RTCW: It Any Good?

Ok, my quick impressions of RtCW after reaching Chapter 3, Part 2. Visually it's a tweaked Q3 engine, so its obvious that its appealing to the eye. One thing I was suprised with was the music. It serves its purpose well in creating the mood and drawing you into the suspenseful action...ok, maybe not suspenseful, but it's good music for a FPS.

Gameplay, uhh. Standard fare FPS. Run around hitting switches, open door, kill badguy, repeat. The catacombs were pretty cool and the animation on the zombies impressed me. Those fire breathing demons rock ass! The AI is actually pretty good. They will run for cover, roll on the ground when fired at, and find reinforcements/sound alarms. I read in the manual that they would toss back grenades, but never once saw it and I'm pretty deep into the game. The stealth missions suck ass. It's almost impossible to be stealthy in this game. Speed wise it feels like Doom running around the levels and someone always spots you no matter what. There is a mission you have to get by without a guard sounding an alarm and it makes for a real tedious, frustration filled, bore.

Multiplayer is just a pretty Day of Defeat with some quality maps. I didn't buy the game for multiplayer, but I could possibly see myself playing a game every now and then.

Final Conclusion? I'm dissapointed, but in myself for paying $60 for a game I already knew wouldn't be that great. Maybe the hype or nostalgia factor or even the hope that it would be this great FPS that brings something new to the table...I dunno. I had to give it a try. I'll probably end up beating the single player within a day or two and returning it. I'm starting to believe my problem is just being burnt out on FPS games. They're all the same pretty much and nothing will ever be like Quake 1 TDM again, so I shouldn't ever get my hopes up. Anyway, RtCW isn't a bad game at all...it's just not worth a purchase unless you are a big WW2 buff and want a professional/unrealistic Day of Defeat multiplayer mode.

6/10 rating baby - not half bad.

Hey, anybody get this error:

GLW_StartOpenGL() - could not load OpenGL subsystem

It works on my WinXP computer in Charlotte, but I'm at my parents' for T'giving and system are identical (WinXp, Athlon 1.3, 256+ mb ram) with the only difference being video card... my computer has a Geforce 3 and my parents' have my old TNT2...

Thanks in advance

Just finished the bastard on hardest setting. What a mission. Man those last few levels are tough, esp the end boss. Those stupid (blah's) that it spits out drove me nuts till I worked out how to deal with them. Nice cameo of sorts at the end too.

Awesome game, awesome fun : )

-red2 : )

Ok, honestly what the fuck. I'm on mission 4 (the stealth mission). I have NEVER played anything so gay in my life. Its just plan stupid. Has anyone else found these pointless mission that are stupidly difficult with the AI that just runs around like chickens with no heads, uck. I could do without mission 4.

The game it self is decent though, Mazel Tov to Activision

Help!! I can't run it. It tells me that it can't find my OpenGL subsystem. I am running a Geforce with Windows XP. Quake 3 runs fine and I've tried copying the opengl32.dll to every dir in the game to no avail.

Man I just started Mission 6. The SP is longer than I thought. I thought for sure after I beat the "uber soldat" that was the game. Then the damn thing load the next Mission. I was like dayum! At the beginning of Mission 6 there is even some comedy between two german soldiers.

Instead of a review, here my fps ranking since Q2:

Half-Life
System Shock 2
NOLF
RtCW
AvP2
Deus Ex
Max Payne
Unreal
Q2
Red Faction

I'm not feeling comfortable about ranking Deus Ex so low. It was great, but somehow I wasn't compelled to play it till the end.

Anyway, what you say?

I don't want to share my opinion on the game yet for the most part but I will say its been mostly good.. but NOLF is better so far. But of course Wolf has some interesting multiplayer.

anyway anyone who thinks the q3 engine cant do large areas is full of shit!

http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/big.jpg

and then chck out the hands on these girls when they die, kind of an easter egg in a way \m/}g

http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/hand1.jpg
http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/hand2.jpg
http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/hand3.jpg
http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/hand4.jpg
http://withease.fragland.net/RTCW/hand5.jpg

hang loose and rock on!

I think that this one is a wasyte of cash. The story is dry and well, I gues FPS's are just getting boring in general. Nothing really new or outstanding about this title. I got bored with it after about 1 hour. Disappointing actually. Felt just like Q3 and thus I felt jilted.

I give it a 5 out of 10. It is just plain average.

