Rewatching this video again after a particularly rough session of Squad trying to play with a friend of mine. We joined a server and a squad and everything was going fine till we finally landed and our squad lead suddenly left and I was inadvertently given squad lead I have played the game and other games like it for over 400 hours and have even done squad lead a bit but trying to coordinate a squad while trying to come up with a plan and command is yelling at you because you are out of place felt like I was working a job and it was not fun to say the least. Edit great video by the way I love your channel and am excited for your next mechwarrior video!!!
13:30 I think this is the strongest point against Squad. Whenever I've tried to pick up Squad, I find myself joining a game, running around for a while with a distracted squad leader, and inevitably spending most of my time messing around with the logi trucks and trying to figure out if the dots on the horizon are friendly or not before I die. After an hour or so I end up playing a comfort game instead, one that I know I can jump in and have a good time with. As I've gotten older, I am less and less interested in sinking time into these types of games where you have long interstitial moments breaking up the actual gameplay, and where minutes of running around and positioning can be immediately undone by a sniper I'll never see or just poor team co-ordination. These games seek to add a deeper experience by increasing the risk of each life/ticket, but to me it's just not a trade I'm willing to participate in anymore. The closest I would get is something like Arma 3 with a dedicated group at a scheduled event, with a Zeus who can respawn people, add and change the scenario, etc to keep things lively. The 'Dungeon Master' comparison you make is apt because it seems like these things work best with the same type of care and coordination that a TTRPG requires. When it works, I'm sure it's glorious. While a lot of people knock Insurgency Sandstorm for being more of an arcade experience than a military simulator, I think it has a better balance of fun and risk, especially in co-op. If Sandstorm had more vehicles and larger maps I think it would be strong competition for Squad. Also I fully agree with you that Squad is not a shooter at heart. The gunplay compared to its peers is frankly boring and shooting at stuff feels like a chore. Love the videos and the obvious time and effort you put into them. First saw your MW5 and MWO videos and was pleasantly surprised to see this one pop up.
Your first paragraph perfectly presents "inefficient fun". If you only have so much time to play alone or with friends, SQUAD isn't a high-confidence sales pitch. As I've gotten older, I want more games *like* SQUAD: I don't want to sweat on an overwatch match. I'm not 16 anymore and don't want to compete against 16 year olds. Unless you're a familiar Squad leader, SQUAD requires such a large time budget to account for the low probability of all the fun factors aligning up. Even if you're a familiar Squad leader, being a squad mate is a ton of fun, too, and those veterans should be afforded that opportunity to follow rather than lead. Sandstorm is an interesting example. It's slower and more about pacing, corner checking, etc, but I find there to be very little "player to player interaction" in the PVP. I can't revive, heal, fix, point, direct, or otherwise coordinate with friends in Sandstorm: it really feels like slower call of duty at times. Co-op, though, tends to be very efficient fun. The gunplay and long list of fun features helps, too. I appreciate the comment and compliments, and I'm even more appreciative you've given my other content a chance. I'll probably end up doing a 50/50 of MechWarrior/Battletech and then variety. The MWO Faction Play video is next.
@@birthdaytruck I actually disagree with this, and this is why some servers don't "pop". Look at the clip in reference, and look down a couple servers. Everyone ignores the 54/99 seed server waiting in queue to get into a full one. If people joined the low pop/seeding servers they would fill relatively quickly. There is ALWAYS a server that is available
Eloquently put as always. I've always really liked the _idea_ of Squad, but I can only imagine the several dozen hours of experience and squadmate dice rolls it'd take to be able to play the game properly and it's just hard to justify the investment.
Man I tried to play it because someone told me if I liked Insurgency I'd like this. When I played it it was so confusing and absolutely a mess to get into I gave up on it an hour in. Hell Let Loose is another similar game to Squad, and I think it solves a LOT of the problems here. Its easier to become a Squad Lead, the gameplay is less ridiculously focused on staring at a map, the aiming is significantly better, its easier to run (though not to say its easy to run), ETC ETC. I recommend picking it up on sale sometime!
Had you found yourself in a sqaud with that familiar or veteran Squad leader, you would have played more than an hours worth and would have come back. hell let loose does feel more accessible in a lot of ways, but I haven't put enough time into to to determine if it's what SQUAD needs.
