Developers Offworld Studios have been hard at work on the much-awaited Infantry Combat Overhaul patch for their tactical shooter: Squad. A complete rebalancing of almost all the features available in-game to players, whilst they wade through combat on foot.
Squad, a game that started its life out as the Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2. The game has always had a major focus on player cooperation and communication during gameplay. However, due to it being a fully modern rebuild of the original mod, it has adopted more modern features and as the modern gaming industry moved to focus on more solo playstyles. Ones that reward individual prowess over group cohesion so too has Squad. Much to the frustration of its players who play the game wanting to feel that their group effort matters more than the sum of its parts.
The Infantry Overhaul Patch is designed to correct this shortcoming and with a multitude of features such as differing weapon sway that punishes those looking to run and gun, or its suppression and recoil systems with an aim to make gunfights both slower and more enjoyable.
Offworld Studios has decided to shake off the blisteringly fast and precision awarding gameplay of the modern shooter and has instead focused on a slower-paced and more coordinated experience for their players. The developers have started taking advantage of Squad being entirely player versus player to do so while retaining the chaotic and dynamic nature of matches that Squad is known for.
The most commonly recorded and spoken about feature and also its most visually impressive feature is the new suppression mechanics. It is a system that blurs the edges of the player’s screen whenever they are on the receiving end of sustained or when being too near an explosion. Players were very impressed with the mechanic during the initial playtest, because it may be subtle at first.
The effect forces the player’s vision into a narrow cone, (more so when using one of the game's scopes), which limits the player’s field of view and reduces the in-game sounds, on top of the character twitch and flinching from the hail of bullets and shrapnel.
All of the aforementioned effects may prove to be fatal for the poor unfortunate suppressed players, as they face attack from dozens of angles. The constant threat of unseen opponents is a now major factor, as much like the Arma and Battlefield series, Squad's maps are vast and sprawling environs and very large teams who will be more than happy to turn a difficult experience into a fatal one, well at least in the game that is.
Along with these impressive changes are a slew of smaller adjustments to various features, that an infantry player will now need to take into account during their chaos-filled misadventures through the massive battlefields that Squad has to offer. Reducing the player’s jump height and adding increased fall damage to prevent players from engaging in superhuman leaps to and from buildings. The new way of handling scopes has also been changed in order to prevent long ranged-focused players from being able to instantaneously cut down players that are supposed to have caught them off guard.
All in all, these changes seem to be positively accepted by the game’s player base, as all of these new features and tweaks promise for a slower and more tactical experience to the game. Many players, old and new, are impatiently awaiting the ongoing series of play tests being hosted by the developers on their Discord server to be completed before eagerly hopping into the game to experience all the new features for themselves.
Alex Shelley (@UmbraPone)
News Editor, NoobFeed
| Platform(s): | PC |
| Publisher(s): | Offworld Industries |
| Developer(s): | Offworld Industries |
| Genres: | First-Person Shooter |
| Themes: | Tactical Shooter, Strategy, Simulation, Massively Multiplayer |
| Release Date: | 2015-12-15 |
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