Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis

Operation Flashpoint
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis boxart Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis boxart
Developer(s)	Bohemia Interactive Studio
Publisher(s)	Codemasters
Engine	Real Virtuality 1
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	EU June 22 2001 NA August 30 2001
Genre(s)	Tactical shooter
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer

Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (OFP) is a tactical shooter and battlefield simulator game released in 2001. Set on a group of fictitious islands in the year 1985, Operation Flashpoint (OFP) puts the player on one of three sides in a hypothetical conflict between the NATO and Soviet forces led by a renegade general. The Resistance, which generally sides with NATO, is the third playable faction. Two expansion packs were released; Gold Upgrade (which included 'Red Hammer', a campaign from the Soviet perspective), and Resistance, which introduced various new features and improved the graphic and sound effects. The main feature of the game is its close attention to realism.

Synopsis

Cold War Crisis

The year is 1985, and Mikhail Gorbachev has come to power in the USSR. While his Glasnost and Perestroika reforms are welcomed by western governments, there are communist hardliners in his own government that are unsympathetic to his cause.

One of these men, a fanatic hardline general called Aleksei Guba, is determined to bring down Gorbachev and make himself the next leader of Russia. Guba commands an army on the island base of Kolgujev. Nearby is Everon; an independent republic, and Malden; another republic which has a strong NATO presence. Guba invades Everon, crushes the militia force there, and secretly plans to take the war to the Americans.

The NATO presence on Malden, under the command of the American Colonel Blake, moves in to investigate the loss of contact with Everon, and reports of invasion by an 'unknown hostile force'. When a helicopter of troops sent to investigate doesn't return, Blake orders a full scale invasion of Everon, not knowing about the Soviets, and the deadly conflict that would lie ahead.

During the campaign players take the roles of one of four characters:

David Armstrong - A determined Private in the US Army who is training on Malden when the fighting breaks out.

Robert Hammer - An inexperienced tank commander who has been called into front line service due to a shortage of tank crews.

Sam Nichols - A Black Hawk pilot who is called on to fly helicopter gunships, and eventually an A-10 Thunderbolt II.

James Gastovski - A retired US special forces soldier, Gastovski is called out of retirement to carry out sabotage missions, and settle a score with an old enemy.

Red Hammer

An add-on campaign Red Hammer, which was released by Codemasters, depicts the same conflict, but places the player in the role of a Russian rather than American soldier (Dmitri Lukin) who during the course of the campaign, somewhat unrealistically, switches from his steadfast fight against American forces to battling his own countrymen in order to pave the way for an American take-over of the island. Some fans of the game consider Red Hammer a failure, claiming it has a badly written story and poorly designed missions. There are a few vehicles added, including AH-64 Apache, BMP-2 and other types, but since Red Hammer includes only a few new objects, players mostly don't need to have it in order to play online. The save game system was altered significantly, making reverting to a previous level impossible in the Red Hammer campaign.

The character Dmitri Lukin had been a Spetsnaz in Afghanistan but was demoted to Private and shipped to the regular army for insubordination. During the course of the Red Hammer campaign he is put in command of a squad, promoted to Corporal and Sergeant, drives tanks, flies helicopters and eventually gets promoted to Lieutenant and assigned back to Spetsnaz. On one of his missions he is ordered to kill a resistance leader who turns out to be an old acquaintance. He joins the resistance movement on Everon and is later airdropped on Kolgujev to join the resistance there and prepare the island for the American invasion.

