stevenmu

Like RatoN, I'm quiet happy that it's been farmed out to GRIN. I think Ubi have RSE under too much direct control and have too strong an influence over their versions of the game, but it seems to me that GRIN were more or less given an overall brief and told to go and make it play the way us PC gamers want it to. While they don't have total freedom, I think they have enough, along with the talent and intent to give us the game that we've been crying out for.

It would be handy for taking a suppressed weapon, meaning you can leave your primary suppressor free (as you mention afterwards). Other than that, if the handling is modelled well, the MP5 or the M8 compact could be more usefull in building interiors or other confined spaces.

I should be pretty good, A64 3200+, 1gig PC3200 and a 128MB 6800. I'm kinda regretting settling for a 128MB vid card, it's starting to mean that I have to run medium textures instead of high, but then again I never really see much difference between them. I'm hoping to see some comparisons between systems running Ageia cards and those without soon to decide if they're going to be worth buying or not.

I went for Jungle myself, altough I'd be just as happy with Woodland for pretty much the reasons en4rcement mentioned. Lots of carefull sneaking around, tense night time missions, suppressed weapons etc. Maybe even the occasional mad dash to get to a clearing for exfil, being chased by lot's of bad guys, laying traps/ambushes to slow them down and so on.

iirc the 1.6ghz AMDs were either the Athlon XP 2200+ or 2400+, which means it's (roughly) the equivelent of a 2.2 or 2.4 ghz Pentium 4, you should be fine for the minimum spec.

I'd hope it's based on where the drone happens to be, if the drone can see someone they get a red diamond, if they hide from the drone, or take it out, the diamond dissapears. That'd add a pretty cool dimension to it. edit:oops, didn't realise there was more pages when I hit fast reply. ^^^^what they said.

Part of the reason some of the screen shots look so 'bad' is bcause of in game effects which change the colour pallette and make it look grainier and grittyer depending on what's happening at the time.

I was a little concerned about GRAW after playing LD too, but then I remembered why I'm looking forward to GRAW so much. The few details that we have indicate that it is going to be the tactical shooter we all want (or close to it, I'm sure we'll all find some flaws in it ). While it does have the hero character and single squad system like LD, the command map and individual squad member order system should make up for that. The maps will non-linear allowing us to tackle missions (lasting up to 2 hours !!!) how we want to. The enemy AI sounds very impressive, operating on individual, squad and strategic levels, and will have to be better than LDs to cope with the non-linear nature of the maps. There's plenty of other details of course, they're just the ones that come to mind immediatly when contrasting with what I don't like about LD. There's still plenty of reason to look forward to GRAW, and of course there's almost certainly going to be a demo for us to 'try before we buy'. Judging by how late LDs came out though I won't be expecting it for a while.

Sorry, looking back now I must have misread you, a combination of the time of night and the fact that there always seems to be someone complaining about something, has me seeing things

Firstly, I'm sure the game will be released. GRIN have to be payed for all the work they've done and I'm sure Ubi would prefer to do that out of our pockets than their own. Ubi has also invested time and money in the game and they'll want to recoup that with a nice profit on top, plus keep the franchise alive for future game to bring in even more profit. Secondly, I have to agree with everything NYR said, Ubi don't owe us anything. In the past we've payed them money for their games, and in return we've recieved those games. That's it, we're even. In fact we've probably all gotten a lot more out of those games than we ever expected. The simple fact is, Ubi release games, if we want them then we buy them, if we don't want them then we don't buy them. If we want a different game to the ones Ubi release then we find someone else making one we do want, or we make our own. Thirdly, with regard to the comments on engines, I really don't get it. You're complaining that modern games are just focusing on the graphics (which is a fair comment), but then complaining that that GRIN are using their own proprietery engine ? The only reason to use a generic engine would be for fancy graphics, that's mainly what generic engines provide. The exact same gameplay could be applied to the proprietery GRIN engine as could be to a generic Ubi/RSE one, in fact it would easy for GRIN to use their own engine because their devs would already be familiar with it, and they'd be able to customise it at will.

It's my understanding that you can call in support from Apaches during missions, it's possible that this would only be in specific places against specific targets and they will fly in and out on rails, but I'd hope for a bit more than that. If some vehicles are going to move dynamically then I'd hope all, or at least some others will too. Of course that's little more than optomistic speculation.

As Colin said, it's been confirmed that there won't be driveable vehicles, but I'm hoping as you say that there might be some potential for modders to add them in. I've been thinking that GRAWs visual style and maps would make for an excellent 'Man on Fire' mod, and some evasive/defensive driving missions would go well with this (if being a little out from the actual movie). I've never even attempted thinking about a mod before so I've no idea how possible this'll be, but I'm thinking that vehicle movement in game will be controlled by some kind of scripting which can react to in game events (as opposed to being on a fixed scripted 'rail'), and therefore can hopefully be scripted to respond to key presses.