Even though I really tired my fingers out typing 'dir' 'cd' and 'get' for a few hours prior to playing this game I've truely enjoyed playing it so far.

God willing I defy the odds of probability I might just get to try out multiplayer in the near future.

It really reminded me of the old wolfenstein. That was important. But the good point is, that it's also something new, class based multiplayer game.. wow. Just few levels (i think 7??) but still really cooooool!

I am glad I did not listen to the whiners! I was ready to buy this game long ago, but then I saw the mixed reports and I hesitated, not for long though as I purchased it last night. What I expected was a nice single player FPS with the Quake3 engine at its heart in all its glory. I did not expect a 'revolutionary game' as those are few and far between. I wanted to get lost in a WW2 'wolfenstein fantasy' (with the option to play a little Co-op multiplayer on the net too). Well getting down to it, after playing through mission 4 part 2 I was moved to come back here and post a simple comment. This game ROCKS! The level of detail is awesome in mission 4 and those flamin' zombies back in the beginning scared the hell out of me at 2:00AM with the all the lights out. Sniping is a blasted and tearing through rooms with guns blazing is too much fun. I am surprised buy the negative reactions I see posted here. I am no newbie to the world of FPS or games for that matter. Having played since the beginning, (Wolf3D), I remember awaiting the release of DOOM and many of the others to follow. I have played ALL the recent 'BEST' and while this one is not going to be something different like Max Payne it is very good. I will get dozens of hours of fun out of it and in this day and age where a dinner out with my family runs $60+ I consider it worth the money. I find it regrettable that somewhere the price has been jacked from Activisions claim of $49.99 to that of $60+. My only concern is that enough makes it back to Nerve and Gray Matter so they can continue to produce quality games. The graphics, sound, storyline and level of detail all lend a hand to create a wonderful and epic atmosphere. The AI is not as ‘ferocious’ as I had hoped, but having some experienced writing AI code I understand how difficult that task is. Real good AI is years away folks. RTCW is not perfect, but this game is EXCELLENT.

Where is my blood? I want BLOOD

In-depth review:

I like it mucho.

Thank you. Must go play more Wolf.

./Xak

P.S. Loading a game doesn't work from within the game. You have to go out to the Main menu to load anything but a Quicksave. Is this just me?

Setting cg_uselessNostalgia to 1 (/cg_uselessNostalgia "1" in console) makes the old Wolfenstein 3d hud come up.

I saw this at:

http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum18/HTML/000636.html

does anyone have the new ATI card? This game has truform support , if someone can post a screen shot with truform enabled and one with it disabled, much appreciated. Thanks

I pre-ordered this game three days ago, and just got this email from Best Buy:



Thank you for shopping at BestBuy.com!

Unfortunately, the following item(s) are still unavailable to be shipped, but we hope to be able to ship this item(s) to you soon.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Item Description Type Qty Web Price Total Status
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Activision Return to Castle Wo --- 1 $54.99 $54.99 On Backorder


DAMNIT

The ending boss is seriously the most annoying thing i have ever played, besides rune.

My review:

Fun game, but not great. I'm about 1/2 of the way through it, so it may get better.

The level design is very good and the textures used are amazing. The secrets are a welcome return, you don't see a lot of those in games anymore. One thing that was kind of irritating is that on one of the maps (can't remember which one), there are a couple of sniper nests that appear to have furniture and other stuff in them, but there does not seem to be a way to get into them. If they can shoot from there and they took the time to decorate, you'd think you could get into them. If anyone knows how, please let me know.

The storyline is good, but it does not rival No One Lives Forever. I know there are a lot of Half-Life fans out there that probably think nothing is better than HL, but if you try NOLF, you'll see what a good story is all about. HL was fine for the first 75%, then you go to Xen and the story just kind of goes to the wayside. NOLF was 100% story, all the levels, all the puzzles, directly related to the story.

Animations are fluid, but what is with the face textures? They're all blurry. I tried changing some of the settings to see if they would make them a bit sharper, but no go. I have everything maxed out, but the faces still look washed out.

All in all, this is an enjoyable game. If I were to rank my favorite story driven games, it would go:

1. The Operative: No One Lives Forever
2. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
3. Half-Life
4. Star Trek: Elite Force

These are my favorites, not a comprehensive list. There are plenty of story driven games that just plain sucked.

Grey Matter used to be Xatrix, they made Kingpin which was a very big disappointment. It was released half finished because of some problems they were having. They have made a helluva comeback.

