Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is a standalone sequel to the Red Orchestra/Rising Storm franchise whose depiction of ultra-realistic warfare is among the best I've ever seen.

It was initially announced last year but given that it was still in an early state the developers had very little to share with us. That has changed recently as Tripwire has released their first of many community focused updates going over what exactly Rising Storm 2: Vietnam will be about.

Here's a quick summary of the post:

Rising Storm 2 will represent the franchise's first step in to the modern era which means that the ground forces are going to be armed with automatic weaponry and supported by artillery and air strikes. How exactly will this impact the standard Red Orchestra/Rising Storm gameplay they haven't elaborated on but these sort of features are currently undergoing testing and prototyping so expect to hear from them a bit later.

The two features they were willing to discuss however are Squads and Firefights.

- The squad system is currently being remade in order to put an emphasis on cooperation by making it easier to chat between squad members and to play with friends. The plan is to make the squad system a lot more social while removing some of the complexity of the old one.

- The core shooting mechanics are getting a bit of an update as well. Ambushes, sniper skill-shots and tactics will still play a crucial role but you will now also need to put in an equal amount of skill when it comes to medium distance firefights. Given that Rising Storm 2 is introducing a lot of automatic weaponry I assume this means that some sort of recoil & kickback system will be introduced in order to make automatic weapons a bit trickier to use.

It will be interesting to see how modern tactics mesh with the "standard" Rising Storm gameplay

And finally they've talked about the engine they're using for Rising Storm 2. It is going to be an enhanced version of the RO2/RS engine which is based on UE3 and I do hope that those enhancements bring with them some much needed performance increases.

A part of their engine update is also dedicated towards making the community SDK a lot easier to work with as well as more powerful thus removing some of the roadblocks that modders encountered with the previous games.

And that is it for now. I know its probably not as much as you expected but with Rising Storm 2 still being under heavy development I have to say I'm actually surprised they decided to even share this much with us, given that a lot of it can and will change as development goes on.

Either way, once more information gets released I'll make sure to update you as I'm quite interested in RS2 myself.