[AAR] I am new to PR and I absolutely love it!

[DaKillerFox]

I am new to PR and the PR community, so please don't flame me for this post or if this was posted in the wrong forum, please feel free to move it to the right one moderators. I looked all over the "PR Tales from the Front" forum for a thread about how awesome PR is, but just mainly came across a lot of veteran players discussing their gameplay, videos of the game and a lot of discussions about the ever evolving changes and updates.

As a new player who was skeptical about installing the mod, looking for some unbiased feedback about the game, I think posting this will help a lot of potential new players join up and maybe just remind old veterans why this mod is so great. I apologize if this post is extremely long.

A little background info:

Before playing PR, I can't remember the last time I was so excited (and addicted) to a game since I first discovered Counter Strike way back in 2001. That was almost a decade ago. Well, about a year ago, I picked up COD4:MW because I had been out of the game scene for several years and my little brother turned me on to that game. Well, when I first picked it up and played the MP after a short 6 hour SP campaign (awesome, but too short), I found that either I was not up to snuff with the rest of the players or the game was just heavily imbalanced. I mean, for the first 3 days all I did was get spawn-naded to death. In retrospect, I can't believe that a game would make it possible for someone who is halfway across the map be able to throw a grenade at you at your spawn point. Seriously, I didn't rack up my first kill until the 3rd day of playing. To make a long story short, I quickly got bored of the udder chaos of spawning, running around like a chicken with my head cutoff, killing someone or being killed and then respawning within seconds to do it all over again. So I gave up the game. Then about 6 months ago, I found out MW2 was coming out. I decided to pull out the old MW1 and polish it off again. By accident, I came across several servers that actually implemented rules, like no grenading or explosives in the first 30 secs of game play. At this point I was only playing the Search and Destroy modes since that put a little more value in lives, since you didn't respawn until the normal 5 minute rounds were up. But something was still lacking... I couldn't quite put my finger on it. On the rare occasion that I would be near another player or a so, there would be the lucky chance that we could gun down a few enemies or if he went down, I could still "help" out by taking out the bad guy. But what was really missing was TEAMWORK, as everyone just made a mad dash to their favorite camp out spots or area of engagement every time a new round started up.

When I heard all of the disappointments surrounding MW2, I decided to save my $60 to pick up a copy of BF2 for $10 and a $50 headset from Bestbuy, since I loved the BF 1942 series and had missed out on BF2 and the prospect of squads and intersquad communications via VOIP back when this game was first released. Needless to say, after a couple of days, again I was disappointed by the lack of Teamwork. Everyone, even if in squads just ran around "lone-wolfing" it and doing their own thing. Squad Leaders in BF2 were incompetent and were only in squads to be in a squad. There was barely any communication and if coordination was hopeless. I again, was gonna retire from gaming until something better game out, maybe BF2:Bad Company 2?

Luckily, I was searching for some suggestions for decent servers to play on, online, when I heard someone suggest Project Reality. What the heck is Project Reality, I remember thinking. Not unfamiliar with game mods (CS:S Zombie Mod is amazing) I decided to look into it. One word: Wow! As I read reviews at Gamespot, IGN and ModDB, I became very interested. I mean there was so much raving about Squad Leaders who would actually lead the squad, coordinated communications, medics that weren't always somehow unaware of dying teammates, and talk about teamwork.

I downloaded the latest version, PR 0.087 three nights ago. I was fully aware that this was not gonna be like Vanilla BF2 and that there was a sharp learning curve. I got on to the Virgina RRF server and was immediately thrown into a game that was underway. I joined up to a squad and spawned at a rally point. Immediately, I met up with two other squad mates and followed them through the Muttrah city map. Within a few minutes, we all got surprised by a sniper on top of a builder across the street from where we were posted up. I returned some fire and took a bullet. Everything became dark and red and I could hear myself coughing and wheezing. If that wasn't amazing enough, the next thing totally surprised me, out of nowhere a medic from my squad showed up and healed me. I was like, what? That never happened in vBF2.

I left the server to do some more reading from the manual as I was not well equipped to play PR at the time. When I later joined another server, I experienced a less than fantastic outing. This time around, the squads were kinda not too organized and everyone just kinda seemed impartial to whatever was going on. I joined a squad that was in an Armor running around doing, god knows what since they didn't bother to pick me up. I spent 20 minutes running around by myself until I came under fire and died. Very disappointing, as the teamwork element was totally gone.

Last night, I was reading up on Mumble for PR and decided I would like to give that a try since it sounds so promising. I logged onto a server (can't remember off the top of my head) but had an amazing 2 hours of gameplay. After joining up on one squad on the US side of the Muttrah map, I ran around with the SL and set up a rally point and a FOB and was amazed at his level of direction and leadership. Furthermore I was way impressed with his coordination with the Commander and completely the object. Later I was moved to the MEC side by the server (is that part of the team balancing or something?) and joined up with another Amour squad. We patrolled around with me driving, the SL at the gun and a few squad mates as our eyes from afar. This was by far the best game play I have ever experienced, we took some fire from an enemy helicopter and had to find a supply truck for repairs. And this is where the game really shines, the amount of detail to things like repairing an APC, the complexity of doing so, building a FOB with a shovel. Man, this game is amazing. I didn't end up with any kills, but the game play by far was the best thing I've played in a long time. This game is what DICE and EA should've made with the original BF2.

