The Technical Preview for Ground Branch is up for download. Enter the amount of $0 to get it for free. Not much gameplay, but it is supposed to give people an idea of what Ground Branch is aiming for. If you choose you spend $15 or more you will buy into Early Access which will be done from their website. Eventually it will transition to Steam as it becomes more of a game. It will eventually patch into the full game.

http://www.groundbranch.com/store/

For those that were not following Ground Branch over the years, it is a realistic tactical shooter made by a former Red Storm/Rainbow 6 developer. A real tactical shooter which aims to have SP/co-op like the original R6/GR games. Certainly worth taking a look at.

At least unlike Takedown people will see what it is ahead of time.

Of course, Takedown itself seemed like an early access game that was never finished.



The Jedi Master

Agreed. It is still sub par and boring to this day.

Although the Ground Branch Technical Preview isn't much either. You can't really do anything but walk around, shoot, and customize your character/weapons. Later builds will add more content.

Some game footage!

Ground Branch is looking good so far. It will be interesting to see when finished.

My hope is that it becomes a slower-paced, more realistic insurgency on the MP side, with actual coop missions instead of just game modes.

I like insurgency and play it with the guys here, but I get bored with it sometimes. The constant checkpoint clearing and spawning bots. It's realistic in the weapons handling and the damage modeling, but the players/bots are too fast and agile, the bots are too twitchy and accurate, and the maps are too confined depending on the mode.

I think Ground Branch should look at the success Insurgency has had in it's early stages and shoot for some of that while making itself unique by being slower paced and more objective based vs. king of the hill or checkpoint game modes.

Let's face it, Raven Shield in UE4 would almost be perfection.



The Jedi Master

After playing the tech demo and now the early access GB set... I'm loving what I see and looking forward to the future release... but seems like they might be making it more difficult then it really needs to be, sure I want all that realism... and I'm not talking about game difficulty, talking about design and feature list difficulty, but the feature list is too big and too deep... just give us a great tactical shooter just like the yester-year shooters, but improved in every way... not sure if I'm getting my thoughts across, oh well.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling R6 Siege is not going to be what us ol school tactical gamers want, oh sure we will buy it, play it, and enjoy it... but it's not going to be the tactical shooter we're wanting. I'm in hope that Ground Branch will, but I just hope they don't over do it... not sure how to properly compare my thoughts, but IE: ArmA3 is a awesome game... but really, they put so much crap into it... I really wonder how many people use all the "features".

oh well... I'm getting old and grumpy, here's hopeing for the best.

That's how I feel about Arma 3, and DCS, and rFactor, and many sims. There are tons of deep options for things like adjusting spring damping ratios and ammo types and using TACAN to find divert bases, but how many are using those options vs the total number of players?
Is it effort being put in to please the few while features that might please the many are being pushed out?

I like a game that is fun even when you're playing it shallow, that allows you to layer on the sim levels as desired. Take a highly detailed sim and pull them out, in other words put it on god mode with infinite ammo and blasting everything around, how much fun is it? If most of the fun is involved in learning and using the systems, then that implies the rest isn't THAT fun, and that's why these titles appeal to so few.

In short, I think it might be easier to make a fun game more sim-like (look at how many mods for games across all genres do this) than to take a sim and make it more FUN.




The Jedi Master

Thanks for letting us know Flogger.

Downloaded and tried it out, like the feel of it and look forward to more. Can't play it properly though because of no mouse inversion, I literally can not play FPS games without it

COMPLETELY agree Jedi, this is exactly why DCS and Rise of Flight and every other sim becomes so boring to me, once you learn the planes and systems and how to dogfight well, there's so little there to do that is interesting to me besides just going back again and again and kill AI over and over.

I'm not a multiplayer guy, so my hopes is that they just have a solid terrorist hunt style game mode for this game that is playable single player with randomized enemy locations. Other than that I don't really see any features in the game that are just a waste of time being implemented, I use the weapon sight switching all the time in ArmA 3. I don't much see the purpose of raising and lowering your weapon all the time but I can't imagine they wasted a lot of time implementing that.

To be fair in Arma weapon animations for low/high ready are already there for the AI, so all they really did was add in a key for you as a player to do it.

Sight switching is handy, and a very real thing on actual rifles if they're configured for it. A little red dot on a 45 degree angle is sometimes better than shooting 4 yard targets with a 6x scope.

Yes, scopes are only good for distance shots.

Of course, it seems in Arma I'm ALWAYS firing at long distance, plus I disagree with Arma's scaling.

In real life I can see someone 100m away far more easily than a soldier that Arma claims is 100m away. Get to 400m and I'm pixel hunting at 1920x1080 and that's ridiculous. It's almost like the reverse of mistaking ft for meters, where you see 100 and think "oh 100 ft is close" but it's actually 100m. It seems like in Arma things 100m away look as big as things 300m away in reality.
Of course, the AI has no trouble seeing us.



The Jedi Master

Unfortunate drawback of using TV screens, you get the same thing in flight sims. The extreme detail you could see in a real A-10 with your eyeballs isn't even close to what we can simulate in DCS.

I think it's safe to say that with ARMA, if it wasn't as expansive as it is, it'd of been cast aside long ago. The fact that you can drive a truck 10km, disembark and take grenades from said truck, fight off patrols with rifles you can zero, call in artillery, shoot a tank, then set explosives on a compound, while extracting in a helicopter is what makes it so special.

But in the case of Ground Branch, I agree. They don't need all that because they can't hope to compete on that level. GB needs to do several things well. Maps, mission design, weapons handling, and AI. If it does, it can be the more sophisticated man's Insurgency. At worst, it needs to shoot for what America's Army 2.0 was.

The difference is I don't experience this in other FPS that have combat at long range, like Ghost Recon or whatever. It just seems like either the reported scale in Arma is off by a factor of 3 or something or everything in Arma is actually smaller than it should be, so we're all running around like hobbits with hobbit-sized equipment.




The Jedi Master

This is a problem with all games. Typically 100 meters is "long distance" in a game when you have 1920x1080. 200 meters is pretty far, and it tends to be rather difficult to shoot that far. Once you get past that you really need a scope. This is very different from the real world.

Well I doubled down and paid $49 for the Operator's Edition, which includes and enhanced version of the Tech Demo with a few more incomplete maps.

So far, so good, I think. The developers' hearts are definitely in the right place and the guns feel right. I worry a little about whether they will be able to do really good tac-AI. Without that -- it is difficult, time-consuming and has utterly defeated small dev teams in the past -- there can be no R6-style gameplay. I hope they will be in Beta by the end of the year but my gut tells me no. This will require patience.

They almost certainly won't. This game has been in development for what seems like a legitimate decade, it's only a couple guys making slow steady progress.

It is.

When you zoom in while playing ARMA 3, that's closer to real scale. They did this on purpose as a compromise so they could simulate more peripheral vision on the screen while still having the ability to zoom in to a more realistic scale in gun fights.

I remember them giving this explanation in response to people complaining how "unrealistic" it was that you could zoom in.