I made the mistake of trying to get my brother to play once and after 4 hours of back to back little to no fun matches my brother refuses to play again and I can’t blame him.
Had you guys lucked into a squad with a veteran Squad leader, I'm sure you would've enjoyed yourselves more. But that's the issue - 4 hours in and there's always a solid chance you don't find that veteran Squad Leader. It's like signing up for a Dungeons and Dragons session without a Dungeon Master.
A lot of this applies to other Milsim type games too. Hell let loose as another example. While I really enjoy the tactical depth and complexity these games offer, the time spent needed to be in the "Fun zone" for these kinds of games is something i feel worse and worse about spending as i get older, and as other games i enjoy come out. It's hard to justify investing 1-2 hours for 20-30 minutes of 10/10 experience, When i can just pick up any number of other games and just get 1-2 hours of straight enjoyment. But honestly, there's a pretty big drought in fun multiplayer shooters that hit the right balance for me. I'm sick to death of 6v6/ 5v5 moba style shooters ala overwatch or gundam evolution, And battlefield as a franchise has just lost the plot and taken multiple steps backwards in design. Nice vid.
Thank you - I'm glad someone could relate. I've put some time into Hell Let Loose - at face value, it is more accessible and is probably a game I should invest more time into.
"As I get older" indeed. I still have fondness for multiplayer games, especially the high investment ones, but I have largely given up on them. What little time I spend on video games now I prefer to spend on type 1 fun and putting a dent in my impossibly large backlog of games I want to play. Similar issue with sims in general. I love them, but the time requirement…
Hi, everyone! This is my first video since monetization - I have you all to thank! I'm hestitant to shout like, comment, and subscribe, so I'll leave it here: Like, comment, subscribe, and *SHARE*, please! Discord traffic is a fun chunk of traffic, here, and discord is often a good place to talk about a long-form video. The MechWarrior Online Faction Play video is next! Watch my Battlefield video in the meantime.
One of the hardest games to get into for new players, and it has very little to do with mechanics. You need to be patient, check map, and scan for enemies almost constantly. Being able to open the map and quickly determine if what you're looking at is friend or foe is a big first step. When it comes to spotting enemies, you are looking for movement. If you are trying to locate a shooter, you need to listen for the second crack. The first one is the round travelling past you at supersonic speeds, so the second pop will be the actual shooter firing. Once you can get a feel for that you will have a very good idea of what direction to look to find your target. I have almost 2k hours and i'd say the first 150-200 were pretty painful but once you get over that hurdle it's like riding a bike, easy to come back to and very rewarding.
Add in that the community isn't always the most patient with new players as well. I also like to play Simulator Mode on War Thunder and sometimes I feel like some of the simulator players run newbies away because they are angry that they got tkd rather than trying to help them learn the game. Not everybody is gonna sight down and look for minute details so they can tell the difference between friend and foe.
I've been playing since V8... something went wrong after they added tanks and helis (meta wise). And player quality dropped A LOT after ICO (update itself was fine) guys are not willing to listen and learn the game, it seems everyone wants to be master memelord, It gets REALLY tiring...
Regarding the difficulty of aiming at around 9 minutes in your video, that is an user config issue. Set your mouse DPI to a high number like 3200 and adjust in-game sensitivity down in equal ratio(eg. 800 DPI / 1.0 Sens -> 3200 DPI / 0.25 Sens for example). Higher DPI / Lower Sens is better for every game. The Low DPI myth for FPS games is completely bs started by some idiots ages ago for shooters. Your mouse gives far more accurate mouse movements at higher DPI, you can think of it as a hair comb with very large spaced out teeth(low DPI) vs very small teeth close together(High DPI), the comb with a lot of teeth close together allows you to make much finer adjustments.
Well, you were right. There's still some resistance and clunk issues I'm dealing with, but the high DPI low sens option seems to have addressed it. It makes the menus wild, but testing at 0.01 sens and the highest DPI I could make it work.