Keep up the good work!

RTCW is a PIECE OF SHIT

CS is the best game ever man... and UT KICKS THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING EXCEPT CS...

NEWBIE GAMERZZZZZZzzz

Early Wolfenstein Review
"RTCW: It Any Good?" It sure is. The ai in sp is damn good if you ask me. The soldiers hide behind a wall or to another corner. Hell, they're even good at shooting. I have been upto where you have to find the church and you're underground. I haven't played much sp. The lizard creatures with the shield and the zombies in the game is too dumb to kick or run away from the grenade. Then again, they're not human (which I won't take away points because of that), heheh. Hitting the shield is a pain. Those bullets reflect! Also, if I think I have killed a soldier with certain amound of rounds and they live and out of distance, I see some more nazi's. I get lost in some of those levels, which way to go, hmmm. I love this game. Now about multiplayer. The maps are huge or I am saying that because we are new to the maps except Normandy Beach. I wished there was atleast 10 more dm maps (the size makes up a tiny bit for this). The netcode is pretty good, could be a bit better. Story line, bah, who cares. Game gets a 9/10 from me.
This is just my opinon. You may agree or disagree.

I'm in the early part of Mission 4(part 2 or 3 I don't remember or care) and I'd say I'm very sick of shooting things while the 'high-up's chat it up about how to kill me in the frontline. The action is pretty exciting and I loved sniping in this game but that's not all I want from an FPS. There simply has to be more. At least Kate Archer in NOLF had something to say...

BTW, the girls in black are so great to fight against(and look at =D). Actually AI in RTCW is decent and I think we're facing the best AI enemies since the marines from Half-Life.

As to graphics, RTCW never screams out that it's Q3A in a new suit. Nice work.

And I hate to see strafe-jumping here. What if movement has been slowed down in this game?

will someone take&post some screenshots of the in game action?
I think all the shots ive seen (except for the shack's multiplayer shots) have NOT been from the player's perspective, i'd like to see that if possible
I can't buy the game for another 2 weeks, so someone hep' a bruda out! :D

How much hard drive space does the RTCW installation take up?

I've got a tough choice. I'm on the 4th level of Commandos II and unless I remove it's massive 1.6 GB footprint from my hard drive then I'm assuming that the 900 MB I have free without removing Commandos II will not be enough to install RTCW.

Commandos II is pretty cool. But at the pace I'm going though I'll be finished with it in about 6 months I imagine. Deleting any more of my mp3's or pr0n is not an option. I'm down to the bare bones supply of both that I need to keep on my hard drive for own basic entertainment. Moving to CDR's temporarily is a pain in the ass. Can't buy another hard drive for a couple of months. The only answer is for me to stop having a 10GB hard drive. It's the only component of my system that I didn't replace.

OK:

I am somewhere in mission 5...so I will try to keep it spoiler free. I agree with many of the positives people have said about the game: food for health, flak jackets and helmets for armor, bullets and weapons from dead guys or storage locker type areas, generally good AI, REALLY good level design later on (tho it's pretty miserable at times in the earlier levels).

This last point interests me, because usually (in my experience) when you play games like this, they blow the whole load making the first few maps GREAT, with tons of interactivity and excellent design. This is NOT the case with RTCW, the levels improve as they go along. The whole zombie tomb area near the start was sorta weak, IMO.

The guns are pretty good. I like the way they introduce new weapons. The paratrooper rifle particularly has a nice intro, as does the VENOM gun. Sometimes it feels like I have to empty 2 full clips into the guys to make them fall down, I guess they did this for difficulty. This is not true of all enemies, by any means.

The enemies themselves are pretty well varied and tough. I especially like when the game throws more than you can possibly kill at once at you, and you have to get creative in dispatching them. This happens several times. The guards in the towers are also pretty tough to avoid, and unfortunately can make quite a bit of noise when you take them out.

More later, as I get nearer to the finish.

-grendel

Man, just finished playing a brutal set of mp_destruction on my server. With Friendly Fire off and maxlives set at 5, I feel physically exhausted at the end of a round playing a medic...

So much fucking fun. I had to force myself to stop playing, and get back to work on some game called DOOM or something...

