1/ So could you describe yourself so that our readers can know who you are?
I am just a regular everyday normal guy.
For a man involved in development of succesfull gaming project, I spend not much time gaming cause I work a lot. My hobbies are sports, reading, getting in touch with my redneck side while working on my cottage near beach and many other stuff. I'm living in a place which became turning point of WW2 and world's history during most furious and bloody battle known to man. No, dear American readers, I'm not living on Midway. But here's a hint: views of V-river are absolutely spectacular here, local people are affable and girls are hotter than our southern sun. Come visit.
2/ Since when did you discover Project Reality? What do you like about this game?
I've started to play since 0.75 and was amazed by how some tweaks in Battlefield 2 gameplay could make people actually work together, listen to their leaders, act like parts of virtual war machine. Of course PR is not perfect, sometimes people just want to have fun and sometimes pair of douchebags could ruin the round for the whole team on purpose, but it could be fun too. Like when I heard myself on one famous griefer's video, cursing and dropping F-bombs, calling to arms, that was amusing. And let's not forget PR is breathtaking, like when your gung-ho marine squad flying on Huey right into the pulsing heart of battle, chopper avoids smokey trails of RPGs, quickly lands on the street of Arabian city and you get into fierce firefight, see comrades falling around you and you can release CO2 gas from your burning lungs only when it finally gets quiet.
What I really like about this game is the amount of dedicated players, not elitist ones, but good chaps who actually care about performance of their teammates, their combat tasks and who are there to help newbies. And you can find those players on many public servers, you don't have to join some private forums where guys are role-playing and your team will do circlejerk for weeks before actual 3-hour round.
Another thing I started to like after joining the team is management. It takes a lot of skill to keep this mechanism working, keep all those talents inside project where people spend many time working and don't get paid, bake one great release (not without flaws of course) after another and expand project on new platforms. Just think about it, we have PR:Battlefield 2, PR:ArmA 2, PR:Vietnam, PR 2 and we're planning to move further! Expect PR: The Sims where longest round could take more than 20 real years while you raise your sim from toddler to trained soldier and send him overseas to teach people democracy and awesomeness of simleon!!!
Thanks to our management I could do what I do here and because of them you all could play PR now and enjoy its branches in the future. And the whole team does great work. So don't forget to donate.
3/Nosferatu, explains us how you became military adviser to the team of Project Reality? Where does this desire? Can you explain.
I was always interested in representation of real military stuff in computer games. Back in the ole days, when I bought PC decent enough to play 3D-accelerated games of late 90s, I've found a game that became a gem in my collection. It didn't have breakthrough graphics or ultrarealistic physics, but it did have deep atmospheric tactical gameplay, variety of tasks and kickass mission pre-planner. Of course, I'm talking about Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. For me that game discovered tactical shooters and comedy writer Tom Clancy, who, for some reason, considered as godfather of techno-thriller genre. What I've also discovered in Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, OFP and other realistic tactical shooters is sheer ingnorance towards everything that has connection with OpFor weapons and equipment, especially ones from Soviet arsenal.
Looking at representation of OpFor in huge military games I was always amused, it was like watching variations of "Red Dawn" over and over again, just hilarious. Then I started to think: "There has to be some kind of way to do things right, to turn bear cavalry raids I see on screen into something acceptable from realistic point of view", that is why I strated to learn things about modding games like Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon. After my total conversion of original Ghost Recon campaign nothing could've stopped me to go to another level. My huge inspiration at that time was Peacekeeper mod for Flashpoint made by Russian community, not only it redefined OF gameplay for me but also made me grow, learn more about military hardware I haven't met on service, upgrade my nagging and mspaint skills that became very useful during my membership in Project Reality team.
4/ When did you meet the DEV for the first time? How did your appointment happen and what was the topic of your discussion, your job (MA)?
After getting to know what PR actually is and spending some time on forums, I wasn't satisfied with progress of Russian faction and once decided to grab Project Reality by the throat and get everything I want from it.
So I wrote a letter to the team with something like "Hi, I'm going to take over Project Reality, resistance is futile, giving me blue tags is the only option. Cheers.", [R-DEV]Rhino replied with "OK, we will think about it." and everything else is a history.
Just like on any job, you have to prove that you are worthy. I have to read a lot of military literature, revive stuff from past, meet with veterans, visit military exhibitions, dig through many forums, etc. If some of you want to join PR team, get ready to be disciplined mature worker and also be ready to listen to people who were there long before you. What I can promise is that your time definitely won't be wasted, you will learn many things.
5/So you are a military advisor in this team, we explain how this is working, how do you take you there?
To make long story short, my job here as military advisor is to say unpleasant things that have to be said, push artists to do what has to be done to keep PR's quality bar on it's height, and also raise this bar higher with each release. Like one of forum members once said, PR developers are some kind of Illuminati focused on militaristic style, this is actually true and these Illuminati artists know each other for years, sometimes they could get too comfortable with each other, ignore some aspects that they see as unimportant and this is where military advisor has to take big spiked clubs, torches and put some justice in a spirit of holy inquisition.
