Joel Taubel stops for a second near one of the Little Bird helicopters at his base. "Those things are kind of like tinker toys now," he says, having just flown the new Apache attack helicopter. Unlike the relatively tame AH-6 Little Bird, the AH-64 Apache's pilot can fire rockets and the co-pilot can use a chin turret to pour intense gunfire almost any place he can see.
Taubel was the producer of NovaLogic's Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, which was designed around infantry fighting and therefore didn't include tanks and attack helicopters. Now he's producing the first expansion pack, Escalation, which will be adding combat-oriented vehicles like the Apache for the Joint Ops team and its counterpart for the rebels, the Ka-52 Alligator. There will also be main battle tanks that can shred the once fearsome APCs that passed for heavy vehicles in the original game.
Driving Miss "Go-Go-Go!"
Joint Operations was designed so that vehicles are a focus for players who need transportation and pilots who want the firepower their passengers provide. But Taubel notes that hopping behind the wheel is often a thankless job. "No one wanted to be a driver. Everyone's looking at you and yelling 'go go go!' and the whole time you're worried you're going to wreck and get 20 guys killed." So tanks and attack helicopters are an attempt to rectify this by adding deadlier vehicles. In what's probably a concession to the Battlefield games, you can now enter a third person view when you're in any vehicle, which will make helicopters easier to land and will give passengers in APCs and transport helicopters something to look at besides each other.
Full Story Here
Full Size Screens Here