The FX series cards are way out of date now, and even when they were 'in date' most people agree that there performance was poor compared to the equivelent ATi cards. The newer nvidia/geforce cards, the 6800 and 7800 series are much better and are generally thought to be as good as the equivelent ATi cards. (edit: people do argue that one is better than the other but this largely comes down to personal preference and hair splitting). No one knows yet how good a card will be needed to run GRAW well, so all anyone can really advise is to buy the best one you can afford. You'll find good reviews and comparisons of the current cards at http://www.tomshardware.com that'll hopefully help you decide.

I wonder if IGN mentioning a PS2 version was just a mistake on their part, I don't think a PS2 version has been mentioned yet ? edit: graphically it looks impressive for an Xbox, altough the hud really does crowd the screen more than other versions

Thanks, like you said nothing spectacular, but it's news all the same. Btw, I think one of the sites mentioned that part of the story is that the Ghosts just happen to be in Mexico to recover surveillence equiptment (I think possibly the cross-com system) when the president gets kidnapped), this is possibly the ''engin'' referred to.

If that really will be the release date I'm sure we'll have official confirmation really soon

I liked the one liners in [GR], or they way they verbally acknowledged orders or sometimes reported things like "pinned down", or "they're close". They sometimes say "No Fear" in [GR] when you change them to move at all costs (double arrows, can't remember exactly what it's called), and it sounds good then, but I think I'd be turning off speech if they start shouting crap out all the time.

Interesting offer, altough more because of the promise of a timely delivery than the reimbursement. kinda makes me wonder if there'll be a good chance of getting it a few days early. Maybe even us in the EU will get it on the US release date (iirc we're meant to get it 3 or 4 days later). Then again there's a few stores near me that always bring out the big releases (and I'm sure this'll be a 'big' release) the day before they're supposed to.

The thing I'm worried about wrt physics cards is the longevity of them, I've resigned myself to buying one for GRAW, but will the first gen be replaced 6 months later by a new model which you'll need to get for the next wave of games using it, or will it last a few years.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I always assumed Feb '06 meant the very end of Feb, so it's only delayed by 6 days for me

I'm pretty sure it was mentioned somewhere that they're regular PCI, with a PCI-E version possible at a later stage. IIRC they require a molex power connector aswell like most graphics cards these days. Don't forget space for a mini-nuclear reactor to power it all

I was thinking along the same lines, except even further south. Some of the rebels could easily escape down to South America, or it could turn out that they were being backed by FARC (I don't think taking them on would offend anyone's sensibilities ?). Plenty of scope for varied scenery, breathtaking mountain ranges,cliffs, jungle, desert too I think (I suck at geography). When you put it like that, YES that's exactly what I want The bits of Far Cry I enjoyed most were the ones where I could creep around in dense forest at night with a suppressed weapon. Far Cry made it a bit easy with the binos that could track everyone and the bad guys constantly shouting their heads off but it was fun all the same. GR has always had great sound, imagine how cool it would be creeping through a dark jungle, trying to pick out noises that don't belong, maybe a vehicle engine, footsteps, a cough, someone lighting a smoke, taking a dump etc. There's also the possibility of finding signs of passing patrols, footprints, broken branches etc (probably need an extra few gigs of ram to keep track of it all though). Besides, most of the enemies will be located in groups fairly close to objectives, or patrolling obvious routes close to tracks or roadways. And let's not forget all the advanced cross-comn stuff, UAVs wih thermal imaging etc.

I'd imagine it'll be mostly gr.net members who'll be logging on and asking questions. Would it be a good idea for us to have a thread here so that we can get all our questions thrashed out and save us from tripping over each others 'red diamond' questions ? If we can all agree on a list of the most important questions we want to ask, and maybe a member of staff would be willing to present them, we can collectivly squeeze the devs for every last bit of info possible.

Tbh, I don't think the trailer is aimed at 'us' (us being the people who care about GR and are able to make reasoned informed choices about the games we buy). I think it's more aimed at those who buy games based on the 'wow, would ya look at that' factor, or maybe parents buying games for their kids. To me it looks like the for the trailer, they've tried to cut and paste lot's of different features into the one short clip to give it a more exciting, action packed feel, but hopefully throughout normal gameplay it would all fit together in much more of a GR way (if that makes any sense at all). The most dissapointing thing in it for me was at the end when Mitchell gets killed beside the mini-van, it really looks like 'Game Over' time.

The impression I've got from reading the various bits of info we've gotten so far is that there will be other squads operating on the maps, or some of them at least, and at times the player can take control of them. There are also other assets in theater/game, such as air strikes, close air support (somebody better make a mod to let us fly those apaches ), artillery etc... This tells me two things, one is that the 4 man squad is a design choice, not a hardware limitation. The second (and I may just be getting overly excited here), is that your ghosts aren't operating as a lone force, which they more or less did in [GR], but rather as part of a wider picture. For e.g. one mission may be to assault a rebel encampment. You get inserted at one point in the map, other ghost teams outside your control are inserted at other points. Enroute to the camp, you knock out some air defenses allowing air support to come in and take out some APCs blocking your path. The other ghost squads perform similar small tasks before you all join up to assault the camp itself. That's the kind of integrated approach I'm hoping GRAW will have, and the feeling that you're part of wider campaign, with other events not directly related to you going on around you.