Octopus Overlords

I don't know if anyone else is playing the game right now, but the devs posted that they have acknowledged a number of bugs, especially in performance, that they will try to address in hotfixes in the next week. After that they are going to stand down over the holidays and then hit it again in January. They will post in a couple of weeks their plans for a big 1.1 update for some more comprehensive fixes and also updated and new content.

I once again went down the rabbit hole two days ago on fiddling with performance settings and finally got something I'm happy with. I also banged my head a few more times on the "Greased Palms" mission (the postal facility), failing each time and finally taking a break from the game.

I've now installed the "In Game Menu" mod which allows access to all eighteen missions. "Greased Palm" was the ninth in the campaign and I realized that I was going to start disliking the game if I couldn't unlock any missions past that. However, with the mod I can now play all missions, which means I can now access the other 50% of the game .

I’ll probably pick this up during the holiday sale. It may not have the planning phase, but it seems to hit all the other high notes of the early SWAT and Rainbow Six games. Until then, I’ll just keep checking in on your AARs.

If so ate playing with real people it has a sort of planning phase. If I'm thinking of the right game you can draw on a map pregame and discuss planning with other people.

Punisher wrote: Sun Dec 17, 2023 11:32 pm If so ate playing with real people it has a sort of planning phase. If I'm thinking of the right game you can draw on a map pregame and discuss planning with other people.

There is (usually) in the game some in-mission map, which might be a blueprint or a hand-drawn sketch, available on your tablet. It is possible to put markers on that map in your tablet which (I assume) can be seen by others on their tablets. You can use this before starting the mission and also anytime during the mission. I'm also assuming everyone can put markers on the map. But really by the time everybody has played the level a couple of times verbal directions will probably be enough. The game just cries out for a group of friends to play, I can't imagine the chaos of several strangers in a lobby trying to beat the postal facility.

Just to clarify, there is no minimap or "radar" in the game. This is very much a game trying to mimic real life as much as possible.

I think it might be the only way to beat the postal facility level is to do it MP .

I haven't been posting screenshots or giving away too much on the maps because those would definitely be a spoiler. I did play a new level this afternoon. I don't remember the name of the mission but the location is Cherryessa Farm. I actually managed to win it on the first attempt, but I've got in over twenty hours on the game now and I'm really get the hang of things. Oddly, just like in Door Kickers 2, I'm not doing a lot of swapping out of weapons for my character or for the rest of the team.

I was doing another map and after quite some time carefully clearing rooms and spaces, I made the assumption that there wasn't a bad guy in a blind spot on the large balcony since my three guys (one had previously died) had declared that they had cleared the place. Bad assumption. If I had better reactions than a dead otter I might have beat the guy to the draw, but I didn't and I was killed. So, good lesson there; my AI teammates are pretty good, but if they are down a guy there might be some spots that aren't being checked. Best to always and slowly pie a blind corner.

Another good hint, whenever you start a level, always switch your long gun to full auto. Later in the level you can start worrying about ammo (which you can check), but early on you'll want to be able to throw a lot of lead at bad guys who might have body armor.

I'm also finding that having that "In Game Menu" mod is making me go less crazy. The unmodded game only allows access to levels you have beaten plus the next one in the sequence, this is true even in practice mode. So as I previously mentioned if you are stuck on one mission (IE, postal facility), you can drive yourself crazy playing it over and over. This mod always you to play any map, even the ones you haven't unlocked. The purists might object, but the purists probably have better reactions than I have

I did some more exploring in mod.io and this page shows the map mods available for RoN, sorted by last updated. I sorted there so hopefully the maps have been checked against RoN 1.0 will be listed near the top. You'll notice several "SWAT4 or Not" maps, recreations of SWAT4 maps.

