Shades Of Twilight

After playing this the past couple of days, somehow I feel that it seemed much easier than the original Rainbow 6 Las Vegas. No seriously. Let me tell you why.

In most FPSes, I pretty much can’t compare to guys that play multiplayer. Meaning, I need to take a second or two, to aim my crosshair on the bad guy before firing, but these guys can just “instinctively” look in my direction and I’m dead.

So anyway, as I progressed through the missions, I found the AI doing some really dumb things. Like this mission where I was supposed to rescue some hostages, the bad guys were kinda swarming all over the carpark and bullets flying everywhere.

I hid behind a pillar.

Then a bad guy came running past me, saw me, turned around, and stood there. No he didn’t fire at me. He just….. looked. I was startled for a split second, but I instinctively fired off a burst at him, and he collapsed. Thinking it was a glitch, I carried on.

Soon after, I was crouched behind a car. Another bad guy came running past my crouched position, and turned to look at me. Again! He didn’t fire. Just looked.

Now, in other games like COD4 for example, in both situations I’d already be dead and reloading a previous save.

Another trick I found so far, is to ALWAYS send my men in before me. Especially if I think I’m gonna die if I go in first Really, the AI seemed to miss when it comes to shooting at my men, but doesn’t miss that much when they are shooting me. I figure, I still can do a “heal” on a fallen team mate but they can’t heal me the moment I go down (which is downright unfair!).

So, I use them as cannon fodder

In any case, I’m much happier with the performance of R6V2 on my 5 year old PC compared to Assassin’s Creed. Pretty smooth gameplay most times, very rarely get “stuck” due to sudden particle effects (from guns firing, explosions). I’m pretty amazed that the resolution is set to my max and most effects on “medium”, yet I get framerates of 20 to 25 on average. Yeah I’m pretty happy with that figure, considering the age of my rig.

Back in November 2007, I wrote about how bad the AI in GRAW2 was.

After my recent reformat, I reinstalled GRAW and finished playing through it again. Now, I’m reworking my way through GRAW2. This time around, I installed the latest patch, v1.05. Back in November I was still playing with patch v1.03.

I must say the AI is much better this time around. More pro-active, much like how GRAW is. Now, they tell me “Contact!” and they fire back. They don’t need to be fired upon to shoot back this time. However, Hume, my sniper, sucks. I wish I had Allen back with me. He’s THE marksman. Far as I knew, Allen never missed. Every single time in GRAW1 where he saw a sniper or an enemy, he’d kill the guy with his first shot.

Hume, in GRAW2, sucks ass. Usually takes 2 shots to take an enemy out.

Right now I’m up to mission 4 or so. Just after entering Juarez I believe. I just finish the mission where we were supposed to take out the rebel base which is holed up at a supermarket. This mission was a framerate killer – it plummeted from mid 20s to between 5 and 7. As you can imagine, when mortar shells are falling, when Apaches are striking the enemy armour, and explosions going off all around me, the whole scene started to jerk like in a slideshow. It doesn’t help that I’m playing this on a 5 year old rig too

Anyway, seeing as how much better GRAW2 is this time around, I’m starting to have hopes of being able to finally complete the final mission – The Last Stand. It’ll be coming pretty soon if I continue this good performance. In fact, I got a “Perfect Mission” score where I was supposed to infiltrate a quarry and take out some artillery pieces (mission 2 if I remember right). I was the one holding the sniper rifle and the rest of my guys were on assault weapons. Basically I just sent them in first, to peek around corners and to clear the path for me.

Ah well, since I’m sick and the meds still knock me out, I can’t play too much. But, I’m happy now that the AI is so much better.

More on GRAW2 later! Maybe I’ll do more video captures and show ‘em to you guys.

It came as a surprise to me actually.

I was still playing around on GRAW2 recently, then decided I should go back to GRAW1 and re-play some missions. When GRAW1 loaded up, these are the things I noticed almost immediately:

1. Framerates were smoother (needless to say)
2. The Tactical map sucked
3. GRAW1 AI rocks!

No, seriously. GRAW1 AI rocks in comparison to GRAW2’s. For example, when I put the whole team on “Follow” mode, in GRAW2, at the most, what they’ll do when they spot an enemy is whisper into the comms “enemy sniper”.

What happens in GRAW1 is completely different – they tell you “Enemy sniper” and they FIRE BACK!

In GRAW2 I have to conciously “put them in harm’s way” before they’ll open fire on the enemy. In GRAW1, as soon as they spot an enemy they’ll take him out.

I just wish that they had transplanted the GRAW1 AI over to GRAW2.. then at least I’ll still have a chance in the last mission. Yeah yeah I’m still stuck at The Last Stand mission in GRAW2… pinned down by enemy fire, snipers everywhere… and, lots of reloads because the snipers keep picking me off.

In GRAW1, I remember I was on a street, walking.. my Ghosts were on “Follow” mode. They spotted an enemy sniper on the rooftop. They said “Enemy sniper” and I heard a couple of shots go off behind me… next thing I knew, they said “Got ‘im”. I never even saw where the sniper was, and they had already taken him out! Now THESE are the kinda buddies I’d go to into battle with. They watch my back.

As for the tactical map, well… I really came to appreciate the improvements they did to the map in GRAW2 when I saw the GRAW1 map. Less options, less everything. But I guess the great AI made up for it. I think the designers wanted GRAW2 to be a more “micro-managing” game.

Anyway, enough chatter… time to get back to the fight!