SimHQ.com - Technology Zone - 2005 E3Expo: Day 3

The last thing I did before heading for the plane was stop by Bohemia Interactive to get a look at Operation Flashpoint 2. If you want to talk about hiding a light under a bushel they seem to be doing it. Bohemia had a small little closed meeting room and didn't appear to be making any real noise at the event. I will say this, what they are going to put out in the next year or so will definitely make some noise.

First off, there is some confusion over the name Operation Flashpoint 2 and Armed Assault. These are actually two different games. Armed Assault is, from what I understand, an interim title using the engine developed originally for military use. Armed Assault will feature a new engine, multiplayer code, and physics but retaining much of the original game play from the first game. The game will ship essentially with the original Operation Flashpoint and Resistance (sorry, no Red Hammer) style mission setup.

Armed Assault

The really cool thing about this game is that the game will allow the importation of most of the mods and user made add ons that have literally transformed this game into whatever you want it to be. This game sounds to be something of a hybrid, not a 'true' new game in the total sense but essentially a new game in many of the most significant features. The game is planned for release sometime in quarter four of this year.

This game alone would have been enough for me to give a 'good job' to the guys at Bohemia but then they told me about what they are doing on Operation Flashpoint 2 and it literally knocked my socks off.

Operation Flashpoint 2, if they pull off what they want to do with this game, will take tactical shooters to an all new level. I am not kidding here, they are going for what I think may be the ultimate tactical shooter to date. A shooter game that will never play the same, will continuously surprise you and will draw you in like nothing before it. The more I heard about what Bohemia was attempting to do, the more I was amazed.

OFP2 trades the cold war setting for a 'futuristic' setting of 2010 in areas that look suspiciously like the places US forces currently are deployed. You won't have real world places (e.g. Iraq) listed as the place of allied deployment, but the new game engine uses satellite data to reproduce real world areas in pretty solid detail. I saw some renderings of terrain that looked suspiciously like Afghanistan on the pre-alpha version of the game that was shown to us.

Operation Flashpoint 2

Graphically the game is supposed to be substantially improved over the original title. The stuff we saw was pre-alpha, and as such was not optimized. Even so, the terrain at this time already looks better than the original game and looks almost as good as any other tactical shooter currently on the shelf. The team has even gone to the trouble of getting detailed shots of the plant life in the 'fictional' land that is not noted and is rendering that plant life in full 3d. Some shots of the game in its full glory look amazing, scarily so at times.

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