At Ars Technica, Ben Kuchera tells the searing story of a young medic who joins an assault team charged with storming enemy positions. The only problem is, the assault team is composed entirely of snipers, and refuses to move out. He asks his CO about it:

"The squad leader grinned coldly before bringing the binoculars up to his eyes. 'Of course we're the attacking force. That's why it's so important for every man under my command to pick up a sniper rifle and wait here, at our base.'

He nodded to himself, sure of his strategy. 'Snipers as far as the eye can see. Sooner or later... they'll come to us.'"

This and other anecdotes are hilarious gags at the expense of the way games like Battlefield work, and gamers' seemingly bottomless appetite for killing things through long-range sights, and driving vehicles they don't know how to use.

It also reminds me of Red Orchestra 2, and the kinds of stories that come out of its more structured missions and teams. Sometimes I'm a little sad that I rarely get the chance to work on my sniping, or my tank-driving skills, but I also have to admire how harshly RO2 enforces balanced teams and cooperation. The temptation to go lone-wolf in a RO2 match is tempered by how indifferent it is to kill-to-death ratios, and how difficult it is to operate in isolation from the team.

I wonder if it's just a question of audience, or whether RO2 has created a set of acceptable behaviors through classes and scoring. If you took the same people who are parking on hillsides in Bad Company 2 and put them in RO2, would they still camp? I'm not sure. There is something about RO2 that is authentic, that creates stories not about what I did, but what "we" did.

A post on the Red Orchestra blog announces Rising Storm as the first expansion pack for Red Orchestra 2. It'll ferry Red Orchestra 2's bloody, muddy realism out to the sunny, sandy beaches of the Pacific theatre, where American forces will battle the Japanese army on famous battlefields like Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Peleliu.

The expansion is a total conversion created with help from Red Orchestra's active modding community. Tripwire recruited a "hit-list" of modders who had worked with Tripwire before, and asked them to help produce the expansion.

"As Red Orchestra: Ostfront had such an avid modding community, producing some pretty good content, it made sense for the Tripwire team, the core of whom were ex-modders themselves, to offer this opportunity to a team of modders," Rising Storm producer Tony Gillham tells Gamespy.

The US and Japanese factions will be asymmetrically equipped. Gilham tells Gamespy that balancing the well-equipped US forces against a Japanese army that hardly used automatic weapons at the time is the biggest design challenge for the team at the moment, but they're hoping that carefully constructed maps can help to even out each battle. The expansion's due to arrive at an unspecified point this year, and IGN have the announcement trailer, which you can see below.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad has had broken experience and achievements since it launched, among a number of other problems. In a message to customers today, Tripwire admits, "...We've not done as well as we would have liked in the most important area to us - the happiness of all of our customers. To put it bluntly, the game had a rough launch. We've been working diligently since launch to get these issues sorted and have made great progress fixing issues with matchmaking, VOIP, and stability as well as improving performance. The final major area that we've been working on is stats, player progression and ranking."

Because players were wrongly credited for Audie Murphy-levels of heroism, Tripwire has decided to globally reset the stats for the game.

As I say farewell to my hundreds of undeserved kills and phantom sniper shots, Tripwire explains its position. "We have now fixed all of the major issues with the stats system and released an update yesterday to address these issues. Due to the problems with stats and players either earning stats and achievements that they didn't actually earn or earning stats at many times the intended rate, we are going to have to do a global reset of all stats for the game. This means all achievements, stats and player progression will be rolled back as if all players were new. This was not an easy decision for us to make, but one we felt we needed to do to preserve the integrity of the stats and ranking system, and to provide all of the players the best experience with the game over the long term."

Since this is going to erase a lot of progress, Tripwire have made the next few weeks a "double experience period" so players can quickly rank up to the levels they would have achieved if the experience system had not been broken. Tripwire has also created an achievement, "In B4 Reset" for those who play during this period, and hope to give some future rewards to people with this achievement.

