I glance left, where our evac waits, rotors whomping. My dead Fire Team respawn behind me, (at a considerable cost to our score), and we push back the PLA before re-establishing our position. First you stop the bleeding, then you get rid of the injury. It's a matter of maybe ten seconds of hiding in cover and applying bandages before I'm as good as new. Bullets might kick you in the face like a particularly flexible donkey, but you can recover.
I might be bleeding out, but I can patch myself up. Which leads me back to my current predicament, slumped against a wall at the top of our slope, our high score in stasis as we get overwhelmed. They're immersive, they're realistic, but I wouldn't call them fun.” I don't really get much fun out of military simulations. We're creative, we're making an entertainment product, and it should be fun. Authentic is fine, as it gives you some leeway to be creative, and that's what we are. “We want to steer away from the idea that it's a simulation we've banned the word in the studio. Red River is still far from its heavily-scripted competition, but it has a clearer idea of its own image.
The last game in the series, Dragon Rising, struggled to find a balance between its roots as a military simulator and its desire to appeal to Call of Duty fans. If you play the game differently, the AI will react differently.”īut this isn't ArmA, and it's not trying to be. Because it's an open world, when you come down the middle, they might flank you or pick you off from a distance, but if you take another route, they've got to be able to react to that appropriately. “They know what the scene is, and they know they need to get from A to B, but when we say 'Action!' they react to whatever's going on. It's much more autonomous I'd describe them as more like improv actors.” That's Sion Lenton, the game's Creative Director at Codemasters. “It's not scripted, like whack-a-mole AI. The way the AI works is a symptom of the open design of Red River. It works both ways, too, with enemy locations flashing up on your compass as they're seen, moving from hard, certain red triangles when you've got direct line of sight, to blurry, vague blobs once their position is unconfirmed. But should you duck behind cover and relocate, they'll continue to fire at your last known location. You fire, they hear you and send bullets your way. If they can't see you, and you aren't shooting at them, they don't know where you are. Sniping in Red River is surprisingly satisfying, as the enemy AI works on a line of sight basis. The first few waves are dispatched without a hitch. Me? I was a Scout, awarding me a semi-automatic rifle with a scope. Preferring to keep maximum distance between me and people who want me dead, I set the Fire Team along the walls one on an MG, the rest with clear lines of sight to the oncoming forces. The level we were playing was laid out with a walled slope at one end, and an open section of flat land in front of it leading to where the Chinese helicopters would drop off their troops.