While I see that nothing like this currently exists on the market, I can kind of see why. The reason old school shooters look and play like they do is because of technical limitations. There’s a reason new Ghost Recon games don’t look like Ghost Recon 1 anymore, even if Ghost Recon 1 is still available and playable today. And if you’re interested in ultra janky gameplay, we have Arma 3. I just don’t understand who this game is for exactly.
Old school milsims actually were pushing the tech envelope. Novalogic were the kings of it and went all in on voxels for good or for bad (mostly bad). And it let them do VERY large worlds with a lot of entities being actively simulated at once with an art style that could run on hardware of the era.
And even the OFP/ArmA era were similarly beasts of games that mostly just took advantage of uniforms (that thing soldiers wore before cod and battlefield decided they wanted to sell skins) to reduce the textures that needed to be in memory.
The reason newer Ghost Recons don’t actually play like Ghost Recons is that they aren’t actually milsims anymore. They are movie sims. They want you to feel like you are Jim from The Office getting froggy with all the terries. You can see the same with the Rainbow Six games where they went from tactical room clearing to fighting off hundreds of terries in a single small house in Vegas (good game) to outright not even having pve anymore in Siege.
Which is the same reason Battlefield keeps trying to make people think it isn’t a Battlefield game whereas cod increasingly tries to become one. Major studios make games that sell well by remaking games that sold well.
Which is why publishers like MicroProse (modern and historic) are awesome. They make games that others aren’t making or that others aren’t doing a good job of. Sometimes that is a ridiculously complex mech game that nobody understands and other times you get something like High Fleet that is almost universally praised for its accessibility and style while also being streamer candy for the ones who try it.
But, at the end of the day: Just because a game isn’t made for you doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made.
For people who want FPS single player, squad control games. The choices are really original Ghost Recon, GRAW, Brothers In Arms, and kinda-sorta Full Spectrum Warrior.
Arma is more open ended. There is a niche for a game that is out of the box squad control with missions designed around it.
Sure you can tell people to keep replaying those old games over and over, but new entries into the genre would be nice. The graphics of this new game are a mix of indie game devs knowing their limitations and appealing to original GR era nostalgia.
I’ve played all the games you mentioned and I am a huge fan of squad control games. I’ve recently looked through Steam games with tags “single player” and "shooter"most recent titles are primarily arcade style shooters.
One thing I’ve noticed while playing CTA Gates of Hell is that no AI, whether friendly or not has ever had any sense of self preservation, and this is true for any game. So what ends up happening is, you as a player always end up babysitting your AI. You expect a squad full of capable soldiers, but end up having one capable one and a punch of crayon eating babies. That’s why most modern titles cheat with their friendly AI, making them immortal, invisible, teleporting them and giving then wall hacks. I’ve mostly given on the Idea that a squad control game can have satisfying AI interaction. If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.
It sounds like you specifically don’t like the sub-genre as a whole. Thats perfectly fine, but can you accept that there are people who do like these games? I mean clearly, since those older titles still have fans those people exist. That is the audience for this game.
Quite the contrary, I love this subgenre more than any other one regarding shooters. But I’ve never seen it done right. If you know any game that doesn’t end in frustration about the AI, please tell me.
I’m more than OK with micromanagement in games, but that’s not how it should work in shooters. Men of War is a good example, it’s a strategy series with a notorious amount of micromanagement, but the difference is, you get all the information needed to manage your units and you as a player are not part of the battlefield. No enemy unit can look up in the sky and shoot down your birds-eye camera. But in shooters, not only do you have limited information about your enemies and your own team, you can also be killed during micromanagement. This is not how it should work. Your friendlies being a little bit more pro active is the least one could ask for.
Like imagine you storm Osama’s hideout and every time your soldiers have to ask you - the captain if its OK to shoot the terrorist in the room, or if its OK to move onto the next room, or its OK to take cover, that’s how it feels.
And because you’re essentially responsible for every single action of your team, you also feel responsible for every single mishap, whether it actually was your fault or not.
Also modern shooters themselves have already fairly demanding controls, pairing that with the ability to command different units means compromises have to be made in user experience. Your commands are usually limited by line of sight, you can’t tell your units to advance behind this wall and search for cover. Arma 3 tries to address this issue with the “Command Mode” that let’s you zoom out the camera to a birds-eye view, but that’s essentially what a strategy game is anyway. You also can’t command multiple squad simultaneously, each squad needs separate attention, while the AI computer can do everything at once, putting you even more at a disadvantage.
Developers also rarely bother implementing actual military techniques. The only 2 examples I can think of are Arma 3s combat advance (half the units cover, the other half moves) or Ready or Not’s room clearing. What ends up happening is, people just take 4 machine gunners with scopes or 4 snipers, since all units essentially behave the same AI wise, there no downside to that.
In my opinion a squad control game should essentially play itself, meaning that if your character dies, the rest of your AI should be smart enough to finish the mission or at least retreat on their own, just like a real squad would if their commander dies. The challenge shouldn’t come from janky controls or cheating AI, it should come from having the odds stacked against you. The goal shouldn’t be to just finish the mission, but have everybody come out alive. A lot of those games become almost trivial, if you just leave the AI at spawn and run through the mission yourself.
If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.
Yeah, that’s what I’m here for. Another way to look at it is this: remember how much “All Ghillied Up” wowed people when they showed it off at E3, and then again when people got to play it? I wanted to be the guy telling the player what to do, not just following a series of instructions. You’re right that when a game like Wildlands has to resort to wallhacks, there’s a lot of satisfaction that evaporates with it, and that’s why there might be a market for a game made the old-school way.