Coming from a military background, with a lot of military friends, Squad wasn't that hard of a sell for me. Sometimes we would have enough people to fill up our own Squad. And we have one guy who likes being squad lead. We even had times where maybe it was just the two of us, but we would both be squad leads and work together more like a Squad supporting another Squad instead of doing everything by Teams. Squad is one of those games where if you have the time, you can create a lot of meaningful memories. But its also very frustrating. Much like Foxhole.
Foxhole is an interesting reference: I bought it not too long ago and intend to invest some time. How was your experienced trying to get your interested friends in the same group together to play?
@@birthdaytruck Never really had to try and sell it to them. Most of the friends I played squad with were already tracking it when I brought it up. And most of us have had the game since it came out. If I did have to try selling it I would probably say its like a "Hardcore Battlefield. Its lays somewhere between ARMA and Battlefield." Hell some of these friends I've had since BF2 was the big thing. So trying to find the same server and trying to get on the same team wasn't anything new to us... For sure its outdated but still not as outdated as going to multiplayer and typing in an IP address. Also all being Military the things that happen in Squad is already kinda what were used too. Hurry up, get here, nothing fuckin happens, fuck around until something does. Organized Chaos happens. Back to fucking around. I do think Squad would benefit from with a Commander Role were their primary role is to coordinate the team rather than having a bunch of random Squad Leads expect the other Squad leads to know what happening. Oh, and a heads up with Foxhole (unless the devs have changed things around) Everything in that game is sourced, produced, and transported by players. Nothing is done with AI. Its been a while since I've paid attention to Foxhole now but last I heard there was a Logi strike going on in the game and the since a lot of players who usually get stuck playing Logi are on strike some front line units were running out of bandages, ammunition, and even rifles.
I haven't, no, but I put a LOT of hours into regular Battlefield 2. A lot of folk have asked, from my BF2 and this video, to cover Project Reality. I just haven't had enough time in it to warrant a video on it.
time and time again It's been shown as impossible to make a game about war without depicting war as "fun" so SQUAD doesn't try to be fun to begin with. There's this quote I can't for the life of me find that explains something to the effect of war being all encompassing boredom until your buddies get rudely awoken by artillery fire and screaming, SQUAD IS this aside from the screaming because its a piece of software and not an actual live conflict. For a "game" derived from an old battlefield 2 mod, SQUAD bares more resemblance to ARMA than it does to other large scale interactive war vignettes like battlefield or planetside. it's appearance on steam inherently advertises it to an audience that will bounce right off of it as SQUAD is not a true "video game" in the sense we know, it bares more resemblance to a piece of military simulation software, the kind that actual world militaries would license as virtual training tools for actual troopers. not quite as large scale as ARMA but certainly its damn close to the same level of depth. The problem is that SQUAD is looking for players rather than licensees, it shouldn't be available to the public to begin with.
After watching through this, the game kind of reminds me of Hell Let Loose - but Hell Let Loose I think does it all better. Have you considered convincing your friends to play that? It would be interesting to see what you think of it.
28:07 As a Squad vet, seeing you spawn on a very far away HAB, only to walk all the way back towards your uncontested and non-overran attack HAB on the middle of Mutaha 1000m away looks incredibly disingenuous. You may not have meant it to seem like that but ranting about Squads downtimes while fast forwarding through seemingly self-inflicted downtime confused me. All in all, decent video though
I could have used a Squad vet with me to tell me what to do and where to go. In that particular instance, I had no idea where else to spawn. I can assure you - that was genuinely the closet spawn available to me. You'll also have to understand: footage isn't always gathered when the player is "trying".
@@birthdaytruck I guess that makes sense since OWI doesn't even have a proper tutorial on how to read the map or any of the items on it. OWI really needs a forced tutorial of some kind
Rewatching this video again after a particularly rough session of Squad trying to play with a friend of mine. We joined a server and a squad and everything was going fine till we finally landed and our squad lead suddenly left and I was inadvertently given squad lead I have played the game and other games like it for over 400 hours and have even done squad lead a bit but trying to coordinate a squad while trying to come up with a plan and command is yelling at you because you are out of place felt like I was working a job and it was not fun to say the least. Edit great video by the way I love your channel and am excited for your next mechwarrior video!!!
13:30 I think this is the strongest point against Squad.
