Hidden & Dangerous 2 First Look

You will still be able to use vehicles for transport to distant locations. The developers announced that they are going to introduce planes, and some other location-dependant exotic vehicles. The control of these vehicles will be utterly simplified, yet their physical models will be as detailed and accurate as possible. Each vehicle's characteristics will be defined with about 150 different parameters. The new engine is also capable of handling different materials with different characteristics, some of which will be highly important for gameplay, like how easy bullets can go through them. And speaking of bullets, they also got real ballistics models... This aspect of the game, though, still has some unresolved matters, especially concerning the notorious 3rd person targeting, which made H&D a very frustrating game at times. As the programmers received a lot of complaints about that, in their last-years' port of the game to Dreamcast, they tried to fix this by adding the auto-aim option. H&D2 won't feature this, as it obviously didn't turn out to be the best possible solution. The developers just stated that they would strive to make aiming in H&D2 a bit simpler, but combined with less accurate shooting and smarter enemies.

The AI is supposed to be much better, which is good, as it was one of the worst things in the original game. You shouldn't see your enemies running out of their cover when shot at any more. They should only sporadically shoot out. The routine for target selection will now depend on a large number of parameters, which should make the AI actions far less predictable. When in groups they will act in coherence with each other. You will be able to issue orders to your soldiers like: move, guard, assault, retreat, stand ground, and determine their reaction to enemy sighting: not fire, hold fire, stealth, etc... I sincerely hope that this will function as it should, as I cannot even remember how many times I commanded my soldiers in H&D to shoot the enemy on sight, and they just stood there being shot at as they forgot what that heavy metal thing they were carrying served for.

The game will have 23-25 complex missions in six campaigns. The save game system will remain the same, which means that you won't be able to save a game while playing a mission. The retail version of the game will include the long-awaited mission editor. There, that's all there is to be said about the single player mode.

As for the multiplayer mode, the general assumption is that there should be about eight game mods (classic death-match, ctf, king of the hill, escort...), and that the players will be able to set a large number of parameters on their own. The multiplayer mode should feature five exclusively multiplayer maps, plus all single-player maps. The programmers are trying to make the game support up to 20 players per game, and they are currently considering a possibility to introduce multi-person campaigns.

Even though it was announced to appear in the beginning of the year, Hidden & Dangerous 2 surely won't appear until summer... And as we can expect another great game of the same genre Bohemia Interactive Studios' Operation Flashpoint (also a Czechoslovakian title), about the same time we're sure to have loads of fun. H&D2 is bound to achieve great success as there is a great number of players who eagerly want to get their hands on it in spite of all the trouble they had with the first part.