Resistance

Another add-on, Resistance, is set three years before the events of the two preceding games. The player takes the role of an ex-Special Operations soldier, Victor Troska, who has returned to his homeland of Nogova after years in exile serving the US Special Forces. During the first introductory mission to the campaign, the island is invaded by the Soviet Union. Initially, Troska refuses to have any part in the fighting and ignores the persuasion of the resistance pioneers, despite feeling guilty and helpless as his countrymen are massacred by the Russian invaders. One day, a seriously wounded guerilla takes refuge in Troska's barn with Russian troops literally on his heels. At this point, the player is faced with a decisive choice: to deny his presence and fight, or to reveal his presence and become a Soviet agent (in which case, Troska is executed after his first successful reconnaissance mission, though he can also decide to give false intelligence to the Russians and join the resistance after all). Troska has virtually no choice but to lead a ramshackle uprising, and the player must use his/her resourcefulness to salvage weapons and ammunition from fallen enemies to supplement supplies which are continually available at later stages in the campaign. The Resistance expansion pack also updates the graphics, sounds and multiplayer mechanics, adding much more than the Red Hammer expansion and thus drastically improving the original game, even to the extent that a lot of pre-Resistance addons and mods were incompatible with the newer version due to the huge changes. It is now considered a norm amongst OFP fans to own the Resistance expansion. Few third party missions, addons or other material are made today for people still playing with pre-resistance versions. The only criticism by some players from the original game is the signature change of the AK74, which has a reduced bass note from the original and does not sound as accurate as it does in real life. Resistance also failed to address some clipping issues that drew complaints. The game engine that is used in OFP handles external environments well, but is limited in depicting areas such as buildings.

Gameplay

A server host has the ability to choose cooperative multiplayer missions where a team of human players fight together to accomplish specific objectives, as well as the player-devised Conquer The Island (CTI) mode where two teams of human players, or alternatively one team of humans and one team controlled by AI, have the ability to build their own bases complete with basic defences, train AI infantry units, build empty or AI-crewed vehicles and clash in large-scale battles.

Operation Flashpoint also includes an in-game mission editor which can be used to create anything from simple missions (with some practice and/or by using some of the extra tools that are available on the web) to professional campaigns complete with custom music and voice and advanced triggers and waypoints which greatly reinforce the smoothness of a mission and the intelligent activity of the AI.

Most missions are heavily scripted but take place in a large game world. The game world doesn't consist of maps as most do, rather the events happen on open islands. These islands are large; if you attempted to travel from one end to the other on foot it would take well over two hours, depending on the island and person.

The Islands

The original OFP version's three main islands are based on actual existing islands. Kolgujev is based on Tenerife Island, one of the Canary Islands. Everon is the Croatian Island of Krk. Malden is the Greek Ionian island, Levkas. OFP's desert Island is Meganissi, the largest island just to the east of Levkas.

While these islands are based on real islands, the geographical size of OFP's islands in the game are on a smaller scale than the real ones.

Although the island of Nogova itself, found in the expansion pack Resistance, has no real world analogue, it shares landmark names with Bohemia Interactive's native Czech Republic and several areas appear to be very similar to areas in the game."[1]

Fan-base

Although Operation Flashpoint's fan-base is somewhat smaller than that of wider-audience first-person shooters like Half-Life or Quake (most likely due to its realism and difficulty level being an undesirable factor for some gamers), it is still very active; a great number of missions (10000+) created using Flashpoint's mission editor are available for download on fan pages, and fan created mods (25+) and add-ons (2000+) have already been released as well as many still in progress. There have also been a few community made graphical improvements to the game, adding DirectX 8 and 9 effects such as reflection and so on. The modders among the community have managed to represent many of the world's military forces in the game. Addons range from 18th century muskets and cannons, to futuristic aliens and spaceships. The main focus is on modern and realistic addons with a large number of today's armed forces represented, even including less well-known armed forces such as Finland, Sweden or Pakistan.

Many in the fan-base see the ever-increasing amount of add-ons and mods created in contrast to missions as a problem. The vast number of add-ons are rarely used in missions, as there are simply too many to use. A popular belief among mission creators and scripters is that add-on and mod makers receive too much credit for their work, while mission creators and scripters hardly receive any gratitude. A further problem is the compatibility issues between mods and user-created missions makes it extremely important for players to coordinate which mods to install before playing. This has essentially limited Operation Flashpoint's multiplayer to pre-arranged games between users who already know each other.

