The Future of PR

[labonte95]

So I came across this comment in Bluedrake42's community page on YouTube:

https://imgur.com/a/xOo6oKV



He basically says PR will never grow or improve because of it being an "illegal" game, and therefore no release on steam, etc.

This raises a few questions for me, mostly because this is the first I've heard someone call PR illegal.

#1. I know its very unlikely, but if EA decided this mod was indeed illegal, could they force a shutdown or pursue legal action?

#2. Will the bf2 engine ever reach a state of "abandonware," where EA completely open sources it?

#3. Is it possible to recreate how the refractor engine works in a modern game engine? I assume this would be an insane amount of work as I know very little about how that works. But I feel the engine jank is what really sets PR aside from modern tactical shooters.

I wanna end this by saying that I disagree with what Bluedrake says about the game never growing/never getting new features. The developers keep proving that hardcoded limitations are still being broken. The game looks and feels smoother than it ever has, and it seems every update has been bringing more and more people into the game. It's pretty common to hear squadmates saying they came back to PR after playing squad/doorstop. And I don't see that slowing down anytime soon.

Long live PR!

[dcm]

I hope that project reality stays around. It's the only game I truly enjoy(Modern games are fucking garbage. From every point of view but graphical).

I dont know what EA's moves will be when it comes to PR. They could shut it down, but that would incur so much bad press, for the company that won 'worst company of the year,' back to back. EA is not liked by anybody. They've lost the fifa license and need a win. Killing PR would be a great big loss for them. Not just reputation wise, but it may cause another shitstorm and negatively impact consumer confidence in EA. It serves them no benefit to kill PR.

The BF2 engine is old and outdated. But EA still owns the rights to it. EA has abandoned it's own games many times over and the community is keeping them alive. BF2 revive anybody? But no, EA will never open source anything. They will try to squeeze the juice out of the lemon until it's nothing but a husk of it's former self. They have no reason to open up access to their tech, no incentive to do so.

Do you remember the old GTA games? That released on the PS2? Those games like many others were built on the renderware engine. Designed by criterion games. When EA acquired the makers of said engine, almost overnight everybody dropped renderware and moved on to other engines. Since then, no games have come close to the feeling of the renderware engine and it's contemporaries, like the aforementioned refractor engine(At least for me). Some people have tried to remake renderware engine and recapture the magic. But it's pointless because there are so many questionably better modern alternatives like Unity and UE5. In order to recreate the BF2 engine it would be a monumental and pointless task. The best option going forward for PR would be to stay the course with the refractor engine. Or go full commercial with a modern engine that encapsulates the feel of the refractor engine, with less brokenness and jank.

On a personal note: As much as I like and respect bluedrake and thank him and his youtuber/streamer pals for keeping PR alive. I have to disagree with him. I feel that he's only attacking PR, because he has a competing product out there. The milsim community is very small. And few players ever pickup titles outside their comfort zone and stick with them. I've played them all; Squad, Insurgency, Insurgency: Sandstorm, Hell Let Loose, Post Scriptum, Beyond the Wire, Isonzo, Tannenberg, Verdun, ARMA 1, 2 & 3, DAYZ, Etc. None come close to the feeling of PR.

I believe that bluedrake was banking on the backlash to sqaud's microtransactions and pr's age, to build interest in Operation Harsh Doorstop. But sadly that game will require a lot of work. Not just content wise, but gameplay and development wise. Everything is broken and it's not very fun to play. His attitude of 'leave everything for the community to fix' is lazy and off putting. It comes off as contemptuous in his videos. I believe that his monetization plan is to license out the SDK for commercial users? Basically he's trying to create a version of roblox for the milsim community. And I do not believe that he will be successful in that approach. Because milsim gamers are much more mature and have less time and money on their hands. They would rather buy a ready made commercial product than make it themselves. The roblox audience is much younger and more creative. Roblox is the new newgrounds.

If bluedrake reads this. Please know that I wish you and yours all the best. But I however see no future in your game, down it's current path. In order for a game to be popular enough for people to want to make content for it. The game itself has to be good. It's foundation has to be solid. Look at Skyrim, Fallout, Minecraft and even BF2. Those games as broken and janky as they are/were. Their foundations were built on fun. And people demanded more content from those games. When the devs could not fulfill that demand the community itself would. I would know. I ran Call of Duty 2 and 4 custom map servers for years. I had new maps on the regular. The demand was so high for new CoD content that almost every day we had new maps.