Whenever I've tried to pick up Squad, I find myself joining a game, running around for a while with a distracted squad leader, and inevitably spending most of my time messing around with the logi trucks and trying to figure out if the dots on the horizon are friendly or not before I die. After an hour or so I end up playing a comfort game instead, one that I know I can jump in and have a good time with.
As I've gotten older, I am less and less interested in sinking time into these types of games where you have long interstitial moments breaking up the actual gameplay, and where minutes of running around and positioning can be immediately undone by a sniper I'll never see or just poor team co-ordination. These games seek to add a deeper experience by increasing the risk of each life/ticket, but to me it's just not a trade I'm willing to participate in anymore. The closest I would get is something like Arma 3 with a dedicated group at a scheduled event, with a Zeus who can respawn people, add and change the scenario, etc to keep things lively. The 'Dungeon Master' comparison you make is apt because it seems like these things work best with the same type of care and coordination that a TTRPG requires. When it works, I'm sure it's glorious.
While a lot of people knock Insurgency Sandstorm for being more of an arcade experience than a military simulator, I think it has a better balance of fun and risk, especially in co-op. If Sandstorm had more vehicles and larger maps I think it would be strong competition for Squad.
Also I fully agree with you that Squad is not a shooter at heart. The gunplay compared to its peers is frankly boring and shooting at stuff feels like a chore.
Love the videos and the obvious time and effort you put into them. First saw your MW5 and MWO videos and was pleasantly surprised to see this one pop up.
Your first paragraph perfectly presents "inefficient fun". If you only have so much time to play alone or with friends, SQUAD isn't a high-confidence sales pitch.
As I've gotten older, I want more games *like* SQUAD: I don't want to sweat on an overwatch match. I'm not 16 anymore and don't want to compete against 16 year olds. Unless you're a familiar Squad leader, SQUAD requires such a large time budget to account for the low probability of all the fun factors aligning up.
Even if you're a familiar Squad leader, being a squad mate is a ton of fun, too, and those veterans should be afforded that opportunity to follow rather than lead.
Sandstorm is an interesting example. It's slower and more about pacing, corner checking, etc, but I find there to be very little "player to player interaction" in the PVP. I can't revive, heal, fix, point, direct, or otherwise coordinate with friends in Sandstorm: it really feels like slower call of duty at times. Co-op, though, tends to be very efficient fun. The gunplay and long list of fun features helps, too.
I appreciate the comment and compliments, and I'm even more appreciative you've given my other content a chance. I'll probably end up doing a 50/50 of MechWarrior/Battletech and then variety.
The MWO Faction Play video is next.
@@birthdaytruck I actually disagree with this, and this is why some servers don't "pop". Look at the clip in reference, and look down a couple servers. Everyone ignores the 54/99 seed server waiting in queue to get into a full one. If people joined the low pop/seeding servers they would fill relatively quickly. There is ALWAYS a server that is available
Eloquently put as always. I've always really liked the _idea_ of Squad, but I can only imagine the several dozen hours of experience and squadmate dice rolls it'd take to be able to play the game properly and it's just hard to justify the investment.
Man I tried to play it because someone told me if I liked Insurgency I'd like this.
When I played it it was so confusing and absolutely a mess to get into I gave up on it an hour in.
Hell Let Loose is another similar game to Squad, and I think it solves a LOT of the problems here. Its easier to become a Squad Lead, the gameplay is less ridiculously focused on staring at a map, the aiming is significantly better, its easier to run (though not to say its easy to run), ETC ETC.
I recommend picking it up on sale sometime!
Had you found yourself in a sqaud with that familiar or veteran Squad leader, you would have played more than an hours worth and would have come back.
hell let loose does feel more accessible in a lot of ways, but I haven't put enough time into to to determine if it's what SQUAD needs.
I made the mistake of trying to get my brother to play once and after 4 hours of back to back little to no fun matches my brother refuses to play again and I can’t blame him.
Had you guys lucked into a squad with a veteran Squad leader, I'm sure you would've enjoyed yourselves more. But that's the issue - 4 hours in and there's always a solid chance you don't find that veteran Squad Leader.
It's like signing up for a Dungeons and Dragons session without a Dungeon Master.
