Red Orchestra was born a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. I played it quite a bit back then, when the total numbers of people playing per night was less than a hundred. But, as I’ve said before, I’m a glutton for obscure mods.

The game came out of obscurity somewhat when they worked a deal with Valve to develop a standalone version. The new game was called Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. I didn’t purchase it when it was released, but I did participate in the beta before. The addition of vehicles, and improved physics were nice, and the gameplay only got better. I can’t remember exactly why I wasn’t interested enough to purchase it, so I will blame it on a random MMORPG.

About a year ago I was goaded into finally picking up the game by some CoFRs. While my heart belongs more to PRMM, I have varied my gaming diet with influxes of RO.

As usual, I don’t get to the point of the post right away. Here it is: The Red Orchestra team hosted a contest for custom maps, and the result is a new map pack of 32 maps approved and released. I got mine from fileplanet but the main Red Orchestra site lists some alternative download sites. Fileplanet does have a great writeup on each of the maps in the pack.

These maps look great and the fact that there are so many probably means I will spend time that I should be using to study or code to play all of them.