The E3 Experience
Well, I have now survived what is known as the E3 experience, and since most of you that will be reading this were not able to be there yourself, I will try to paint you a picture of what it was like. For those of you that were there, what are you doing reading this?.... write something so that these people know I was not on crack the whole time I was there, when I get all excited about something I saw.
It was Thursday morning, and after quite a late night, Snicker and I drug ourselves out of the hotel and down to the car with girlfriends in tow. When we arrived at the Convention Center, we paid $6.00 to park and after about 10 minutes of searching for a parking spot we were on our way. When we entered we turned in our V.I.P tickets, and stood in line to get our badges like the 80,000 other poor schmucks who were there at the last minute :-). After getting our badges and discussing what the titles of the girlfriends should be (they wanted their title to be Boss: Rainbow Six Retreat... we thought Warden fitted them better). By this time it was about 10 minutes before they would actually open the doors, so again we stood on the main floor of the L.A. Convention Center in awe of how many people were there.
As we stood in line, taking in the first sights and sounds of E3, I was approached by a guy with a TV camera. He looked at my badge and noticed that I was with the R6 Retreat, and informed me that he was part of MercX. If you are not already aware, they are a R6 clan and also so a TV Show in Canada. We talked to him for a bit and he said that he had an interview with RSE as soon as we got in. About that time the doors opened and it was time to enter "The E3 Experience".
When we made it through the doors we were immediately hit with more sounds and lights than you would find at any concert. There were explosions, music, scantily clad women, people, speakers, etc. everywhere. Eidos had a ver large booth, and we happened to see John Romero in it, of which Snicker got a picture. As we made our way to the South Peak Interactive booth, which was the home of the RSE booth, we saw what we thought was surely an illusion. It was a real live General Lee from the TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard". I thought that we might have to seek medical attention for Snicker, because he just might burst with excitement. We then had our picture taken with the General Lee, and the Duke's were there also, Daisy was, as usual, very ummm... well endowed, and slightly underdressed, which made our significant others somewhat hostile towards Daisy. Anyway, after we got done there, it was on the the Holy Grail of E3!!
The Rogue Spear Experience
The Red Storm Entertainment Booth was most definitely the best of the show in our personal opinion. They had more games, further along than about 80% of the rest of the big name companies there. They were demoing Rogue Spear, the Sequel to Rainbow Six, along with Force 21 and the console versions of R6. While the console versions looked good in their own right, there was just no getting around that Rogue Spear was the main attraction. So I assume that you want details, well I have some details for you. If at any point in here I ramble, just keep reading because there are many secrets imbedded in the words of a sleep deprived man.
At first glance, Rogue Spear (Which will be refereed to as RS in the rest of this article) was breath taking, and after diving a little deeper into the details, it was almost Heaven (I say almost because we did not get any hands on time with it). The new animations of both life and death are amazing. I saw a man get hit by the blast of a frag and literally die in front of you. No more just falling back and dying, these boys are better than any action film you have seen. If someone gets shot in the throat, they act as such, and if they get a good Overdose of shrapnel, they stagger and stumble in disbelief as the last bit of live seeps out of their new found wounds.
Throwing flash bangs now has serious repercussions especially at night or in dark areas. As with a real flash bang or any very bright source of light it will burn an image into the retina of your eye. This is very similar to what a camera flash does to your sight, and it has been modeled into the game . The effect will last for about 45 seconds and deteriorate over that time. They also realized that the flashbang did not just effect your vision but your hearing also. For this occasion they have added a sound that makes you think that your ears are still ringing from the explosion.
I assume that most of you are aware that your aim got worse after you had been injured in R6, while there was no apparent reason for your aim being off to the rest of your team because you showed no outward signs of being injured while in the actual playing phase. This has been replaced by a limping animation. If the character is shot in the leg, they will limp quite noticeably. This will be very useful in team play for determining who the guy with the HBS should be.
The AI was a big concern as the sequel news first hit, so as Carl Schnurr said they completely scrapped the AI and started over. Now an enemy will ambush you, search you out, and take cover if being shot at and missed. We got to talk to Carl briefly, and he was very open about all the things that they were trying to do with the game. He was also very helpful in answering all the questions Snicker and I had, and we had quite a few. I would like to thank Carl for all his help and patience. The new AI ,although it was not polished or completely ready for play was still amazing. If they are holding hostages, they will escort the hostages back and forth from the bathroom, and they will also move the hostages around if they think the situations calls for it. Can you imagine what it would feel like as a terrorist to escort 4 hostages into the bath room and have 4 members of the R6 team come busting out of the stalls in the bathroom:-).
As I said there were not a lot of completely done things in the game, but what we saw that was not finished was absolutely JAW DROPPING!!! If the demo they had there was any indication of how good the final product can and will be, they have game of the year in the bag. Forget other games that you may have heard about (including Team Fortress 2 which it looks like will be delayed quite some time), because RS is gonna ROCK YOUR WORLD!!!! If you have vacation time around September plan on taking it because I promise you that you will not leave your computer until sleep or lack of food forces you to.
For all of you that wanted the sniper in the game, he is now there in full force, they even have a designation for that in the planning stage. Although the sniper does not lay prone, he does sit in an upright sniper position, that looks great. The animations on the snipers movements are great to get up he puts his hand on the ground and raises the other side of his body up. You would just have to see how smooth it is to know what I mean. Most of what we witnessed at E3 was a sniper setup on a go code to take out an enemy with a good LOS or strategic position. This works very well, as when you give the go code the team AI will take out the enemy sniper leaving you to command the ground troops in the assault. But if you prefer to to play the part of the sniper, there is more than enough team AI to take the whole map by themselves unless someone gets off a nice frag or just gets lucky, while you sit up high and pick off the stragglers.
If you are tired of people cheating by using the constants.txt file, that may be solved. I talked to Greg Stelmack and he hinted that there might not even be a constants.txt file. Now, if you go e-mail RSE and tell them that I said there would not be one, you are on your own because I said MIGHT. When asked about what was being done to stop some of the cheating in the game, they said that they were trying to gather all the information about it so that thye could find the holes and patch them up before the game was released rather than later. Well folks, this is all for today, I am very tired and have many other things to do so I will try to add more tomorrow if possible. If you have any questions about other games we saw at E3, let me know and I will try to get something up about them.