A lot of this applies to other Milsim type games too. Hell let loose as another example.
While I really enjoy the tactical depth and complexity these games offer, the time spent needed to be in the "Fun zone" for these kinds of games is something i feel worse and worse about spending as i get older, and as other games i enjoy come out. It's hard to justify investing 1-2 hours for 20-30 minutes of 10/10 experience, When i can just pick up any number of other games and just get 1-2 hours of straight enjoyment.
But honestly, there's a pretty big drought in fun multiplayer shooters that hit the right balance for me. I'm sick to death of 6v6/ 5v5 moba style shooters ala overwatch or gundam evolution, And battlefield as a franchise has just lost the plot and taken multiple steps backwards in design.
Nice vid.
Thank you - I'm glad someone could relate. I've put some time into Hell Let Loose - at face value, it is more accessible and is probably a game I should invest more time into.
"As I get older" indeed. I still have fondness for multiplayer games, especially the high investment ones, but I have largely given up on them. What little time I spend on video games now I prefer to spend on type 1 fun and putting a dent in my impossibly large backlog of games I want to play. Similar issue with sims in general. I love them, but the time requirement…
Hi, everyone! This is my first video since monetization - I have you all to thank! I'm hestitant to shout like, comment, and subscribe, so I'll leave it here:
Like, comment, subscribe, and *SHARE*, please! Discord traffic is a fun chunk of traffic, here, and discord is often a good place to talk about a long-form video.
The MechWarrior Online Faction Play video is next! Watch my Battlefield video in the meantime.
One of the hardest games to get into for new players, and it has very little to do with mechanics. You need to be patient, check map, and scan for enemies almost constantly. Being able to open the map and quickly determine if what you're looking at is friend or foe is a big first step. When it comes to spotting enemies, you are looking for movement. If you are trying to locate a shooter, you need to listen for the second crack. The first one is the round travelling past you at supersonic speeds, so the second pop will be the actual shooter firing. Once you can get a feel for that you will have a very good idea of what direction to look to find your target. I have almost 2k hours and i'd say the first 150-200 were pretty painful but once you get over that hurdle it's like riding a bike, easy to come back to and very rewarding.
Add in that the community isn't always the most patient with new players as well. I also like to play Simulator Mode on War Thunder and sometimes I feel like some of the simulator players run newbies away because they are angry that they got tkd rather than trying to help them learn the game. Not everybody is gonna sight down and look for minute details so they can tell the difference between friend and foe.
What I didn't include in my SQUAD video was another attempt at squad leading where I was instantly (lightly) bullied for trying to get a comms check.
I've been playing since V8... something went wrong after they added tanks and helis (meta wise). And player quality dropped A LOT after ICO (update itself was fine) guys are not willing to listen and learn the game, it seems everyone wants to be master memelord, It gets REALLY tiring...
Regarding the difficulty of aiming at around 9 minutes in your video, that is an user config issue.
Set your mouse DPI to a high number like 3200 and adjust in-game sensitivity down in equal ratio(eg. 800 DPI / 1.0 Sens -> 3200 DPI / 0.25 Sens for example).
Higher DPI / Lower Sens is better for every game. The Low DPI myth for FPS games is completely bs started by some idiots ages ago for shooters.
Your mouse gives far more accurate mouse movements at higher DPI, you can think of it as a hair comb with very large spaced out teeth(low DPI) vs very small teeth close together(High DPI), the comb with a lot of teeth close together allows you to make much finer adjustments.
I'm going to give this adjustment a try: if it solves the jumping issue, I will report back. That solves lots of headaches.
Well, you were right. There's still some resistance and clunk issues I'm dealing with, but the high DPI low sens option seems to have addressed it. It makes the menus wild, but testing at 0.01 sens and the highest DPI I could make it work.
26:51 true! *adachi scroll*
Hah - are you agreeing that I should design video games? Because I shouldn't: I should complain about them years after release.
Good video and you explained your points very nicely.
