Ghost Recon live-action trailer has cloaking devices, explosions

Edit: Cod4 not MW2..

the russian villian in MW2 had scraggly messy black hair.

damn you and your corrections! But Zakhaev didn't have an arm and had a goatee. But yeah, this guy does look exactly like the BFBC2 bad guy

There was also an evil bald Russian in Bad Company 1 as well.

No. I won't die. As long as the children are still scared of me, I will continue to haunt them in their dreams.

i say the same thing too bald russian guy who wont die

That same bald guy is the antagonist in uncharted 2.

Metro 2033 is what you're looking for. It tries to humanize the demon Russkies. =p

So. It is time for Russian game developers start to create games portraying the US as the bad guys :)

I'm surprised Russians haven't called out American developers as racist, how many Russians do you think we have killed in video games by now? More than their total population by now for sure.
But the African-American community sure was quick to call out Resident Evil 5 as racist, amirite?

@Fierod and @ Robert

This game is being developed by Ubisoft Paris. Frenchmen! The French are actually considered Russia's best European ally. So what the Russians need to do is get Ubisoft to make the same game but from the other side’s perspective.

Stop assuming US developer’s have a negative view toward Russia. It's just such an easy believable storyline to create considering Russia's past.

@Sean
An easier storyline to make would be to represent China as an enemy, imo.
Russia as an enemy has been so overdone, it's gotten to the same level as killing Germans in WW2 games.

I think Sean has a good point. Russia just fits, because for like 50 years they were the only country that could match the US in military might. It worked in the first half of CoD4 when you were fighting, er, what's his name middle eastern bad guy, because it was a small insurrection, but in MW2, there really isn't any country besides Russia that could launch a successful full scale invasion of the US. Maybe China, but that's not as cool

@Fierod- "I'm surprised Russians haven't called out American developers as racist"
Wait a minute, did you just imply that 'Russian' is a race? Aren't most Russians, like most Americans, caucasian?

Coincidentally, there is a remake of Red Dawn in the works with the Chinese as the invaders in place of the Russians.

It's not just that Russia fits, it's that Russia does indeed have these "ultranationalists" who are violently against the government:

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31491414/

That's from a couple of months ago; they were threatening to bomb police stations and government buildings in response to Putin's iron fist. It's not a completely implausible (though unlikely) scenario that they could throw a coup and install a new government (it happened to them less than 100 years ago). Many poli-sci types talk of the "re-awakening of the Great Bear" (as Russia is apparently known) even without these fringe elements, so it makes for good near-future fodder. The US does not have anything like that, so you'd actually have to claim that the main, ordinary US government itself is the bad guys. Say what you will about the US, but this would prove unpopular, yet the games are able to get around it for Russia by saying that the ultranationalists took over.

Maybe they could somehow resurrect the Klan or the Confederacy as a way for the US to have gone bad, but that might remind people a little too much of (wiki wiki) Wild Wild West.

to be fair, it's not the russians portrayed as bad guys in these games, it's a small group of extremist russians. think of it as the difference between al qaeda/taliban vs. the whole of afghanistan.

that being said, they have become fairly ubiquitous in these kinds of games, so you have a fair point.

http://xeno.sova-center.ru/6BA2468/6BB4208/E7F0971

More reading from the SOVA center, which is a think tank/research center focused on nationalism, xenophobia, and hate crimes in Russia. A relevant quotation:

"The ultra-right groups are actively and deliberately switching to anti-state terrorism. Their objectives are to destabilize the government, to increase public distrust of the government, and to paralyze civil society organizations working to counteract racism and xenophobia. Apologists of the ultra-right terror see their ultimate goal in provoking 'a nationalist revolution' and establishing a neo-Nazi regime in Russia."

If that doesn't sound like what's portrayed in these games, I don't know what does. These groups are some of the reason Putin is getting a bad rep for being repressive, because he deals with them quite forcefully, since that is probably one of the few things that works.

Wow, that's an interesting read. Makes "No Russian" seem a lot more plausible.

"The ultra-right have switched to anti-state terrorism for various reasons. Some may have done so in revenge against the authorities, as in the mentioned Day of Wrath example. Some others use violence to step up pressure on the authorities, as was the case in late 2008, when a dwarfish ultra-right group killed and beheaded a native of the Central Asia, left his severed head outside the district council's office and circulated a letter with a photo of the head and threats to target the local officials unless they kept the immigrants away."

