Operation Flashpoint (series): Difference between revisions

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* [[War Is Hell]] : The games pit you in the role of a [[The Everyman|completely ordinary]], [[Redshirt Army|completely vulnerable]] and [[We Have Reserves|completely replacable]] [[New Meat|young soldier]]... who's fighting in small scale conflicts [[It Got Worse|that could easily spark]] [[World War Three]]... [[Averted Trope|No]] [[Anvilicious|heavy-handed]] condemnations of war or [[Contemplate Our Navels|sombre thoughts of your squadmates]] are ever heard, but the depiction of modern warfare in the game (subtle, yet straightforward) [[Show, Don't Tell|says more than a million words]] : It's nerve-wrecking, [[Everything Trying to Kill You|unpredictable]], [[Finagle's Law|often completely absurd]]. Virtually [[Anyone Can Die]]... And they do - ''[[Dying Like Animals|all the damned time]]''... Despite being war sims, the games never glorify or trivialize war and the way it changes the world, society and individuals.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWCfM5oCUSk Made all the more poignant] in ''Resistance'', where Viktor [[Technical Pacifist|tries to convince his friends against going to war with the Soviets]]. He's a recently retired professional soldier who [[Shell-Shocked Veteran|has seen too much death and suffering to count]], so he warns them that their desperate fight to liberate their homeland [[Defied Trope|isn't going to be]] [[War Is Glorious|glorious]] [[Hollywood Tactics|or easy]] [[Averted Trope|at all]]. But even though he's against the idea of fighting at first, [[The Call Knows Where You Live|he gets tangled up in the worsening situation]] and eventually decides to lead the Nogovan resistance cells (because if he didn't, things would probably end up even worse). [[Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped|And to hammer the point of the trope home]], the end of ''Resistance''' storyline [[Bittersweet Ending|is anything but cheerful. The resistance fighters only manage to win at a terrible price and with heavy loses]].

* [[What Could Have Been]] : The game was first designed with the intention of creating a purely non-public military sim, but the devs changed their plans already in the late 90s and made the VBS versions of the game only after it achieved significant commercial success. Also, EA Games and other big publishers declined to publish the original ''OFP'', with the general reasoning being that [[It Will Never Catch On|war-themed FPSs and other games have no real following or future]]. After the release of ''OFP'', a suspicious number of exactly such games flooded the video game market. And the genre is still going strong. The use of "iron-sighting" in [[FPS]]s also became more popular after ''OFP'' than ever before.

* [[Where I Was Born and Razed]] : Happens in varying degrees in the [[Urban Warfare|city liberating missions]] of the ''Resistance'' campaign. Since all of them involve some tank warfare, expect the Nogovan resistance being forced to shell their own former homes and public buildings in order to smoke out the Soviet soldiers from their well-protected defences and hiding places.

* [[Wide Open Sandbox]]: None of the games have "maps" in the traditional sense. You load an entire island, of perhaps 200-400 square kilometers, and then you play a mission on that island. It's essentially the same concept but on a much larger scale and uses the surrounding oceans, rather than [[Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence|walls or cliffs]], to prevent the player from leaving. While you're often restricted from just going anywhere you want on the island in the missions (because disobeying orders gets you in trouble and wandering deep into enemy territory is generally a bad idea anyway), many missions are set up in a sandbox manner, allowing you massive space to roam and a wide variety of equipment and support options. Occasionally, fan-made missions will put you in a ''[[Call of Duty]]''-ish linear mission.