-Xian

Picked it up on my way home from work. I've only played for two hours but so far I'm impressed. Keep in mind that FPS games are my favorite genre and I don't necessarily care about "exiting new gameplay" that everyone promises (and rarely deliver). I know the drill, and I know what to expect. Shoot stuff. Find stuff. Shoot more stuff. These things are the epitome of a FPS, and no matter how much games try to innovate, in the end they still boil down to the same basic theme...and wanting something more basically just means you need to try a different genre.

With that said, I like it. The graphics are nice and the levels fairly detailed. The sounds lend nicely to the overall ambience of the game. The level design is nice, and playing through so far has given me much of the same enjoyment I experienced playing the original. I haven't played any multiplayer... I might get to it later tonight but I really don't care about it much, I bought RTCW for the single player experience. Granted we all have different tastes and opinions, but I rarely play anything other than DM or team DM online and I've already got Quake 3 for that. Really good single player FPS seem to be hard to come by, but I think RTCW just might be one of them.

I need help bad........ not sure if anyone has got past this part yet... i haven't seen anyone mention it here... but... can some one bluntly recommend how to complete the "wink wink" in the last church/cathedrial level........ sorry bout the wink wink... i just don't wanna spoil anything for anyone... I am stuck big time... can't figure it out... either that or i am an idiot... well... hope some one can help... thanks......... :)

This game is feeling more like Indiana Jones.

Who let the Germans out

wolf wolf wolf wolf wolf

yeah yeah I know sooooooo bad, but so bad it had to be said. LOL

Well i played RTCW for a decent while. The first part consists of you escaping the castle. I really didn't know how to approach this game in either being sneaky or going in guns blazing. I chose guns blazing :) And so far its worked, but some points of the game require the occasional stealth travel. The game kind of reminds of NOLF actually, and after seeing a few comments i see that some people agree :) Anyway, the storyline is built pretty nicely i think, much more than regular wolfenstein was :p The weapon system is similar to Half-life, in how you press a button and see on the top right a list of the weapons. Unfortunately i haven't been given access to a lot of the weapons available later to the game. The environment (sounds and music also) are great, i didn't really like the castle atmosphere, but the catacombs are pretty scary, and the music and freaky zombies and undead support this :) So yeah im at the catacombs part, and its actually kind of scary cause those zombies come outta nowhere and theres all kind of sounds coming from everywhere!!!! Anyway, im digging the game so far, hoping for some more varied environments and more surprises to the storyline :) Havent tried multiplayer yet cause im on thanksgiving vacation and dont have the ownage college connect.

Wow. Just finished chapter 2, the level design keeps amazing me.

I'll put it this way:

I put down Diablo 2 just to play this game. And thus far, it's been worth every minute of it.

RTCW:

Progress: IÂ’m probably half way through the game (IÂ’m in Norway)

Difficulty Level: 1 2 3.

Graphics: Well, itÂ’s Q3A engine, itÂ’s hard to make it look ugly.

Music: So fucking annoying, after a couple of levels I turned it off.

Multiplayer: HavenÂ’t tried it yet.

Crashes: Just one.

A.I.: oh boy!

1. Sometimes it was the dumbest A.I. that IÂ’ve ever seen. (They get lost, get stuck on ladders, bunch up on stairs). Stealth missions are piece of cake. I can sneak up on any moving or standing guard and knife him at any angle except right in front of him as long as I walk. All they could see is right in front of them. Although guys on watch towers with binoculars had very good vision and required patience to pass by them. Also, sometimes IÂ’d find a place usually in a corner that they couldnÂ’t hit. So IÂ’d be standing there and theyÂ’re shooting me at point blank but IÂ’m not taking any damage.
2. Sometimes it was the most impressive AI that I’ve ever seen. (Acting in teams, try to defend themselves first then run to sound the alarm, running for cover, hiding, also communicating with each other etc) Many times they act like a real combat units that made me say “wow, this is cool”.
3. Sometimes A.I was wall-hacking and aim-boting like thereÂ’s no fucking tomorrow. (Nazis probably learn it from Q3AÂ’s bots) When I run into special-forces like paratroopers or black leather fetish ladies they new exactly where my head is going to pop up and my head had some very strong magnet to make sure I donÂ’t miss their bullets.


Cool Things:

Food as a health power up is kinda cool, I liked it anyway.
DidnÂ’t see any ammo or health in boxes everywhere where they shouldnÂ’t be.
All power ups and weapons are in right places (like lockers, ammo rooms, on enemies etc)
Reminded me more of Doom than of Wolfenstein which is a good thing for me.
Finally exit menu is back , with stats that I can see whether I miss anything or not. I like to find and kill everything before exiting so itÂ’s a big thing for me. I hated Unreal for not having one.