I downloaded the "SWAT4 or Not" Sky Tower, which honestly I don't remember from SWAT4, and the map plays pretty well. I managed to get two of my AI teammates killed, or rather they did themselves , but then I got myself killed when I flashbanged a small room and charged in and got shot, the bad guy apparently immune to the flashbang . I don't think this is an issue with the map as I've seen posts about the vanilla game complaining that the effects of flashbangs are hit or miss. However, I will attribute this to the bad guy wearing ear plugs and anti-flash googles, not outside the realm of possibilities.

I've now played on another mod map, again inspired by SWAT4, SW4T or Not - Red Library Remaster

Remaster of Red Library Offices from SWAT 4

- Music and ambient sounds from SWAT 4.
- Upscaled textures from SWAT 4.
- Full AI pathing support.
- Selectable spawn points.
- Random AI Spawns, faithful to original spawn locations.
- Press M when playing to access the map layout when in level.

I finally beat the "Greased Palms", postal facility mission. Unfortunately it did not go all my way. I saw this hostage being held as a human shield by the bad guy:


Not being confident of my Annie Oakley-like sharpshooting, I let my team bang and room enter. It didn't go well:


So I only scored a "C" grade... of course I also lost an officer dead as well, that didn't help. But I finally beat this level!

Did you forget rule #1?
Shoot the hostage.

Got a couple of achievements that are apparently pretty rare

After a year, I'm back to playing this. There have been a number of updates released and the game works a lot better now without having to play around with the graphics settings.

They have released a second DLC for the game, for those of you who aren't aware.

I've decided to do a narrated video of a Ready or Not mission to show off the game a bit. My apologies for the choppiness of the audio narration, I didn't have this problem before when I recorded it with the built-in Nvidia recorder, but I'm having problems with that so I switch over to using the relatively new Steam in-game recording and exporting the file.

UPDATE: It turns out that the audio issues I was having with the narration were due to a setting for "Automatic Gain" in the Steam game recording settings. I can't fix these videos but I'll make the change in future ones.

Here's another RoN mission, again with narration and again apologies for the occasional cracking of the audio track. However, the Nvidia recorder keeps quitting on me so I'm stuck with using the Steam in-game recorder and its microphone support.

And yes, I figured out later in the video how to disable a trap on a door.

UPDATE: It turns out that the audio issues I was having with the narration were due to a setting for "Automatic Gain" in the Steam game recording settings. I can't fix these videos but I'll make the change in future ones.

Yet another RoN mission from me, with narration. Again, the narration audio is a bit choppy but it's the best I can do. This mission has the additional highlight in that I die during it.

UPDATE: It turns out that the audio issues I was having with the narration were due to a setting for "Automatic Gain" in the Steam game recording settings. I can't fix these videos but I'll make the change in future ones.

A good article form PC Gamer about the latest DLC, Ready or Not's Dark Waters DLC has some cracking maps and scarily intelligent AI suspects that managed to outsmart me at almost every turn

Ready or Not is an intense and realistic tactical FPS where mistakes usually have violent consequences. But the upcoming [actually it has been released] Dark Water DLC has upped the ante with complex new maps and a new AI that's way too intelligent for my liking.

Like any other map in Ready or Not, you get a choice of where you land in the new ones—there'll usually be three or four options that offer various tactical advantages and disadvantages [actually not true, a lot of the early maps have only one starting point; not a big deal]. On Mirage at Sea, a luxury yacht embroiled in a hostage crisis, we landed on the helipad so we could work through the boat methodically from the top to the bottom. Thanks to the thin corridors, multitude of rooms, and numerous suspects, this yacht was pretty chaotic.

Our first firefight was in the stairwell down to the second floor of the boat. We got pinned down in a corner, so a couple of us backed up and doubled round to try and catch them off guard—the only problem was the suspects had the same idea.

As part of the new DLC, the devs are also introducing squad behaviour to the upcoming content and the rest of the game. This basically just makes the suspects smarter. They'll have certain roles now, like trying to lure players into traps, scurrying around behind to distract players, and working together to alert everyone to where players are.