Gameplay

Flashbang out!

Rainbow Six brought us our first taste of deliberate realist gameplay, and Red Storm is attempting to take that gameplay to new heights with Raven Shield. Just as in the first game, moving will effect your crosshairs, and thus your weapon spread, but the crosshair movement is effected by even more details in Raven Shield. Move your point of view 90 degrees quickly and you’ll lose accuracy, go into a run, get hit, and all of these details will effect your accuracy. What if you are shot in the leg? Your movement is slowed for the remainder of the round.

New to the R6 franchise is a wide variety of details some borrowed from other realist shooters, others brand new ideas. You can now go prone instead of just crouching for example, and leaning which you were capable of in Rogue Spear, can now be done at a full run. Leaning itself is done entirely differently, in Rogue Spear it simply made your bounding box to be hit a little different and altered your view. In Raven Shield leaning effects your entire model and all the details that entails, so when trying to fit into a tight space and having issues, you can lean a bit and fit in.

How are these guys missing each other?

Alley oop

Die!

One major detail to the R6 franchise, and counter-terrorist teams in general, is how to handle opening doors, or breaching. You can shoot a handle off of a door, throw a frag to blow it to pieces, or when the shotguns are released you’ll be able to blow it clean off it’s hinges. New to Raven Shield for the more subtle player: doors can be partially opened with a mouse wheel, so you can open a door a crack, and lean in, taking a couple of pot shots before closing it. Perhaps you prefer to open the door just a hair while a teammate lobs in a flashbang, close it, then blow it off it’s hinges and charge in with your enemies blinded.

Realism, realism, realism

Rainbow Six is defined by it’s realism, but in a few of the situations in Raven Shield, it seems that Red Storm decided to forsake realism, and actually make the game slower for simple sake of the game being slower. The best example is on Streets, each of the starting bases has a ladder leading down to a lower basement level, you can either traverse the ladder to scale the 10 or so feet down spending eight or so seconds as you very slowly descend weaponless. Or you can opt to fall down, and take half your health in damage and be limping for the rest of the round. Now, never mind the fact that a crème de la crème counter-terrorist wouldn’t take eight seconds to descend 10 feet of ladder, but the falling, how is it one can fall ten feet and take more damage than an m14 shot to the leg does? We’re talking about assault rifles here!

This is present in a number of the details in R6: Raven Shield, for example you still can’t jump. Red Storm didn’t want players “bunny hopping” across levels, as real SEALs and SAS wouldn’t do that. However, in Day of Defeat (admittedly a World War II mod, but easily one of the most realistic shooters we’ve seen) the player can still jump, it’s simply his crosshairs become epileptic as a result. As a result, in DoD firing while leaping or for a good amount of time thereafter is an exercise in futility and simply a waste of ammo.

It is these arbitrary mechanisms in the foreground of Raven Shield that don’t make the game feel realistic, but forced, the game is very slow, and very thoughtful.

He just fell down a whole flight of stairs

Obligatory buttshot

M14 creeping around the corner

Thoughts on thoughtfulness

It is this very thoughtfulness that makes the game so appealing. The skillset in Raven Shield isn’t just about how good of a shot or dancer you are, it’s also about the moments leading up to those shots and those dances. A player who knows where his opponent is, can descend on that opponent slowly with his crosshairs leveled at him, thus his shots will be crystal clear. The player caught off guard, however, will be at a significant disadvantage as he whirls to face his attacker and sends his crosshairs flying across the screen in panic.

Half of the skill of playing Raven Shield lies in the intelligence you play it with, when clearing a room, doing it slowly insures a level shot. An economy of motion, checking the corners before panning across the rest of the room, will insure a player has an ever minimized crosshair when he does find an opponent. In many ways Raven Shield relies on the player’s intelligence in how he plays the field as much as it relies on his skill with a weapon.