We are very close to actually start working on the "online coop campaign / invasion" mode, which will at least partially touch the topics of sidearms, progression and abilities.
A metagame where you yourself are in control of things is a bit troublesome in perspective of RWR, where half the point is that you're not the one pulling the strings. The metagame in the online coop campaign mode, at least to start with, will be simply a linear set of maps that need to be completed - losing a battle will make the battle restart with possibly different initial setting; going through the whole campaign will reshuffle the maps, enemies, whatnot. I'm fairly confident we'll see some variations on maps here, e.g. some of them will be set up as attack/defend maps, regular map battles likely start with player faction only controlling one base and working up from there.
Availability of some resources would be possible to control per map, but not quite sure if it makes sense in the mode I'm mainly talking about here. If a player had been saving up his mortar strike calls over several maps and suddenly he'd find himself in a map that is, let's say, out of reach of the mortars, that wouldn't be very nice, unless he somehow knew about it beforehand.
I still don't think classes will happen in RWR so that you pick a certain type of unit, but it's the items you carry and how you use them what makes your "class" or role. Appearance could be made something to choose or maybe it changes depending on your primary weapon -- with this thinking the engineer tool would consume the slot for primary weapon.
Squad customization would be important in some cases, but how to make setting it up not a burden? I'm having nightmares of a complex menu system where you manage your squad, yuck. You spend 10 minutes doing it only to watch two enemy jeeps drive by and shoot them all dead after you're done with tweaking the squad settings
Maybe scrolling up/down with mouse over a squad member to switch his preferred gear set to something predefined, and they would independently try to gather the items to fill the gaps? Your "first man" would have certain stuff, your "second man" would have something else maybe, and when the first man dies, and the second man becomes the first man, does he swap his gear with the dead man's stuff in order to respect the priorities? The gear choices would probably not be personal to the squad members (as they die, and don't come back as same) but rather mapped to indexes for the squad members. This idea doesn't feel right anyway, just brainstormed it.
To some extent, squad gear sets could be automatically chosen as something that makes sense from the context. E.g. if you've got a suppressed weapon and other stealth gear, it doesn't make sense that your squad has weapons that make the most noise and flashes with brightest lights.
3rd person view mode most likely won't happen, unless there's a way to do 3rd person with a far away camera. Here's the reason why (it doesn't look quite the same like that, does it?

)
http://www.modulaatio.com/runningwithri ... hot175.png