... continued from the original article. Thanks for continuing here.
The graphical environment in GRAW was also much more modernistic, and seemingly a lot more photorealistic. When playing the game on an Xbox 360 you'd have a hard time believing you aren't watching a real life action movie.
Much later UbiSoft released the latest in the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series: Rainbow Six Vegas (R6V). Playing Rainbow Six Vegas was so natural, so easy to just start playing and so easy to control that I felt like I was in heaven when playing the game. It has the best elements of the FPS genre, and uses the most naturalistic and player friendly cover system ever implemented in any of these type games. While some Gears of Wars fans may differ, it is -- by far -- the easiest and most common sensical cover system I've ever encountered and is so smoothly integrated into the game that as soon as you start playing you feel completely immersed in the game play and feel like you are in total control of your virtual representation that is on the screen.
My friends and I played many hours of R6V. Many, many hours. Thanks to the very smart foresight of the development team for implementing their Persistent Elite Characterization (or whatever that third word was) or PEC, gamers were rewarded with a ranking system that rewarded continued game play with promotions to new ranks, new armor, clothing, and weaponry that was unlocked and other bonuses that encouraged also encouraged that continued game play.
If a few other games (*cough* *cough* Crackdown *cough*, *cough again* Guitar Hero II *cough*) hadn't come out and flooded the market with a wealth of gaming choices, my friends and I would probably have kept on playing R6V until we were all maxed in our rankings, and even then, we'd still be setting up regular matches to keep on playing. It's that much fun, and is that well done. The only thing besides the wealth of other gaming choices that slowed us down was a growing sense of boredom with playing the same maps (areas) over and over again.
As things slowed down with Crackdown, and before GH2 came along, UbiSoft released a second edition of GRAW, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. It provided new areas to play, a new single player story mode, and seemingly in response to complaints about the first GRAW game, was more tolerant, more forgiving to players, and slightly easier to get through. (Some said perhaps too easy, and too short relatively speaking). It too featured some great mutliplayer team modes, including some co-op campaign modes that are great fun. My friends took to the game in much the same manner as we had with R6V and contented ourselves with GRAW2 while waiting for promises of new maps and some new gaming modes to come to R6V via an expansion.
While we played GRAW2 together, we all marvelled at things that were done right in GRAW2, but we lamented other things that we really liked from R6V that seemed to be missing in GRAW2. GRAW2 was and is a good game, but not a perfect game. Not as good (to us) as R6V.
This got us all talking about what would make the perfect FPS game for us. How could UbiSoft (or others that might follow) come up with a better game for us to spend our time and money on? Here's how: combine Rainbow Six Vegas, the cover system it uses, and it's urban combat (SWAT like) tactics with the open area tactics and maps of GRAW2. Make a game that takes the best features of GRAW and GRAW2, and put it together with the best features of R6V and you would probably have the perfect FPS game. Perhaps you could mix in a bit of the Splinter Cell: Double Agent gaming modes to add elements of stealthy hand-to-hand combat modes. Modes and missions such as kidnapping or stealthy assassination of terrorists that would then lead to the SWAT like tactics, which then eventually lead to the open area tactics. If all of this was in one game, it would perhaps be the ultimate Tom Clancy game.
Having said all of this, and mentioned UbiSoft's (and their partner/subsidiaries) a few times, I'm not even sure that the type of game I'm talking about would ever come from Ubi. It might come from one of their competitors, it might come from them, or it may never come. I hope the latter isn't the case, and I hope eventually someone puts out the type of game I'm talking about here. If so, they'll get my money fast and I'll again be occupying my time for hours on end.
