Ground Branch, will this game revive the tactical squad based genre?
polycounter lvl 7
I was playing the good old rainbow six and swat 4 lately and noted that this genre basicaly died. Rainbow six kinda dumbed down the " highly tactical and simulation " side to focus it self on storytelling and a more arcadish gameplay. Swat 4 unfortunatly died.
there was ghost recon, but ghost recon 2 unfortunatly followed another path, and since then well ghost recon isn't really the simultion game the 1st was.
The closest to a squad based game that existe today is arma 3 but it is closer to a military simulation than a tactical squade game.
Well lately I found this game named Ground Branch, made by an indie studio withe the lead designer of the first rainbow six and ghost recon at it's head, and I was quite pleased by what the little they were showing.
this video is from last year kickstart ( unfortunatly they failed to meet the necessary found raising )
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ju66BqaUr4"]Ground Branch Kickstarter v2 - YouTube[/ame]
Lately they announced that they were switching to Unreal engine 4 for the engine of the game. they also released a teaser for the kickstarter coming january 2014
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1DZqrIq2BI"]Ground Branch KS Teaser 1 - YouTube[/ame]
I don't know if there are any old school rainbow six, swat or ghost recon player here, but what do you think about it?
there was ghost recon, but ghost recon 2 unfortunatly followed another path, and since then well ghost recon isn't really the simultion game the 1st was.
The closest to a squad based game that existe today is arma 3 but it is closer to a military simulation than a tactical squade game.
Well lately I found this game named Ground Branch, made by an indie studio withe the lead designer of the first rainbow six and ghost recon at it's head, and I was quite pleased by what the little they were showing.
this video is from last year kickstart ( unfortunatly they failed to meet the necessary found raising )
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ju66BqaUr4"]Ground Branch Kickstarter v2 - YouTube[/ame]Lately they announced that they were switching to Unreal engine 4 for the engine of the game. they also released a teaser for the kickstarter coming january 2014
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1DZqrIq2BI"]Ground Branch KS Teaser 1 - YouTube[/ame]I don't know if there are any old school rainbow six, swat or ghost recon player here, but what do you think about it?
Replies
that's exactly it.
In a game like this, there are two main things to take in to account. There's the game, but more importantly there's the player. Any time you're talking tactics, you're talking thinking, and thus talking about the player. A fairly good example of that would be Quake3:
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Which is a very simple game, but because of the players learning the map, knowing the times, and even knowing the most common routes other players take, it becomes an immensely deep tactical game. Sure twitch skill is still a very large element, but it's nothing if you play just reactionary.
In short, my point is that you don't need a complex game to have a tactical game. What you need is a slow-ish game where you have a bit of time to think, and where mistakes are costly. This is what promotes well thought out approaches, not a large variety of guns and skills.
I really miss the days where you played thos games with a team " IN TEAM ". the experience was priceless. I'm hungry for a good tactical squad game.
This generation got none what a shame.
I miss this:
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CS is a tactical game, you use a ton of teamwork, you need map knowledge, you need weapon knowledge, you need to know how the physics of the game will affect factors such as your jumping and grenade tosses, the list goes on and on.
Compare that to a game like CoD, which only requires you to have map knowledge and knowledge of the equipment to be successful (in addition to game sense, but every competitive game requires that.)
Counter-Strike is one of the most popular tactical games out there right now, and even then it isn't very popular anymore, 1.6 and CSS both have communities that get smaller every year, CZ might as well not exist, and everybody is playing CSGO. Then go ahead and look at the CSGO community, Valve gave a statistic a while back, but something like 60-70% of the people playing CSGO are playing Casual mode exclusively, if you've played Casual you'll know that it's a strategy-less clusterfuck.
Then the player base gets split further with the other modes, and finally you're left with maybe 30% of the community playing competitive mode which actually requires all of those factors I listed before. In addition to that, very few people play on ESEA compared to the past (because of the introduction of MM), and altpug and leetway are almost nonexistent as well.
Generally speaking, most people nowadays just want a game they can pick up and automatically be good at. I know people that claim to love shooters, but then they don't play any FPS other than CoD for more than 5 minutes because they don't want to learn the new mechanics. Additionally, the devs of CoD intentionally don't make changes because they know most of their fanbase consists of people who hate gameplay change. I remember when that Activision spokesperson had to tell people to shut up because gamers were threatening Treyarch over a patch that slightly increased the draw time of one of the sniper rifles.
Personally I play an incredibly wide variety of games and I really miss the tactical genre because the only way for me to get a tactical fix now would be to either play quake live (which I've played to death) or to play CSGO (which is a hacker infested shit hole right now.)
we've still got arma but it's a difference of scale, arma generally takes place on larger battlefields with larger groups of combatants and usually involves vehicles.
obviously these things have more of a niche appeal but it seems like these days it's much easier for independent companies to create lower-budget games that target a niche, so, i for one hope this game is successful.
there was a recent kickstarter game in this genre called takedown: red sabre which seemed promising but was a little rough around the edges on release.
What I liked with Ground branch is that they want it to have some nice little detail Like opening a door with the tip of the weapon for exemple.
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me can't wait.