Orel & All Its Offshoots

[Mike Nomad]

Orel, originally done by Slashbot427, has certainly proved its a very popular map concept. Any mellonhead that says Tank Warfare in RO is lame, dying or whatever is overripe and needs to be planted!

Did you know there are fifteen iterations of Orel that I know of? Slashbot has obviously made it clear that he doesn't care about edits, re-writes or whatever of his original Orel. I don't blame him one bit. All this action surrounding OREL is amazing. The BIG Armor Based Map Concept is certainly a winner. I can only wonder why certain mappers fight this truth and continue to foist crapola maps on the community. Imagine if all that mapping talent was combined to provide outstanding large combined combat maps.

50 man servers are right around the corner and its slated to be included in the imminent update from TWI. I can't imagine what the delay is with the update... TWI has always been right on the mark when they gave approx release dates. This time however, we seem to be in some sort of unexpected holding pattern.

Back to all the versions of Orel.. Like all things in life, some versions are great, some are good, some are not so good and some simply suck. Hmm, that's what makes it all so interesting.

We will examine the best of the best very shortly... Hopefully, there'll be plenty of user comments here, in this thread.

Stay Tuned.....

[Reservoir Dog]

The 88vs76 and the 88vs76_redux are by far the most played and popular ones out there right now. I didn't say they are the best, just the most popular right now.

Enhanced version should be rocketing right now as far as servers running it and man hours played. It isn't. I seriously doubt it will even come close to the popularity of the previously mentioned versions. Why?

This map was released as a final. Yet after, what, 2 people said it was unbalanced another version is released. My opinion is that the mapper didn't spend time to verify balance and was so easily swayed. THis is going to make alot of people wonder how much time was actually put into enhancing the map. If you are going to "enhance" a classic you should take the time to verify all points of a map. If it went thru a beta phase, like most maps, the kinks could have been worked out instead of another version hitting some servers (like we need another one). Another version is only going to discredit the first one I'm afraid.

Its so easy to remake a popular map and try to cling to the popularity of the original. That's why Arad has been redone to death. It should be unique and have its own character to it to set it apart from the many other versions we see out there and especially the original. Other than fixing some errors on the original, that have been done on other versions, it doesn't really set itself apart. It might be that I had high expectations of this version since it had Slashbot's permission.