A few weeks back, I was watching a series of Developer Diaries from the folks at Codemasters about the (at the time) forthcoming Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising. While a lot of it was your run-of-the-mill “hey our graphics are great” and “hey check out our cool AI,” the one that really drew me in was their explanation of their “Hardcore” mode.

For those of you not familiar with the original Operation Flashpoint, it was a modern military FPS whose main claim to fame was a gritty sense of realism.  Flashpoint was not a run n’ gun kind of game; running and gunning, in fact, was probably the quickest way for you to lose.  Flashpoint was, in a basic way, a military “simulator.”  The player had limited information about where enemies were, getting shot once or twice would probably kill you, and an awful lot of the game was simply spent running from one waypoint to the next.

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