Retro Let's Play: Soldier of Fortune (Raven 2000)

Our OCAU Retro Let's Play for the month of April (after the morning of the 1st) is Raven's Soldier of Fortune, one of the many first-person shooters of the late 90s/early 2000s era of early 3D accelerators, and one of the many built on the venerable Quake 2 engine.



"PROMISES TO BLOW THE DOORS OFF THE FIRST-PERSON ACTION GENRE." -C/NET GAMECENTER

Why?

I never played this game in the 2000s, so I don't have nostalgia for it specifically, and I'm coming into it with fresh eyes. As one of the early commercial Linux games, I was interested in getting the Loki Entertainment port running on a period-correct Linux install. Then, by the Deus Ex Effect, a few people came out of the woodwork mentioning how much they enjoyed it.

The selling point of the game was its "graphic depictions of violence" (quotes because this is still the Quake 2 engine, which kids these days liken to Minecraft), with it being an early example of zone-based damage in FPSes, and famously, dismemberment technology.



The plot puts you in the role of a tactical mercenary charged with stopping terrorists, but reading reviews of SoF 2 the first game apparently isn't a serious tactical simulation, and is mostly about shooting people's limbs off.

Ports

The game was originally released for Windows 9x by Activision, and later ported to PS2 (Pipe Dream/Majesco) and Dreamcast (Runecraft/Crave). The Loki port to Linux was self-published.



The PC version is commercially available at gog.com, and as of late March/early April is currently discounted to around AU$10 in their Spring sale.

Check PCGamingWiki for notes on widescreen support. There's notes there and here on support for modern Linux systems, but it's just as easy to use Wine/Proton.

Sequels

SoF 2 (2002, with id Tech 3) was apparently decent but slower and more tactical.

SoF: Payback (2007) was apparently bad and not done by Raven, but it was Refused Classification in Australia so it's got that going for it.

If you're still up for some Wheel of Fortune, I put the versions to pick from here.

Screenshots from MobyGames:



Longplay:



I was also recommended the GmanLives reviews for good journalistic coverage:

 

played this top death (mine, many many times) back in the day.
I've purchased the G0G updated edition and playing perfectly on win 11

started on hardest mode and didnt get past the first room in the subway. right expectations reset and back to the middle difficultly. hahaha.

 

Keen to play this again to compare it to my memories.

Played it on release. I think it actually kind of shocked me with the violence levels at the time. I'd come from things like Mortal Kombat with it's "gruesome but still cartoony" violence, or Doom/Quake were it was "pile of gibs" kind of violence, which again was rather silly when you think about it. What immediately stood out to me with SoF was location-specific damage, enemies begging not to be killed, and other gruesome things that really seemed to take the game from "comic violence against make believe monsters" to something actually rather dark when you consider the human-on-human specifics of it.

I don't think I got particularly far in the game back then. A combination of the above-mentioned shock factor, along with time pressures (I was in uni and working at the same time), as well as just generally sucking at FPS titles (which I still do today - see when we played "Blood", and I could only play it on easy mode).

So yeah, willing to give this one an actual proper attempt and see how far I can get in it today. Realistic gun violence still gives me the creeps today, which some folks might find odd, given my love of the horror genre. But to me the worst horrors are what people do to each other, rather than things like monsters and ghosts. So I'll see how this goes now in general, but also with the hindsight of how far these sorts of games have come.

 

I remember buying SoF and loving it. The ability to target different body parts was fun, and the overall gameplay was very solid, it was more like an action game with some tactical nods than a tactical shooter like the first R6. I played the second and enjoyed that a lot as well. Never got the third, because laws.
Thanks for the memories and I think I will look at buying it again.

 

under 10 bucks here
https://www.gog.com/en/game/soldier_of_fortune_platinum_edition

I'm into the 3rd mission and i'd forgotten a lot of the story line, so while the graphics havent aged well, the game play and specific horrific violence remains tight and still a little confronting (but I dont play modern shooters, so who knows where they've gone to today)

 

Ta, I grabbed this just now.

 

Absolutely loved multilayer in this.
Don't remember single player at all
99% sure I have the cd still

 

I rated Double Helix as a better multiplayer game, the maps were better iirc. But still dropped a ton of hours into MP SoF too

 

The GOG version all by itself wouldn't let me go fullscreen. I grabbed the "SoFplus" patch (there's a download on the site specifically for the GOG version), and now I can play 1080p fullscreen:
http://sof1.megalag.org/sofplus/

There's still a few issues with my character sliding around at certain points, but apparently that has something to do with uncapped frame rates. So I'll try to find a way to solve that.

