I live over 20 miles outside the city and was relegated to a 28.8 kbps DU connection, which would barely handle DoD and CS, let alone BF2.
Got the demo (DL at work) and at the time it indeed seem phenomenal. I bought a laptop (company paid for it) capable of running BF2 and would drive into town in the evening (30 minutes each way) to plug into ADSL and play.
Didn’t take long (about 4 times in total I think ) to realize that BF2 was, to put it mildly, boring, repetitive (die, spawn), full of smacktards trying to garner points and ranks. Team work and tactics, though much touted, weren’t that effective as most players weren’t as interested in covering an advance as they were in hopping into a tank solo or bomber and attacking anything that moved.
I had heard of Project Reality but with dial up it was out of the question so I gave BF2 to my nephew and went about my merry way playing mostly SP games.
A few months ago, miracle of miracles, I was able to get hooked up to a wireless high speed ISP.
Like every new comer to high speed, my first evening was spent on YouTube. I stumbled across a PRM video made on an insurgency map with a few people actually using VOIP (rather than the perpetual RAP music in the background).
I assume it was the SL that was directing fire, checking on the status of his squad (“how is everyone doing”) and ordering the squad into various areas and reporting contacts.
I also saw the weapon performance where they are deadly if aimed right (rather than the 2 headshots from a .50 cal sniper rifle required in BF2) and went for it.
Got my BF2 back , DL’d and installed PRM , fired it up and gave it a whirl.
There was so much to learn in the game my first times on line were a mass of confusion so I decided to go the SP route for a while to figure things out. (Bots don't really mind if you TK them to figure out the medic kit.
).Then I was able to log on and play as a squad member.I fell in love with PRM. It has turned out to be almost EXACTLY what I was looking for in a game for all these years.
Like all other on line games, it depends so much on who you are playing with as to whether or not you end up in a cohesive squad or a group of soloists (even applies to BF2). I’ve found both but the times I’ve played with a cohesive unit have been so immersive I simply didn’t want the map to end and the squad to disperse.
My only regret is that I found PRM in the early summer when there is so much to be done around the home and gaming time is so limited, especially for PRM which, at least for me,requires at least a dedicated 2 – 3 hours to play rather than the 20-30 min maps in DoD/CS/RO.
But winter will be here shortly (actually seems like we just got rid of the snow yesterday) so hopefully gaming time will be enhanced by the long, cold winter nights.
Good work on PRM developers. Loving it.
P90 ftw!
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