Play with Real RTCW as first experience?

[NickelZach]

I've never played Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Should I play vanilla or is real rtcw a straight upgrade?

[WolfETPlayer]

Depends on what you want. For pure classic experience go for the vanilla with iortcw source port.
For slightly upgraded experience with fancier graphics,sounds and new weapons go for the realrtcw.

[VVanTuz2OO2]

Originally posted by NickelZach:

I've never played Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Should I play vanilla or is real rtcw a straight upgrade?

If you really don't like old graphics, sounds, and experience, then you should. But you also need to keep eye on that thing, that it may be content non-vanilla gameplay elements. Also installing mod can be more difficult, so make it on your own risk.

Also I recommend to complete first Mission (4 chapters), and then try to accomplish the same missions in RealRtCW, and after all make the decision which one version you liked more.

[Kritzburgh]

You can't go wrong with either. If you go with vanilla, I'd definitely get the ioRTCW sourceport that way you can play with widescreen support and at a native resolution.
One other note is that if you go with the RealRTCW mod route, it is built on the ioRTCW sourceport already, so you don't have to install ioRTCW prior to installing RealRTCW.

[Kritzburgh]

And one other amendment. If you feel like you're having FPS problems with either, type the following 3 commands into your console.

/r_primitives 2
/seta com_maxfps 144
/cl_renderer opengl1

The last one, especially, is useful because at the highest quality graphics settings, ioRTCW will switch to a new renderer called rend2, which, unless you have a top notch PC, you'll definitely notice your FPS tank.