The Operation Flashpoint community is often viewed as a very mature, serious and responsible community, with very little aggressive behaviour on multiplayer servers and on the various fan webpages. Although it is extremely easy to cheat in Operation Flashpoint, players rarely run into cheaters as often as in, for example, Call of Duty. This is believed to be a result of the off-beat look and gameplay, as well as Flashpoint's realism, which frightens the average gamer, leaving only the hardcore to the game.

Over the years, Operation Flashpoint has won critical acclaim for its realism of simulating military conflict situations on PC, even to the extent where the game's technology has been adapted for real soldiers to use as a special combat training application VBS1.

Operation Flashpoint was developed by Bohemia Interactive Studio (BIS) and distributed world-wide by Codemasters.

The sequel, Operation Flashpoint 2 is being developed independently of Bohemia Interactive Studio by Codemasters, it is due for release in early 2008.

Bohemia is working on an unofficial sequel named Armed Assault ([2]), based on an improved Flashpoint engine which is due to come out in Q4 2006/Q1 2007. Armed Assault (aka. ArmA) was originally reported to be backwards compatible with original OFP addons. BIS has now stated that some changes will need to be made in order for OFP addons to work in Armed Assault.

One of the more popular websites dedicated to Flashpoint is OFP.info, found here :- http://ofp.gamepark.cz/. It hosts many of the community made addons, as submitted by their creators, and also flags up important news stories and releases from the BIS community forums.

Some of the best received and popular mods are FDFMod, ECPmod and FFUR. Although large downloads even for a typical broadband connection, these addons are recommended downloads by OFP enthusiasts and extend the game and its functionality significantly.

Weaponry & Vehicles

Operation Flashpoint features dozens of guns and vehicles, and pioneered the use of realistic vehicle and aircraft combat in FPS games. While Operation Flashpoint cannot provide the same level of vehicle realism as a dedicated tank or flight sim like Armored Fist, or Falcon 4.0, it is nevertheless impressive because it is both able to simulate aircraft, tank and infantry combat with higher levels of realism than other games in its class, and also accurately simulate the complex relationships between these elements in wartime, (i.e. combined arms).

Related games in the series

• Operation Flashpoint: Resistance (PC), released in 2002 as an expansion pack to the original, known also as OFPR
• Operation Flashpoint: Elite, a Xbox version of Operation Flashpoint, and Operation Flashpoint: Resistance was released in November 2005.
• Armed Assault, a semi-sequel to Operation Flashpoint. The game uses upgraded technology from Operation Flashpoint but since Bohemia Interactive Studio does not own rights of the name Operation Flashpoint to Codemasters the game title will not be Operation Flashpoint.
• Operation Flashpoint: Red Hammer, a campaign created entirely by Codemasters. It is regarded as a low-quality production by the OFP community.
• VBS1, or Virtual Battlefield Systems. A training tool for military agencies round the world, among them the US Marine Corps. It is based on the Operation Flashpoint-technology
• DARWARS Ambush! Convoy Simulator , 2005
  • Operation Flashpoint game was used by BBN Technologies to create a commercial military training product developed as part of the DARPA DARWARS program. ~ (Article)
• Game2, another military game from Bohemia Interactive Studio.

Awards

Partial listing:

• PC ZONE Classic Award
• IGN Editors Choice Award
• Simulation Headquarters Best of E3 2001
• Gamespy: Best of 2001 (PC Action)
• Computer Gaming World's Editors Choice Award
• The Adrenaline Vault: Seal of Excellence Award
• ECTS winner
• The Wargamer: Award of Excellence
• Gamestar.de Award
• PC Gamer Awards
• COMBATSIM.COM: Best Integrated Battlefield Simulation 2001

See also

• Operation Flashpoint 2
• Operation Flashpoint: Elite
• Armed Assault

External links

• Official Site of Operation Flashpoint
• OFP Community Wiki