I love this mod so far and unless I come across something that is really bad with it (I highly doubt it), I'm gonna continue playing it. Great work on this game, I can't even call it a mod, that's not appropriate for this level of development. Just awesome!

[ma21212]

Welcom to PR and thats proabably the best $10 you ever spent lol anyway just to get you a little more exited watch this. i always show this to friends to try to get them into PR, one of the best PR vids imo even tho its almost 3 years old
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJXg9...eature=related

[gazzthompson]

Welcome, i highly suggest "tactical gamer" server (TG) as your american and its awesome. Also this video is a must see for new players:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwZ1rUFZF5E

also i wouldn't suggest crewing assets (defintly not planes or helis) without having a good practice on a training server (try choose one thats empty/few people in) or over LAN, tho from what you said you did quite well in the tank as pretty much all assets have different controls/features from vbf2.

Also if you join a server or its the start of a round, try join squads called "eng voip" or "voip tw" etc.

[[R-DEV]dbzao]

Nice... sometimes you can get some bad rounds, but stick with it, find a good squad and you will definitely have some good times.

[DaKillerFox]

Originally Posted by gazzthompson

Welcome, i highly suggest "tactical gamer" server (TG) as your american and its awesome. Also this video is a must see for new players:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwZ1rUFZF5E

also i wouldn't suggest crewing assets (defintly not planes or helis) without having a good practice on a training server (try choose one thats empty/few people in) or over LAN, tho from what you said you did quite well in the tank as pretty much all assets have different controls/features from vbf2.

Also if you join a server or its the start of a round, try join squads called "eng voip" or "voip tw" etc.

Yeah, I personally intended to stay away from all vehicles, especially planes and helicopters after I read the massive amounts of notes on how to fly in the PR manual. I only drove the APC because my SL wanted to be the gunner and two other squad mates were heading into the hills to snipe. I would say that I fared pretty well for the first time outing in an APC. We were guided by our sniper from point to point and about where to get repairs from a supply truck and everyone on the squad was very helpful and extremely patient in teaching me how to drop ammo boxes for teammates and the like. I probably wouldn't have lasted as long as I did without the rest of the squad and team. We were able to repair because another supporting squad had a supply truck near by and they helped suppress advancing enemy ground troops with return fire after we first got attacked.

What are the squads that are "eng voip" or "voip tw" are these squads that use the VOIP built into the game?

The one real disappointment with PR, is the lack of mumble users, although the VOIP in-game works really well for squad communication. I've just read so much about what you can do with mumble and seen the videos others have posted showing what mumble in-game looks and sounds like. It sounds awesome, but there aren't very many mumble users. And the mumble server is confusing, how do you know what channel to join on the mumble server vs. the game server? Or what team to join on? The names of the channels don't exactly match the game server. I like the prospect of Mumble in that you would be able to communicate with other squad members in your vicinity, instead of staring at each other blankly. Half the time, it feels like they are trying to make gestures that I'm supposed to interpret, LOL.

But hey, thanks for the warm welcome from all of you. I'll have to check these vids out later when I get some free time.

[DaKillerFox]

Originally Posted by ma21212

Welcom to PR and thats proabably the best $10 you ever spent lol anyway just to get you a little more exited watch this. i always show this to friends to try to get them into PR, one of the best PR vids imo even tho its almost 3 years old
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJXg9...eature=related

Yeah, I knew that if I bought the new MW2 for $60, I'd probably just end up with a soul-less experience and stop playing in a few days. So you're right, this $10 was one of the best investments, game-wise, that I've made in a long time. I want to watch this vid, but I can't 'cause I'll probably get too excited to play and I don't have time to do that until later tonight or so. But thanks for posting the vid, I'm looking all over for great PR vids to watch and I've seen a couple, but more is always better.

[goguapsy]

Hey man! I wrote a guide... I wonder what some "new" guy would look at it... any reviews? Thanks you!

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f10-...ber-guide.html

[JiiPee]

As far as I know, PR is first multiplayer FPS game in history of gaming that has working teamworkplay on PUBLIC servers! It's quite remarkable. Many years I played different multiplayergames and frustrated the lack of teamwork until PR was published. And I have played online since times of Half Life's Team Fortress and it's other excellent mods. I don't play any other FPS games anymore. Only PR and that is all I need.

In PR you can also go lonewolfing and help your team that way even so it's more difficult and you need lot of patience because sometimes you run like 10 minutes just to be shot by a sniper You can find the thrill of firefights and the excitement of sneaking and scouting, hit and run missions and ambushes in same package! I haven't found that anywhere else...

Thank you PR team!

[PLODDITHANLEY]

My first time after VBF:

Spawn on carrier I hop on to a Huey, the pilot types 'where to mate' I nearly fainted - hooked.

Sometimes very good but sometimes a bit frustating without Team work, but the good times out weigh the bad easily!

[goguapsy]

Get on password night on TG mate. That's the real teamwork.