 Rogue Warrior - Xbox360
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| GENRE |
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Action |
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| PLAYERS |
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1- 24 |
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| PUBLISHER |
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Bethesda |
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| DEVELOPER |
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Zombie Studios |
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| ESRB |
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| CREATED |
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02/06/07 |
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Dicking around behind enemy lines.
Before I get into Bethesda’s forthcoming (and promising-looking) Rogue Warrior proper, you might want to take a look at this guy. His name is Dick Marcinko, he invented what we now refer to as SEAL Team Six, (the Navy’s first counterterrorism unit) and he's at least half the reason the game I'm fixin' to preview has the weight, cred and personality that it does.
Set in an all-too-imaginable present, Rogue Warrior is a first-person shooter employing the Unreal engine and streaming tech to present impressively-sprawling environments. The single-player tactical campaign puts Marcinko, playing his larger-than-life self, and a team of SEALs covertly behind enemy lines in North Korea.
 While they’re back there (on what we can laughingly call “standard” reconnaissance), it seems that Kim Jong Nutjob suddenly orders a massive attack on South Korea—instantaneously landing Marcinko and his team in the direst, most isolated black-ops straits of Oh-Niner-Shit Creek. With no hope of support, backup or evac so far into hostile territory, they’ve only got the one, long-haul option—to skulk and fight and sabotage their way back to friendly lines, against more odds than Phil Collins on the pro wrestling circuit. Major chaos and general hilarity ensues.
So of course, we had to—were obliged to, dontchaknow--go into the desert outside Vegas and shoot some real, context-compatible weapons while within the command-control sphere of this guy. It makes for a better understanding of the realism of the game, you see. Yyyyyyeeeeahhh, that’s the ticket!
At the very real risk of cutting into my own (and many of my colleagues’) future fun and/or respective death-wishes, I have to wonder aloud when game publishers are going to stop intentionally putting our collective editorial asses into life-threatening situations (for which we have to fill out liability-waiver forms prominently featuring the word “DEATH” on every page.
That, and introducing us face-to-face to interesting but scary individuals whose mere, declassified proximity probably gets us each our own skimpy, placeholder file with the NSA, on general principles. Not that we don’t appreciate the thought.
(At the very least, I sometimes ponder when said publishers will stop putting guns and alcohol into our hands on the same day – although, to be fair, they’ve at least hitherto been doing so in the correct order).
 Up close and in person (with his big ol’ shorts and way-past-regulation hair), Marcinko is friendly, articulate and even gruffly charming (in a fuck-you-too kind of way), and seems genuinely interested in the translation of his considerable experience to an engaging video game—and yet, the whole time, I couldn’t help trying to mentally gauge just how many people this guy had personally dispatched in the course of his career. As the saying goes, I’m glad he’s on our side.
Playable in first- or third-person perspective, Rogue Warrior boasts battlegrounds where the player can exercise a lot of tactical judgment and creativity: In the demo we attended, players could cycle through the their A.I. teammates and give them single-button commands (like flanking, attacking particular enemies, adjusting posture, and so forth). Even the baseline AI seemed pretty decent, with team members utilizing the scattered bits of junk in a de-commed shipyard as cover, moving forward with stealth when appropriate, and supporting the player’s attacks. If you want to micro-boss your team, you can; if you haven’t the patience for that kind of thing, you aren’t stuck with it.
The real piss-your-pants news here is that in Rogue Warrior’s “solo” game, an Xbox Live friend can join at any time, and take on the role of one of the (formerly AI) squad-mates. No dropping out of the game, no fwopping your way through lobby menus, none of that happy-crappy---just *pop*, rock and roll. Awesome.
The sabotage/stealth attack aspects we saw were a lot of fun; silently taking down isolated guards at the fringes of the enemy pack is one option, but of course, any other guards who notice anything untoward—such as a prone, unresponsive or screaming/dying comrade—are going to check it out.
 At this point, the grim fun doubles, due to the ability of players to booby-trap the bodies, and indeed the areas around the bodies. Wire up a fallen foe, raise a ruckus to bring attention to the fact, and then exacerbate the situation with the flick of a switch when his fellow soldiers close in to investigate.
Since this is a shooter that’s at least intended to be rooted in something like the real world, the issues of command and control also, admirably, come into play: real war isn’t a video game where you just pick off anything in sight in a fit of Ramboism. In fact, why not take a page from the history books and look for the insignia/dress of the highest-ranking officers in your sights? Kack the guy wearing the showiest bars with a long-ranged head shot, and you just might convince the less-experienced of the underlings present to break ranks and run away, thereby saving you and yours a lot of effort…and ammunition. Waste not…
The multiplayer game is slated to allow four players to tackle the entire campaign in (hot-swappable) co-op, and you’ll be able to give medical help to each other in the event the worst should happen. For full-on adversarial multiplayer, the game uses a unique tile-based scheme that will continually offer new challenges, at least in terms of maps and environmental layout.
You see, Rogue Warrior takes a bunch of multiplayer maps and cuts them into three pieces, or tiles. When a match begins, your team picks a tile to start on, your opponents pick a tile, and the computer decides which tile will go between you, making for one large battlefield (of some 200 combinations) for which neither side can ever totally prepare.
Add to this the promises of 24 players and 8-10 different game modes—plus ‘bots to work on, for what is euphemistically called the ‘aggressively solo’ gamer—and you’ve got a promising-looking package all around.
 One other less-boasted feature of the game is the sheer personality imparted to the proceedings courtesy of Dick Marcinko himself—he does his own voiceovers, of course, with a smirking, jaded, tough-guy attitude (at one point, upon being informed of the inability of friendly forces to intervene or help in any way, he replies with a jaunty “Okay then, fuckyouverymuch”).
Another aspect we’re hoping to explore/exploit more in the very near future is the tactical open-endedness of the campaign: Since supplies are scarce behind enemy lines, players will have to continually scrounge up new ammo and weapons, and much will depend upon how they conduct their progress toward friendly lines.
It’s tempting to lure a pack of enemies near something volatile like an ammo cache and then blow it, and them, to Kim-Jong Come…but if you’re running low on ammo, that sort of stash starts to look real friendly. Other types of reactive environmental objects are designed to let you decide just how stealthily, boldly or wastefully you want to conduct your team’s progress back to friendly territory.
Rogue Warrior is easily the most macho thing to come from the Bethesda barracks, and it’s going to be interesting to see just how much they push the environmental freedom, the eerily-prescient North Korea storyline, and the verging-on-Duke-Nukemness of Marcinko’s self-aggrandizing in-game persona. We’ll keep you in the intel loop as this shooter nears launch….or the Six o’Clock News, depending on how things work out.
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