It's not all bad news, however. Red Orchestra 2 is hands-down the biggest success Tripwire has ever had: "Within 2 days of the launch of the game it had surpassed the lifetime revenue of the original Red Orchestra that has been selling for over 5 years. The pre-sales and launch week sales of the game broke all company records, even beating out our hit game Killing Floor by a three-fold margin."

Listen up soldiers! We've got ten copies of Tripwire's Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad to give away, da? Ten of our European readers will be chosen by our glorious leaders to defend mother Russia against the Nazi threat.

Are you up to it comrade? Then find out how to enter inside.

Red Orchestra 2 is Tripwire's gritty, realistic World War 2 eastern front shooter. If you like your games hardcore and tense, this is the shooter for you. Not convinced? Read our Red Orchesta 2 preview.

Here's how you can win:

We want you to pitch us a war-game. It can be any genre, and play however you like, but it has to be based on a real life conflict. The more arty and unusual the better!

Answer in the comments below, the ten most original, interesting, historically obscure and funny ideas will win a copy of Red Orchestra 2.

European entrants only I'm afraid. The competition ends on September 30th. If you win you will be notified by private message and your name will appear in this week’s winners. Good luck comrade!

Red Orchestra 2 has launched. And to celebrate the five-year trek of development, Tripwire Interactive has released a trailer. Click within to have a look, and for information on our trio of new RO2 servers.



I've set up three RO2 servers for our community here in the US. Look forward to a heap of Steam events in the future--I think we're actually going to assemble something that resembles a clan, too. I can't make any promises that our servers will be running tonight--I'm unsure how long it'll take to update them and configure everything. I'll send up a flare over Twitter once they're up and running. In the meantime, here're the IPs:

San Jose, CA | 8.17.251.160:7757
Dallas, TX | 207.210.252.106:7757
Chicago, IL| 75.102.38.106:7757

I'm looking for folks to help me admin our servers and/or manage our RO2 clan. Responsibilities would include helping us run public and private events, manage clan members, and edit server settings and map rotation for maximum fun. If so, tell me why you'd be a good fit at evan@pcgamer.com.

Sad news: Tripwire Interactive announce that Red Orchestra 2 has been delayed. Happy news: it's just for two weeks. The team say they need a bit of extra QA time to iron out a few bugs and make sure Red Orchestra 2 is as polished as possible when it comes out. September 13 is the new release date.

"We haven’t taken this decision lightly, say Tripwire. "Moving a release date late in the day is a nightmare. We’ve done it because we feel it will make a difference to the product on launch day – for the better, obviously."

Find out more about the promising World War 2 military shooter in our Red Orchestra 2 preview, or check out the official Red Orchestra 2 site.

Preceding the game's August 30 release, Red Orchestra 2 is up for pre-sale on Steam. Tripwire also revealed a Digital Deluxe Edition of the game, currently discounted at $44.99, that includes access to the "final phase" of the RO2 beta, instant unlocks of four weapons, along with two TF2 hats and two Killing Floor skins.

Buy Red Orchestra 2 on Steam here.

If you own Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, you'll get...

20% off the game's price (as opposed to the current 10% pre-order sale)
Special in-game item - Russian Guards Badge and German Close Combat Badge
Day 1 unlock of the Kar98 and Mosin rifle bayonets



If you buy the Steam Digital Deluxe Edition, you'll get...

Access to the final phase of closed beta before the August 30th launch
Day 1 Unlock of the Elite Assault Weapons (MKb 42(H) and AVT-40) and Semi Auto Sniper Weapons (SVT-40 and G 41(W))
Team Fortress 2 German and Russian hats ("vintage" if bought during pre-purchase)
Two new characters for Killing Floor - Russian and German Soldier Re-enactors

Like so many tinkering, well-armed elves in a war factory, Tripwire Interactive is putting the final touches on its 64-player, WWII multiplayer FPS, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad. Today, they've passed along the final system specs for the game, along with the retail box art.