Of course it's not always like that, main weapons of military advisor are kindess, modesty and wisdom. Most of the time MAs(military advisors) take part in discussions touching subjects of military doctrines, characteristics of hardware and how PR2 will steamroll over our rivals. When it comes to new gameplay conceptions and assets in PR, MAs are first to help, first to criticize, analyse and usually we're guiding these projects till they will become good enough to be in Project Reality. And sometimes MA has to take matters in his own hands to make job done - just like it was with recording of voice-over for Russian faction. Some splendid members of Russian community rented recording studio on one of the central channels on Russian TV in Moscow and went there, session after session to get recordings of top quality, all because Jaymz and me required the best we could get from them. There was a time when studio sessions were cancelled because Russian Orthodox Patriarch died and TV stations were closed for outsiders, but our talents made their best to get in deadline before release.
6/You had worked on voice for Russian Forces but what kind of other job you do in this adventure?
As for voices thing, I'd like to thank =WAR= clan for their dedication and tremendous job on this task. Their acting is maybe far from standards of Stanislavski's System of Acting, but I enjoy kicking all kinds of enemy asses while hearing their voices from speakers, and I'm surely not the only one.
There were many projects under my advisory, including both tweaking game assets for realistic behaviour and overlooking of assets built from scratch. I don't want to bore readers with full list, let's just name some of them: creation of BTR-80 and BTR-80A, tweaking BTR-60PB, tweaking BRDM-2, Spandrel and Gaskin, tweaking BMP-3, tweaking T-72M and T-90, creation of all MT-LB vehicles (MT-LB, MT-LBVM, Strela-10M3, Shturm-S), creation of BMP-2 and BMP-2M, T-72B, T-72M1M, creation of brand new Mi-8MT, creation of AK-74, AK-74M, SV-98, Makarov, PKM, RPG-7V2, SPG-9, creation of custom kits for Russian faction, writing my edition of PR manual and many other projects for all branches of PR, some of those projects are still classified.
My primary methods are drawing red circles in mspaint around "wrong" areas on assets and writing boring rants about how much effort I put into advisory and how much OpFor is underrated. It works.
7/"Nosferatu, what could you tell me about prarma2, I have a feeling when your new adventure, military advisor on your side, but I especially have the opinion that the Caucasian is in you. "
Most of us, PR players, are in the same age group and have seen the rise and fall of tactical action. Since Rogue Spear, many of us expected something huge from project which back then was called "Flashpoint 1985: Status Quo". When it was released, it blew our minds, combination of footman experience, experience of crewman and pilot was something unbelievable. There were games like Battlezone or Uprising, but they had numerous limitations and all around feeling of plastic dolls orgy. Operation Flashpoint was revolution in any possible way and many things like AI, physics, netcode, controls were forgiven for that marvelous rebel spirit. Come to think of it, everything we didn't like in OFP we don't like in ArmA 2 now and, I bet people's ***, we'll continue to dislike in ArmA 3. Some people got frustrated about it, but some started to call it tradition and those are the same people who write flame comments on ArmA forums about PR. And this is the problem with ArmA and our genre as a whole - nowadays players don't demand for more, they're in fear of changes, fear of revolutions, fear of new thinking. That is the reason why so called hardcore realism players didn't accept BF2 when it came out and became new big thing. From the day one I've seen tremendous potential in BF2 for smart tactical players, I welcomed BF2 like if DICE CEO came to my house and told me: "Nosferatu, in exchange for your money I give you the game which you could actually enjoy. We thought how to make your experience rich and satisfying (yeah, we actually care about that), it could be smart & tactical but also kickass gun blazing!" and my answer was: "Hell yeah, Mr CEO, you sooo got my money!". Yeah, later 24/7 Karkand, arty rain and nade spam ruined the game, but it was a wind of change in genre, this is where PR was born.
PR's philosophy was always about bringing smart gameplay to everyone. Whether you are 13 or 30 year old, whether you are playing BF2 or ArmA 2, you could come home, launch PR from one simple link and lead your squad and team to victory. You have to learn some things, there is a reason why Project Reality was called in such cocky manner, but it pays off. Right now our team released beta version of PR:A2 and people are actually complaining about small number of servers, that means many players out there want to experience our vision and what we see is probably the biggest PvP event in ArmA history, caused by "simple" beta mod! Despite the problems within ArmA, despite absense of public PvP gameplay, hundreds of players are there, hence PR history is just beginning and I like to be part of it.
8/What do you want to say to the Project Reality community today
Now this is something for my peeps out there: the initial purpose of PR was exhibition of British faction, but it doesn't mean that OpFor supposed to be just a pale background for shiny GB assets. My job is to keep the bar high and your job is to whoop all those Blufor candy asses across PR maps. The sweetest music for me is thunder of guns in Kashan Desert, chopper rattle in Beirut harbor and cheering when Russian faction wins the round, I want you to keep it like that. This is our time, time to show that we, Opfor guys, will not give up and fade away. This is our uprising, launch PR, grab AK and raise some hell!
Thank you, psychikactivity, thanks to community, thanks to the team. Keep it real.
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