Up to mission 5 or so I think? I'm finding the actual difficulty OK, I'm just getting so lost in some of the levels before accidentally stumbling across where I'm supposed to be.

 

swear I bought this game, back in 2k, and either never played it, or played only briefly for some reason!

looking forward to finishing what I did or didn't start.. Good one.

 

you know a patch is good when the 'thanks' list includes names like


hahaha. made with love

 

I have one core memory of this game stuffed away in the back of my brain.

this is back in the days when games still put "no movement" animations in there. so if you stood still for too long the protagonist would start doing things with their gun like inspecting it etc. I always remember being in one of the earlier train/subway station missions, using the desert eagle pistol thing. I paused at the bottom a set of steps for a few seconds, and as I put my fingers back down on the WASD keys the on screen gun did a cowboy style backwards spin on one finger. as the gun was still spinning I moved forward and rounded a corner and there was an enemy right there.

the gun just stopped spinning as he woke,
the cross heirs landed directly at his face,
and I pressed the mouse and his head exploded
all in one perfect timing from the start of the cow boy gun spin

14 year old me was blown away at how bad arse I thought that tiny sequence of events was.


Don't remember too much else of the game other blowing limbs off etc and that the main dude wears a floppy hat which reminds me too much of eric idle in the bruce sketch

 

I played the hell out of this back in the day, it looked and ran great on my Voodoo card at the time and I still think it has one of the most satisfying shotties in all of gaming, a stone cold classic.

Did anyone play the console relase?

 

I did, i had it on my Dreamcast, but to be honest, it was lack luster due to lack of the mouse.. (it did work with a mouse, but i didnt have one)

that and the voodoo powered pc shat all over it. Def gonna give it a run... the v5 would have been a great game for this. might see how both cards go, vs the original GeForce 256ddr

 

Played a couple of levels, thoughts so far:

The violence warning is great marketing, but if it was shocking at the time it hasn't aged well. The gore of the dismemberment stuff vs. using the "low violence" options reminds me of Mortal Kombat on consoles with its low-violence option - just because you're not seeing the blood or the detachable polygons, it doesn't actually take anything away from the psychological "doing harm to people" aspect that elvis was talking about. I can see how that can make someone uncomfortable maybe the first time you encounter it, I get that - I generally try to be ethical in video games where there's no penalty or benefit from being evil vs. good, just because it feels better. But this game is a massive power fantasy that puts you in the role of a Hollywood action movie, and despite the enemy models looking as close to humans as we could get back then, the gameplay broke my sense of reality more than any graphics options could.

From the (awesome-looking) scripted level events (trucks crashing through things, pipes bursting to reveal a new path) to the annoying overly-dramatic dynamic music (which I switched off), the game looks and plays like an Arnie flick, which is generally a good thing. The game is relatively easy on Medium - I'm playing Kingpin on Medium and that's much harder, but in this you can generally walk around the enemies and not be too bothered by their fire, even if they hit you. It took 3 plastique demolition charges to kill me, I pretty much shrugged the first one off. The guys that run around with explosive pressure tanks on their backs play like a carnival gallery after a moment of scorn at the violence of seeing the first one explode.




But the way the game seems to celebrate these moments (including tracking "nether region" hits on your stats page) takes away the last bit of seriousness from it. You have the "skillful non-violent" option of shooting the weapons out of your enemies' hands



and they cower from you and beg not to be killed



with their gun sitting RIGHT AT THEIR FEET



even as you walk past them and continue on your way



which makes me really question their motivation in the first place.

The "limited saves" mechanic is nifty, and I hope it ramps up the difficulty later in the game.

Overall it's a fun shooter so far, the technical innovations of zone-based damage and the animated environments are excellent. I'm not sure how seriously it takes itself - there's the warning on the loading screen and the scrolling !!THIS GAME IS RATED 'MA' FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY!! on the menu screen, but the Hollywood style of action is too well done to not be self-aware.

Yeah, as a counter-strike fan that's definitely the best gun so far. Laser-accurate while moving, which also helps.

 

by the time you get to the really big guns in 'Siberia' you have to be very careful with saves the temptation to save scum is strong but it will backfire later on in this game

 

Played it for 10 minutes on both period correct hardware and a modern pc.

 

what original hardware are you using there in the vid?

 

Almost every component in this PC is from year 1999.

Pentium III 500 Katmai
Matrox G400 Max
Aureal Vortex SQ2500
Microsoft IntelliMouse 1.0

 

Got Soldier of Fortune running on my Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.26-S @ ~1.4Ghz with Nvidia FX5200 @ 303Mhz, I can't find my Microsoft period correct mouse...