Bad Things:

If I kill a civilian then mission failed! WTF!?!?!!? This sucks!!! Killing civilians is a lot of fun too. In any war thereÂ’re civilian casualties.
Zooming, wtf? I have to use one button to switch to alt then two more to zoom in and out. Who the hell came up with that idea? If a weapon has a zooming ability then I should be simply able to zoom in and out with two buttons or even one like we do in any other FPS.
Another thing about zooming is that once you start moving it zooms out and switches to normal mode weapon without crosshair. Ahhhhhh! Probably the most annoying and frustrating thing about RTCW.
First, of all I want to zoom out when I want to ok? Second, I want my god damn crosshair in order to use my rifle as a regular weapon too!!!!! (I havenÂ’t read the manual though but IÂ’m afraid this is the case)
No crosshair because of the multiplayer? A piece of tape on the middle of the screen, hello?!?!
Zooming out when moving? Realistic? Realistic my ass, I want to have fun, ok!?!?!
Quicksave, ok since ancient times it was the rule that when you die then game restarts where you last quicksaved, in RTCW it does it only when you already quickreloaded at least once. This is annoying.
First chapter of the game was amateurish, very cheap, talent-less level design, predictable zombies surprise appearances etc. But thank god it ended after I killed the first boss and the rest of the game seemed high quality level designs and much better overall.
Throwing grenades suck, they were flying all over the place. Can I just be a little bit more precise like in Quake 2 for example? Thank you.

Ok It seems I can just go on and on forever I better round it up.

Conclusion:

Although there’re many flaws in this game it’s fun, lots of fun I played it ‘till 4 am. I still think the price is too high but to hell with it. If multiplayer will be fun for years then it’s definitely worth it.

Thank you

I'm only up to like level 3, but my early expereince has been disappointing. Some scenes it's just screaming with things you could add to make the game more interesting, but instead it's like enemies always pop out in front of you at the same distance pretty much, and you just rip em apart with that machine gun. Interactivity has been nonexistant...

It's a lot like NOLF, a lot of unrealized potential. I admit that even after being disappointed at the MP Tests, I still bought the game just for the title and the idea of running around castles killing nazis from the occult :)

One thing that really bothers me tho, you'd WANT to at least play the game as it is, fast paced, just gun blazin... but then they have all these secrets they expect you to find, and you'll just overlook them if you play fast. But if you go around searching out secrets, the game becomes boring as shit.

Well the single player game is standard stuff, nothing new and kind of boring. The multiplayer game is pretty good. Last night I played the "day of defeat ripoff" capture flag points mode. It was allright but the weapons are really dull. For my money even though Ghost Recon has a steep learning curve its the better of the team games out now.

This seems to be a relatively error free release, any big compatibility problems, or is it working right out of the box?

I picked up RTCW yesterday, and after playing up through mission 3, I have to say I'm quite pleased so far.

The action has a kind-of "Goldeneye 007 for the N64" feel to it IMHO, which isn't a bad thing, because that game was cool. I could easily see this game being ported to the Xbox or Playstation 2, as it would work well on a console I think (though the controls would have to be simplified).

The graphics are simply awesome. The catacomb levels were 100% atmosphere, with the flickering torches and fog. The fog, BTW... is done better then I've seen it in any other game. Rather than feeling like a semi-opaque white filter has been applied to the player screen, the fog in RTCW feels like it has actual volume and density, like in real life. The outdoor levels are done very well too, giving the impression of actually being outside, rather then in a large room textured to look like outdoors.

I also like the fact that you can use multiple play styles in a single level. You can sneak around for a bit, backstabbing guards, picking people off from a distance with a sniper rifle, etc. Then you can go in guns blazing and just mow them down.

Another surprising thing is the fact that I don't really mind the zombies. Initially, I felt as though they were going to ruin the atmosphere of the game (I'm a WWII buff, so I've waited quite some time for a *good* WWII FPS to come out). However, the game designers made the zombies fit into the game's storyline, without ruining the gameplay. It is, after all, a game - not a WWII simulation. Watching the German soldiers try and battle it out with the zombies is pretty funny, too.

Overall, I'd give the game 4/5 stars. Its not perfect, but its one heck of a good game so far.