Yooooo, lets go. Saving this video for latter. Have not played the game, but probably will still enjoy the video
Coming from a military background, with a lot of military friends, Squad wasn't that hard of a sell for me. Sometimes we would have enough people to fill up our own Squad. And we have one guy who likes being squad lead. We even had times where maybe it was just the two of us, but we would both be squad leads and work together more like a Squad supporting another Squad instead of doing everything by Teams. Squad is one of those games where if you have the time, you can create a lot of meaningful memories. But its also very frustrating. Much like Foxhole.
Foxhole is an interesting reference: I bought it not too long ago and intend to invest some time.
How was your experienced trying to get your interested friends in the same group together to play?
@@birthdaytruck Never really had to try and sell it to them. Most of the friends I played squad with were already tracking it when I brought it up. And most of us have had the game since it came out. If I did have to try selling it I would probably say its like a "Hardcore Battlefield. Its lays somewhere between ARMA and Battlefield." Hell some of these friends I've had since BF2 was the big thing. So trying to find the same server and trying to get on the same team wasn't anything new to us... For sure its outdated but still not as outdated as going to multiplayer and typing in an IP address.
Also all being Military the things that happen in Squad is already kinda what were used too. Hurry up, get here, nothing fuckin happens, fuck around until something does. Organized Chaos happens. Back to fucking around. I do think Squad would benefit from with a Commander Role were their primary role is to coordinate the team rather than having a bunch of random Squad Leads expect the other Squad leads to know what happening.
Oh, and a heads up with Foxhole (unless the devs have changed things around) Everything in that game is sourced, produced, and transported by players. Nothing is done with AI. Its been a while since I've paid attention to Foxhole now but last I heard there was a Logi strike going on in the game and the since a lot of players who usually get stuck playing Logi are on strike some front line units were running out of bandages, ammunition, and even rifles.
very great explanation of why i don't share star citizen with my friends.
Just found this channel, live the content. Also the userpic evokes a lot of nostalgia in me, since I grew up on Soviet cartoons.
You're, perhaps, the first commenter recognizing the userpic. The "true" Birthday Truck.
@@AR_P71 Cheburashka is timeless classic. Very kind and pure cartoon.
Have you tried Project Reality? The game SQUAD is based on.
I haven't, no, but I put a LOT of hours into regular Battlefield 2. A lot of folk have asked, from my BF2 and this video, to cover Project Reality. I just haven't had enough time in it to warrant a video on it.
time and time again It's been shown as impossible to make a game about war without depicting war as "fun" so SQUAD doesn't try to be fun to begin with.
There's this quote I can't for the life of me find that explains something to the effect of war being all encompassing boredom until your buddies get rudely awoken by artillery fire and screaming, SQUAD IS this aside from the screaming because its a piece of software and not an actual live conflict.
For a "game" derived from an old battlefield 2 mod, SQUAD bares more resemblance to ARMA than it does to other large scale interactive war vignettes like battlefield or planetside. it's appearance on steam inherently advertises it to an audience that will bounce right off of it as SQUAD is not a true "video game" in the sense we know, it bares more resemblance to a piece of military simulation software, the kind that actual world militaries would license as virtual training tools for actual troopers. not quite as large scale as ARMA but certainly its damn close to the same level of depth. The problem is that SQUAD is looking for players rather than licensees, it shouldn't be available to the public to begin with.
After watching through this, the game kind of reminds me of Hell Let Loose - but Hell Let Loose I think does it all better. Have you considered convincing your friends to play that? It would be interesting to see what you think of it.
28:07 As a Squad vet, seeing you spawn on a very far away HAB, only to walk all the way back towards your uncontested and non-overran attack HAB on the middle of Mutaha 1000m away looks incredibly disingenuous. You may not have meant it to seem like that but ranting about Squads downtimes while fast forwarding through seemingly self-inflicted downtime confused me. All in all, decent video though
I could have used a Squad vet with me to tell me what to do and where to go. In that particular instance, I had no idea where else to spawn. I can assure you - that was genuinely the closet spawn available to me.
You'll also have to understand: footage isn't always gathered when the player is "trying".
@@birthdaytruck I guess that makes sense since OWI doesn't even have a proper tutorial on how to read the map or any of the items on it. OWI really needs a forced tutorial of some kind
Have you tried playing on an SSD?
Looks like nothing changed since Project Reality days.
Project Reality but for zoomers.