Been done, and didn’t work. Players complained of “Slow weapon upgrades” and “No character progression” and was received poorly, needs more gritty realism.
Or explosions
What’s funny is I know someone with like, 2000 hours in that game. And it just happened to be his favorite fps, nothing to do with the army propaganda.
It’s honestly a solid lane shooter FPS, but it falls flat of the Battlefield killer it could have been. Enough realism and no respawns to make you treat it seriously, but it’s also not ArmA levels of “welp, time to respawn and drive/walk to the objective for 15 minutes”
Plus doing the training unlocks the squad role slots for online play, get that season pass shit outta my face
It’s well balanced, has great level design, and the game mood is serious enough that the scenarios and matches are taken serious too. It’s rare to have someone run in guns blazing for more than a couple matches. Overall, it has a fun gameplay loop that takes itself seriously without being over the top. They know it’s a recruiting tool, so it has to be good enough that folks want to play.
They made the most realistic game and people complained it wasn’t real enough. I will never forget that. And the slow weapon upgrades was because there weren’t any originally. Then you had to complete a stealth mission with one possible path that you had to crawl through for an hour. And the weapons weren’t available on every map.
In many ways the game proved we didn’t want super realism. We wanted fake realism with tactical fashion.
I heard they had to limit people at West Point from playing as all the cadets were learning to shoot first and ask questions later.
Some units did use it as a training tool, but only in conjunction with actual classes and closed matches. So wacky game stuff was very much not allowed. You had to move and fight as a team. For what it’s worth, when I organized some guys to work like a real fireteam the game massively rewarded it in public matches.
For shoot/don’t shoot training without a designated training area (the infamous back 40 of most bases) the Army uses a laser system with compressed air guns. A video plays and you’re expected to interact with it like you would in real life. So there’s a trainer there noting the exact moment you went lethal, if you did the correct de-escalation before hand, and your marksmanship after you start shooting. The scenarios also have branching possibilities so you can’t just recognize which one is which. You actually have to work the problem and hope for the best.
I enjoy a good FPS, even military sim styles like Battlefield, but that also why I wouldn’t join the real military. I enjoy it as a game, a fantasy where none actually get physical injured and everyone goes home at the end of a battle. I’ve seen enough “video game” violence to know I have zero desire to see the real thing or do such things to other people.
Battlefield isn’t a milsim. Aside from the few milsim communites that have existed over the years and mods like Project Reality, Battlefield games were never really the most realistc deptiction of warfare.