While I see that nothing like this currently exists on the market, I can kind of see why. The reason old school shooters look and play like they do is because of technical limitations. There’s a reason new Ghost Recon games don’t look like Ghost Recon 1 anymore, even if Ghost Recon 1 is still available and playable today. And if you’re interested in ultra janky gameplay, we have Arma 3. I just don’t understand who this game is for exactly.
That is wrong on many many levels.
Old school milsims actually were pushing the tech envelope. Novalogic were the kings of it and went all in on voxels for good or for bad (mostly bad). And it let them do VERY large worlds with a lot of entities being actively simulated at once with an art style that could run on hardware of the era.
And even the OFP/ArmA era were similarly beasts of games that mostly just took advantage of uniforms (that thing soldiers wore before cod and battlefield decided they wanted to sell skins) to reduce the textures that needed to be in memory.
The reason newer Ghost Recons don’t actually play like Ghost Recons is that they aren’t actually milsims anymore. They are movie sims. They want you to feel like you are Jim from The Office getting froggy with all the terries. You can see the same with the Rainbow Six games where they went from tactical room clearing to fighting off hundreds of terries in a single small house in Vegas (good game) to outright not even having pve anymore in Siege.
Which is the same reason Battlefield keeps trying to make people think it isn’t a Battlefield game whereas cod increasingly tries to become one. Major studios make games that sell well by remaking games that sold well.
Which is why publishers like MicroProse (modern and historic) are awesome. They make games that others aren’t making or that others aren’t doing a good job of. Sometimes that is a ridiculously complex mech game that nobody understands and other times you get something like High Fleet that is almost universally praised for its accessibility and style while also being streamer candy for the ones who try it.
But, at the end of the day: Just because a game isn’t made for you doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made.
Me. This game is for me. The desire for this has nothing to do with desiring “ultra janky gameplay”, and I’ve already played Ghost Recon 1.
For people who want FPS single player, squad control games. The choices are really original Ghost Recon, GRAW, Brothers In Arms, and kinda-sorta Full Spectrum Warrior.
Arma is more open ended. There is a niche for a game that is out of the box squad control with missions designed around it.
Sure you can tell people to keep replaying those old games over and over, but new entries into the genre would be nice. The graphics of this new game are a mix of indie game devs knowing their limitations and appealing to original GR era nostalgia.
I’ve played all the games you mentioned and I am a huge fan of squad control games. I’ve recently looked through Steam games with tags “single player” and "shooter"most recent titles are primarily arcade style shooters. One thing I’ve noticed while playing CTA Gates of Hell is that no AI, whether friendly or not has ever had any sense of self preservation, and this is true for any game. So what ends up happening is, you as a player always end up babysitting your AI. You expect a squad full of capable soldiers, but end up having one capable one and a punch of crayon eating babies. That’s why most modern titles cheat with their friendly AI, making them immortal, invisible, teleporting them and giving then wall hacks. I’ve mostly given on the Idea that a squad control game can have satisfying AI interaction. If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.
It sounds like you specifically don’t like the sub-genre as a whole. Thats perfectly fine, but can you accept that there are people who do like these games? I mean clearly, since those older titles still have fans those people exist. That is the audience for this game.
Quite the contrary, I love this subgenre more than any other one regarding shooters. But I’ve never seen it done right. If you know any game that doesn’t end in frustration about the AI, please tell me.
I’m more than OK with micromanagement in games, but that’s not how it should work in shooters. Men of War is a good example, it’s a strategy series with a notorious amount of micromanagement, but the difference is, you get all the information needed to manage your units and you as a player are not part of the battlefield. No enemy unit can look up in the sky and shoot down your birds-eye camera. But in shooters, not only do you have limited information about your enemies and your own team, you can also be killed during micromanagement. This is not how it should work. Your friendlies being a little bit more pro active is the least one could ask for.
Like imagine you storm Osama’s hideout and every time your soldiers have to ask you - the captain if its OK to shoot the terrorist in the room, or if its OK to move onto the next room, or its OK to take cover, that’s how it feels.
And because you’re essentially responsible for every single action of your team, you also feel responsible for every single mishap, whether it actually was your fault or not.
Also modern shooters themselves have already fairly demanding controls, pairing that with the ability to command different units means compromises have to be made in user experience. Your commands are usually limited by line of sight, you can’t tell your units to advance behind this wall and search for cover. Arma 3 tries to address this issue with the “Command Mode” that let’s you zoom out the camera to a birds-eye view, but that’s essentially what a strategy game is anyway. You also can’t command multiple squad simultaneously, each squad needs separate attention, while the AI computer can do everything at once, putting you even more at a disadvantage.
Developers also rarely bother implementing actual military techniques. The only 2 examples I can think of are Arma 3s combat advance (half the units cover, the other half moves) or Ready or Not’s room clearing. What ends up happening is, people just take 4 machine gunners with scopes or 4 snipers, since all units essentially behave the same AI wise, there no downside to that.
In my opinion a squad control game should essentially play itself, meaning that if your character dies, the rest of your AI should be smart enough to finish the mission or at least retreat on their own, just like a real squad would if their commander dies. The challenge shouldn’t come from janky controls or cheating AI, it should come from having the odds stacked against you. The goal shouldn’t be to just finish the mission, but have everybody come out alive. A lot of those games become almost trivial, if you just leave the AI at spawn and run through the mission yourself.
So you don’t like GRAW, Brothers In Arms, or Full Spectrum Warrior. Thats fine. This game is made for people who do.
Yeah, that’s what I’m here for. Another way to look at it is this: remember how much “All Ghillied Up” wowed people when they showed it off at E3, and then again when people got to play it? I wanted to be the guy telling the player what to do, not just following a series of instructions. You’re right that when a game like Wildlands has to resort to wallhacks, there’s a lot of satisfaction that evaporates with it, and that’s why there might be a market for a game made the old-school way.