Don’t say “school” and “tactical shooter” in the same sentence anymore
Yeah, I was going to say it’s bad timing, but it’s always bad timing here.
The picture in picture scope is a weird design choice. I remember old delta force games, after moving on to rainbow six, ghost recon, or operation flashpoint, not sure why you would go back to that for scopes…
It is genuinely more realistic and tactical because people don’t close one eye while looking through an optic (usually).
But yeah. Hard to convey and they haven’t pulled it off yet. But modern (and historic) Microprose knows how to rev my engine so still very interested.
There’s no good 1-for-1 way to represent it on a screen.
In real life, the entire image in one eye would be the scope, and the other would be everything else. On a monitor with a little scope pop up you have a small image-in-an-image that you’re looking at with both eyes and bouncing back and forth with to the surroundings. Your brain isn’t processing it the same way.
This is a case where i don’t think it is possible to replicate the real experience, but that doing image-in-image is a more annoying choice than others. I’d veto it on being annoying to play with grounds, and do hope what we see in the trailer either doesn’t represent how it works or is an option.
I mean, you also don’t have the entire image “taking up” one eye. Eye relief is very important because even “light” recoil is a black eye if you are right up on that. So you tend to get a weird tunnel vision as you focus but it IS important to be aware of your surroundings. So having a PIP that you look at and look around actually is a pretty good representation of that and probably about as good as we can get without eye tracking to handle focus.
The real issue (aside from fun animations) is that video games very much put point of aim/impact in the center of the screen. By having the optic take up the right side of your screen it either makes a disconnect in where point of aim is or it shifts point of impact when you aim down sight that is inevitably going to “feel bad” to players.
Also there is one screenshot of this being down with iron sights which I think actually wouldn’t work since those are designed around focusing very heavily. But hell if I know and the people I have talked about and seen this kind of stuff with years ago all had optics.
But for a game? I can see a heavily scripted cod sequence where they take advantage of you being focused on the optic so you have a “wow, I looked at the capture footage and it is so cool you can see Glenn Howerton sneaking up on you” moment. But for anything that is not heavily scripted it is mostly poorly focused effort. Which… is the reason I love MicroProse games.
Also we are probably 10-ish yearss out from actually having direct camera feeds for at least the more expensive soldiers. The US (and I think also UK?) is putting some VERY expensive kit and computers in the basic infantry optics. Full augmented reality setups are unlikely to be effective within the next hundred years, but a return to the “future soldier” drop down display for a HUD style deal is increasingly viable and even consumer grade optics are increasingly having ways to get real time video out of what the optic sees.
I personally think it’s a cool way to increase situational awareness while using a scope. Also, being an obvious callback to the old Delta Force games, there’s definitely some nostalgia there. I at the very least hope it’s an option that can be toggled on or off.
But can’t you do that with a scope over the iron site that is not full screen and not blurring the peripheral around the scope on the center? But as a 90s/00s gamer, I did love silent scope on arcades. I get what you mean.
I’m hoping that was done for some sort of misguided “cinematic” reason for the trailer. I caught a moment at 0:50 that looks like full screen scoping in, and then later at 0:54 that looks like a clearly cinematic angle where the scope-in-screen seems visible in the corner.
Is this the same Micropose that made Transport Tycoon in the 90s?
Yes, but I believe they are only a publisher. The actual dev team seems to be a two person operation with a few indie titles under their belt.
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.
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.
But I’ve never seen it done right.
So you don’t like GRAW, Brothers In Arms, or Full Spectrum Warrior. Thats fine. This game is made for people who do.
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.
I really recommended you the 2nd Misson in the Soviet Campaign in CTA Gates of Hell. It took me a good 3 days to get through it but its as close to All Ghillied Up as you can get.
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.
As a guy who still plays those old school FPS games, they’re for me. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Ghost Recon Wildlands, but the og GR with the Heroes Unleashed mod is unmatched. Ready or Not is visceral, but SWAT 4 feels better and has infinitely better AI.
Looks more like Delta force than Delta force.
Yes that new Delta Force game really looks like it is just cashing in on the attitude of modern Rainbow 6 Siege and generic modern military gameplay. Shame.
