maps originally had no music playing when the game was first released, a later update added music as an option.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI bots that play the combat engineers have a nasty habit of dropping their timed det packs in the middle of a group of friendlies.
• BFG: Treated realistically in Heroes of Stalingrad - machine gunners need to be prone or on cover to place their weapon down to fire it fully automatically. It may be fired from the hip, but very slowly. Anti-tank rifles in both games have a similar requirement and are impossible to fire when not set up.
• Boom! Headshot!: A One-Hit Kill.
• Break Meter: Heroes of Stalingrad has a a suppression meter shown for yourself. When it depletes, your screen greys out making it impossible to see (and therefore shoot) very much past twenty feet.
• Excuse Plot: Don't buy Heroes of Stalingrad for it's single-player campaign unless you want to be very underwhelmed. Although that's still a step up from the first game: your only non-multi-player option was practice mode, which was exactly the same as multi-player except with retarded bots instead of human players.
• Fackler Scale of FPS Realism: Very, very much on the realistic end.
• Game Mod: Began life as one, and won one of the 'Make Something Unreal' contests. The retail version has two mods itself - Darkest Hour and Mare Nostrum.
  • And the developers hired the Darkest Hour team to create an expansion for Heroes of Stalingrad set in the Pacific with the American and Japanese armies. Apart from this, the developers already released the SDK to several modders so they could create mods early: there is a Vietnam War mod and a WW 1 mod. This all before the game even released.
• Hit Scan: Averted. Ballistics need to be taken into account for every ranged weapon.
• HUD: There is one, but it provides neither crosshair nor exact bullet count, unlike most other FPSs.
• Instant Death Bullet: An Averted Trope in Heroes of Stalingrad - if you are fatally wounded, you may conk out instantly (likely from a Boom! Headshot!), but occasionally instead you may still survive some seconds more to continue firing before your character blacks out. As well, being non-fatally wounded requires your character to bandage themselves before they bleed to death (you get two).
• Meaningful Name: In addition to the above about the name 'Red Orchestra', Ostfront is German for 'eastern front'.
• Nintendo Hard: To be expected with all the focus on realism.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Averted in the sequel, there is a single-player campaign for both the Russians and the Germans.
• One-Hit Kill: Very likely, though not always.
• One Bullet Clips: Averted. In fact, you don't even HAVE an exact bullet count on the HUD - just the number of remaining clips or magazines and some text describing the weight of the current mag after a reload. Kind of like Trespasser, but without the voices. In Heroes of Stalingrad, characters will reload box magazines on weapons that use them and save the partial magazine, but will insert rounds one by one into bolt-action rifles, unless the rifle is totally empty, in which case they will load a full magazine via stripper clips. With the telescopic scope getting in way for the Marksman class' rifles, they will always insert rounds one by one when reloading.
• Sprint Meter: In both games.
• Translation Convention: Optionally in Heroes of Stalingrad, after the Bilingual Bonus from the original.
• Universal Driver's License: Averted. Not only do you need to be a tank commander to drive a tank, tanks need multiple crewmen to function efficiently.
  • However, a player going it alone can drive, then switch seats to the gunner position when needed. Many players do this almost exclusively.
  • Similarly, there is only one commander on each team in Heroes of Stalingrad, and only they have the clearance to call in support with the radio.

To Stalingrad, Ho

Stalingrad was a bitterly cold city in the winter of 1942. The German Army was pushing its way into the city, but the Soviets were beginning to put together their a stand that would eventually drive the Wermacht out of the Soviet Union and back into Germany. The majority of the Eastern Front campaign, from 1941 to 1945, is the subject of a new first-person shooter, Red Orchestra. The game combines infantry and tank warfare in a game that emphasizes historical realism and realism over the arcade action that's become so common in other World War II first-person shooters.

Red Orchestra: Ostfront '41 - '45 originally began life as a small modification for Unreal Tournament, before rising to fame by winning a $1,000,000 contest sponsored by Epic Games. Over the course of the contest, the developers honed their skills and expanded the shooter's depth, added more features, and otherwise upped the game's refinement. When Red Orchestra was selected as the winner of the contest, the team was awarded a full license for the Unreal Tournament engine (used elsewhere by such titles as Tribes: Vengeance, Rainbow Six: Raven Shield, and others) and development cash to make a full game. More than a year later, the team has completed its work in the form of Ostfront, a fully-featured first-person shooter that's now ready for retail release on Steam on retail store shelves. I recently spent some time with the game's beta code, and what follows are my impressions.

New Magazine is Heavy

At first glance, Ostfront may resemble a number of other shooters already on the market. The environments and characters could be confused with those from Call of Duty 2, while the gameplay seems to be taken from the pages of Day of Defeat. In truth, the game blends its two closest competitors, picking and choosing their best features and melding the two together with an even greater degree of realism than either titles. In fact, what struck me when I picked up Red Orchestra for the second time (I had played through the original when it was first released in beta form in 2004), was how much the game focused on realistic infantry combat. Like the other games, it has the realistic weapons, zeee German accents, and convincing environments, but Red Orchestra almost seems hell bent on going a step further in the name of realism.

Take the player movement and weapon aiming, for example. The Soviet and German soldiers can all sprint, crouch, and go prone, but don't expect to be able to aim very well while doing anything other than standing still. The game comes without any super-imposed reticules or player assists for aiming, instead forcing players to go crouch and aim down their ironsights to fire and have any hope of hitting their intended targets. To further discourage the type of run 'n gun action common elsewhere, Red Orchestra's developers have modeled a gun sway and positioning according to how a real human might run and point their weapon. Rather than keeping the weapon up front and centered at all times, the player's gun moves from side to side as their character swivels from side to side. This added degree of movement makes it all but impossible to blindly fire and fire off meaningful rounds from an MP40.

In another example of the game's near fanatic devotion to realism, all of the game's weapons and can be supported against environmental objects in order to steady aim. By placing a weapon on sandbags or against building walls, aim is steadied and the likelihood of placing that 7.62mm round into the Soviet conscript across the square greatly improves. But steadying aim isn't as simple as squatting and finding a nice comfortable mass of sandbags to cozy up to. In order to model suppressive fire (especially pertinent with heavy machine guns and artillery included in the game), the developers have taken a page from Call of Duty, blurring the player's field of vision whenever explosions ring close or machinegun fire is nearby.

Finally, there's this message which flashes across the screen when a weapon is reloaded: 'New Magazine is Heavy.' This terse hint reminds players that their weapon will now behave differently than it had when the magazine was empty on the last shot. Anyone who's fired a gun will recognize the truth to this assumption, but it's still striking to see this sort of realism modeled into any game.

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