P.S. Unity and Unreal Engine games feel like shit to me. I can tell when I'm playing a UE5 game, because the of quirks the engine permeate through any game. Does not matter what genre. I can just tell. All contemporary games just feel the same to me because of the popularity and homogenization of those engines. There's very little variety. So many asset flips too.

[Grump/Gump.45]

A steam release would turn PR into Squads player base. This game is found through word of mouth and people like me who searched for combat simulators. It just so happened I found one that was free, still being updated and could run on a laptop. This SF guy commented on my video, I told him to come play on down time.

I seen a French speaking squad on Operation Marlin, obviously military the way they were moving, they did not survive the heat of firefight with those formations in locked down machine gun streets. Really showed them its a meat grinder, which this game emulated very realistically.

All realism needs is accurate terrain features, projectiles and moving. The rest is proximation of everything, how close you are, then the speed of everything. With no communication and survival plan, basic call outs, a lot of different skills, adapting to different environments, everyone dies.

War is going to become more deadly because of video games, even the unrealistic ones help anticipation of things to expect like grenades, explosions, covering corners or taking cover. This simulation shows the deadly potential when you max out the output of firepower and assets in view of each other as one big booby trap covering each other over the terrain. Bullet storm, scanning suppression sweeps for accurate targets that dare to peek.

132 million USA population in WW2. 16 million served total, all other nations had similar ratios. If we went had to go to war, let alone training there would be a big difference between us and regular arcade game playing people. We are not regular Civis, we are Simis. This was the first game of its kind. Realism.

Project Reality will never die, it has only grown. Make better videos showing the most epic Michael Bay realism, then the most top notch skills for individual and team survival. This game must be protected at all costs. Every version kept on offsite files, internet archives. Hide it anywhere.

[Antonyvg]

PR is the only future I got !

[Rhino]

#1. I know its very unlikely, but if EA decided this mod was indeed illegal, could they force a shutdown or pursue legal action?

#2. Will the bf2 engine ever reach a state of "abandonware," where EA completely open sources it?

#3. Is it possible to recreate how the refractor engine works in a modern game engine? I assume this would be an insane amount of work as I know very little about how that works. But I feel the engine jank is what really sets PR aside from modern tactical shooters.

Just to quickly answer your questions.

1. I wouldn't say PR is is illegal, more that it is skirting on the edge of what is and isn't legal. At the end of the day EA has never complained about what we are doing & they would if they thought we had gone too far as they have shut down many mods/games that have before, such as a mod that ported the BF2 maps to BF2142 etc, can't recall its name you can look it up if you want.
2. I very much doubt that, EA would have done that already if they were going to.
3. It is possible to do, but capturing the same kind of gameplay and experience is incredibly hard if that is your main objective. Squad and a few others have set out to do this, even if their objectives changed over the course of development and you can make up your own mind up on if they have succeeded or not.

[labonte95]

Just to quickly answer your questions.

1. I wouldn't say PR is is illegal, more that it is skirting on the edge of what is and isn't legal. At the end of the day EA has never complained about what we are doing & they would if they thought we had gone too far as they have shut down many mods/games that have before, such as a mod that ported the BF2 maps to BF2142 etc, can't recall its name you can look it up if you want.
2. I very much doubt that, EA would have done that already if they were going to.
3. It is possible to do, but capturing the same kind of gameplay and experience is incredibly hard if that is your main objective. Squad and a few others have set out to do this, even if their objectives changed over the course of development and you can make up your own mind up on if they have succeeded or not.

Yea I figured as much. PR is the bf2 engine. Without it, I feel like PR becomes every other milsim shooter out there.

And I definitely agree with DCM about all unreal/unity engine games feeling exactly the same, especially shooters.

My issue with squad,doorstop and pretty much every other milsim out there is that its just too run & gun. I feel like PR is the only one out there where you are rewarded for slower paced gameplay. For example, in squad, you can take 10 minutes to flank the enemy only for them to 180 headshot you the moment you engage them.

In PR, every single person is forced to wait for weapon deviation to settle before they can be accurate. I know the deviation feels horrible to people not used to it, but it almost forces realism in a way.


The only way for PR to "modernize" would be to have a purpose built engine made for the game, and I assume that's a monumental task for such a small community. And even if this happened, PR would naturally lose its charm I think.

At the end of the day, I'm gonna continue to play PR until its no longer physically possible, and I know most of the community feels that way. So I'm not worried about a shutdown or anything. I'm confident we will have full servers for years to come

[dcm]

And I definitely agree with DCM about all unreal/unity engine games feeling exactly the same, especially shooters.