Minimum:
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Dual Core 2.3 GHz or better
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics card: 256 MB SM 3.0 DX9 Compliant NVIDIA® GeForce 7800 GTX or better ATI® Radeon® HD 2900 GT or better
Sound: Windows Supported Sound Card
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Hard Drive: 8 GB free hard drive space

Recommended:
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Quad Core 2.6 GHz or better
RAM: 3 GB
Graphics card: 512 MB SM 3.0 DX9 Compliant NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 260 or better ATI® Radeon® HD 5750 or better
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy or better
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
Hard Drive: 8 GB free hard drive space

Nothing unexpected, right? Having played Red Orchestra 2 on at least three different hardware configurations over the past month, I can't say that I've had any framerate issues on the systems I've used.

'Prod' goes the bayonet. I pull it back for longer. 'Poke' goes the bayonet. It hits the wall of the propaganda building satisfyingly strongly but I'm not convinced it's going to penetrate a flak jacket. I pull it back really hard and OW. My vision blurs and I seem to stagger. It isn't meant to do that!

Oh! Someone's hitting me from behind! Me, the man practising with a bayonet. Stupid boy. I turn around and let go of the bayonet, and it stabs a Nazi in the chest. He falls to the floor immediately and dies. As do I five seconds later when it emerges I'm losing all the blood in the world from my head and have no bandages. We lie there, entangled in each other's arms and it all fades out.

We're in Prague playing a sadly tankless level of Red Orchestra II against Tripwire, the developer on the other side of the world; I wrote about their origins here – Evan's written an extremely comprehensive preview here. The game is, as Evan related, the World War II multiplayer game we always wanted to play; it's totally PC-centric, as you can tell from the ridiculous range of postures available for a first person game; lying, crouching, leaning, hiding behind cover, blind-firing... it's also supremely hardcore; you'd never find a game on a console where the first shot that hits you is normally the last. If you come under fire, your sight blurs to reflect suppression; the way you know how many shots you've got left in your magazine? You guess from the weight of the magazine. I hope you can count...



Through playing the same class a lot, I managed to unlock a 'Hero' character; a rifleman who'd survived long enough that he was now an inspiration to his teammates, giving them a very minor combat bonus. You could tell he was an inspiration because he looked like he'd been dragged backward through a hedge – the more levelled up you get, the more worn your outfit gets. Top soldiers must look like Stig of Stalingrad; my rifleman was a tattered wreck. Mechanically, this means it pays to stay near other troops; certainly in these infantry only battles, having someone else to watch your flank and draw the enemy's fire was absolutely essential.

In fact, the heavy weapons, the fixed gun emplacements and the heavy machine guns (which need mounting to be effective), are only really usable when the map's full and you're moving in a squad, because they draw so much fire and you're such a static target. Despite that, the machine guns are great for suppression themselves, and when mounted can tear through troops who haven't taken advantage of the excellent new cover system.


Welcomely, the game just features Nazis versus Russians, the real meaty battles of the war, where most of the fighting and dying happened. There are ten maps based around Stalingrad, ranging from open tundra to towering buildings, to just plain ruined cityscapes.

Later, when Tripwire had gone to bed, and there were just four then two trigger-happy journalists creeping through the rubble, the game felt very empty, though the combat was more convincing and thrilling because of the huge, empty maps. We roamed the streets, pausing only to do the classic LAN trick of looking at each other's screens or to scream blue murder when we finally found our opponent, frantically bandaging himself beneath a staircase, trying to snipe from a ruined apartment block, or who'd chased us down with fixed bayonet. Not that he could handle it as well as me. Prod! Poke! Stab!

Roswell, GA-based independent developer Tripwire Interactive has marked the calendar. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad will release on August 30, 2011 worldwide. It'll also retail at a surprising price: $39.99 in the US.

Late August positions RO2 several weeks outside the shadow of Battlefield 3 (October 25) and Modern Warfare 3 (November 8). Read my excited hands-on with the game here.