Sorry to keep posting, but sometimes you just nerd out.

As someone who has lived most of his life in Russia and still maintains a lot of contacts with the friends and relatives living there, I can assure you that "No Russian" scene is still about as plausible as an alien invasion. There are a lot of people in Russia who aren't happy with government's actions but a lot of what you quoted sounds like wild exaggerations and unsupported claims.

For clarification, they do not say that these groups are just running riot, but they kill maybe 100 people per year and would 500. My point is not that Russia is teetering on the brink, but rather that racism is a pretty big problem there (with even some of the main political parties using racist/anti-immigrant slogans during campaigns). So they are a country with anti-state terrorists, and no matter how fringe, it's a popular topic. There really isn't a parallel in the US.

@Fierod, if by "African American community" you mean a handful of black people in a "community" of 30 million+ people, sure. I followed the Resident Evil 5 "controversy" very closely and I came away thinking it was a scandal almost entirely generated by the media in order to build up webpage views.

From a statistical point of view, most of the world's atrocities are probably being committed within Africa. Since 1994, the amount of deaths due to African wars is probably around 3 million (some estimates go up to 6 million and beyond). The death toll of the Iraq War + other conflict zones (such as the Israeli area) don't come close to the those figures.

But I figure games are staying away from that region for various reasons. The skin color of the area probably does play a factor. The West (particularly Western Europe) basically conquered Africa for quite some time. There's probably some guilt about that, if only a little.

Other possible factors.. Africa is not economically important to most people, and humanitarian wars in the region are frowned upon (see Clinton's Somalia aftermath). So seeing the Ghosts gets involved in Africa just comes off as implausible to the Ubisoft folks. This is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon after all, and I'd be surprised if Clancy ever advocated for American/Western intervention in, say, Rwanda in 1994 like the liberal Al Gore did. They may have dropped the Tom Clancy prefix entirely though. Clancy is a Republican figure so Ubisoft may have abandoned him in favor of a more "neutral" game title.

Also, African militaries are not very mechanized or technologically advanced at all, last I heard. The Ghosts of the future would be so far ahead of African technology that each one would probably be able to butcher a hundred Africans with ease, thanks to their technological advantage. The resulting game play might enthrall members of Storm Front but I don't know if even the staunchest of Republicans would stomach such a one-sided affair for long.

It looks like a version of power armour, there's a similar real life prototype which I'll post a video for in a second

Here we go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW2pBLQLHj0

Sorry for the triple post, but this one too and is more likely to be the basis of the one in the vid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0X1vyWU6bw&feature=related

It's a prototype exoskeleton designed to help soldiers carry more equipment, more comfortably.

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ_qR8zCLDc

Sorry for yet another video, but this is a much better video of the exoskeleton I originally posted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CeBOWm67A

they named it the HULC? That's awesome

Awesome? It's incredible.

Me too. I'm really tired of shooters right now. I bought MW2 and then sold it two weeks later. I bought Bad Company 2 hoping the vehicles would win me over, but ended up selling that two weeks later as well.

Future Soldier seems to be a little more fresh though. Frontlines: Fuel of War already had some aspects of what we saw in this trailer, but I'm sure Future Soldier will be much more polished feeling.

Jem'Hadar soldiers had personal cloaks ("shrouds") years before Potter. They used them all the time, too, unlike the wizards. And they were, you know, soldiers.

I don't believe that was an actual article of clothing. Their ability to cloak was part of their genetic modification.

I always believed the shrouding was from some device in their uniforms. After all, their uniforms shrouded along with them.

At any rate, the cloaking devices in this game don't appear to be tied to a piece of clothing, either, as you can see from the four guys cloaking at the end of the trailer above. What's up with the forehead lights, though? They look like they give away your position even when you're cloaked.

No doubt. I guess I was talking more about the fella who drops into the access tunnel. It appears as though he's wearing some kind of raincoat.

I also agree; kill the damn headlamps.

reply fail

You figured it out that time.
Reply success.

Seems like, on some level, it's going for the 'theoretical realism'

The cloaking device is actually something that many scientists are researching right now.

Pretty sweet if you ask me.