Before anyone says that it's the assets. It's not just that they use similar assets. The problems lie with the engines themselves. There's no reason why I should be able to tell that goat simulator, fortnite, squad, ohd and assetto corza, All use the same engine just by feel alone. Even on different platforms. In most cases the gun mechanics and even the gameplay is a carbon copy. God damn the epic and unity asset stores. They robbed games of their individuality and made asset flips too profitable for unscrupulous scum to pass up on(steam greenlight anyone?). Man what I wouldn't give to go back to the old days, when each game was a handcrafted experience. I dread the future of AI videogame development.

[Gerfand]

The awnsers for your question is
1- Yes, they can ask for the work to simply stop, however they won't do that for a simple reason, PR is not profitable, they don't see this existing as a threat to their IP, they don't see a legal problem in this.
2- Unlikely, its already abandoware in all but the legal sense, remember, there are IPs like Battlezone, Totall Annihilation, FreeSpace and Freelancer, that belong to some Big Corpo just so they can stay there, forgotten on a shelf.

3- This is interesting, Yes, you can make a newer Engine work, and I gonna say this, besides being for the better, PR will eventually need to move in that direction (This is actually 50% of why I am excited about OHD modding prospects, (disclammer the following is a joke) I gonna rip all PR assets just to dump there muhahaha.

But really, I think it is possible to do PR in a modern engine, the biggest thing however, is that Part of PR charm is it being a older, unfit engine. One thing Slorg, I think, pointed out in a PR vs Squad comparisson video, is that PR has no Aim Sway, instead it uses the older Aim deviation system, something you probably first saw in the OG RainbowSix, which means taking it slowly is much better, this can be done in a modern engine, but some people will say 'wow you upgraded your game just to keep this, you are dumb"

The main thing a new Engine would benefit, however is Shadows and Lighting, which is really important in a Tactical shooter, and Building system, because PR Building sucks (after getting killed by placing FOB and having ATGMs in certain ways you understand what I mean)

But to be honest, if you have total Control of your Engine you can 1:1 PR "engine upgrade", in this sense, the problem with Squad is that they want a Modern PR, not PR in a modern engine.

But in the End if PR becomes a Mod for something like OHD I gonna appreciate it, if its going to happen, its not going to be soon, BF2 Engine will be kept pushed beyond its limits because its what it works today, and "if its not broken you don't fix it"

[MINTEEER]

This MOD has been our for years, EA has bigger issues on their plate than to worry about PR,

[DeOliveira]

Project reality is a great game!

[sprint113]

Some thoughts.

Previously, PR required the player to own a copy of BF2 putting it in the realm of a "legal" mod. Now that it includes most if not all of BF2 in the install, it is technically illegal distribution of EA's IP. So yes, by a strict legal definition, unless PR has some agreement with EA, it is an illegal game. Will EA do anything about it? Probably not. They have very little to gain by shutting down PR while risking incurring the ire of the internet if they do.

Abandonware and open sourcing the engine are two different concept. Abandonware is simply a term to describe the status of software effectively being abandoned by their developer for whatever reason. That comes with the implication that it is therefore legal (it is not) or moral to facilitate distribution (piracy) of said software. It is very uncommon for a publisher, especially one like EA to make their old engines open source. There's a good chance with all the shuffling of DICE/EA and the age of the game to question whether they even still have a full set of code to release.

Yes, you could replicate PR in a new engine. There's been multiple starts to that across the years, ARMA engines (ARMA R), C4 (PR2), Cryengine 3 (PR2), Unreal (Squad), Frostbite (BF3:Reality Mod). Even some tests of a partial upgrade to the 2142 version of the Refractor engine. The problem is that you end up basically starting from scratch with a move like this, both from a game and a playerbase standpoint. A new game would be years behind in development for a long time (see Squad, BF3 Reality Mod's development times) meaning the existing playerbase would be split between playing a full featured old janky game or a less featured shiny new game splitting the already small player base with high risk of killing both games. That lag time would be a very risky proposition for any development team. Also, do you retain the quirks and features of PR, or exploit what the new engine has to offer?

[rogdozz]

FYI, there is already a "Project Reality Gunplay" mod for Operation Harsh Doorstop, if anyone is interested here's the link to the forum post in the official OHD Discord:

https://discord.com/channels/9382926699 ... 9683848192

Let's see, maybe this will eventually turn into a full blown Project Reality 2 mod.