Well… I have no idea what you mean by overrealism.
Off the top of my head, the most comparable in scope to Battlefield, in that they include vehicles and larger numbers of players than say 16 v 16, are Squad and Arma 2/3.
Arma 3 still has fairly clunky controls compared to basically every other FPS, though its far improved from Arma 1 and 2 days. Theres also lots of mods and communities that do organized events, as in general random public play does not really work.
Arma Reforger is the hot new Arma, but as far as I can tell its basically still an early release / alpha / ironing out the core engine bugs.
Squad I find to be basically the best currently existing middle ground between the silly problems of the BF series, without going as full bore on realism that Arma does, and generally has much better handling, less clunky controls, far less needing to learn and customize a wide variety of keyboard commands.
You may find either one or both of these as over realistic, again im not sure exactly what that means.
Theres also Hell Let Loose and a few other decently popular WW1/WW2 shooters that are more or less similar to HLL, but I have not played it, only heard about it, so I may be totally off base there.
Other than that… while tactical squad based shooters such as Ready Or Not are certainly more realistic than say BF in certain respects, there is not a wide variety of gameplay, and i wouldnt really say theres a similar level of action.
Theres a high degree of /tension/ from not knowing when the actual high stakes action can occur, but the action itself generally comes in extremely intense bursts.
And if you wanna go full bore into that route you can play Escape From Tarkov until you discover the only way to actually be able to have any BF style action is to pub stomp with friends you have outside of the game.
EDIT: Yeah, its a huge shame what happened between COD and BF. To a large extent BF started trying to win over COD players by implementing more and more features from COD, resulting in a lot of what made BF work become pointless. COD series has done a bit of emulating BF style stuff, but it generally hasnt been as impactful on the core gameplay of COD multiplayer.
That being said, Ive never been a fan of COD multiplayer. The community is among the worst in videogaming, still to this day.
Overrealism like forcing real life mechanics to get in the way of the fact that it’s a game. Things like waiting for engines to start properly or being locked into tedious animations for reloads or clearing jams. Played a couple mods like that and it steals some of the fun. I know it sounds like I’m straddling the fence wanting a both game and realism, I just figure there ought to be a good balance instead of complete disregard for capability and physics of the tools you use in game.
Arma for sure is clunky, I’ve avoided that one for a long while after playing the early versions.
I have HLL but I’ve outgrown the WW2 shooter genre and haven’t played it in years, the development was painfully slow and I got it in the super-early stages. It was really hard to find any group to play with, too.
Regarding your edit, agreed. However I’ll offer that I think CoD is the more honest of the two, it never tried to be anything other than what it is while battlefield has slid back from a do everything game towards CoD gameplay. I don’t think there’s a major FPS games’ community that isn’t toxic.
Well, Squad does have those two things you specifically mention:
Generally speaking, reload animations take roughly the amount of time seen in actual combat footage and reported by various available US and UK publicly available military studies.
It also has delays for starting up vehicles, although this is essentially near 0 for most light vehicles, long for APCs and Tanks, and quite long for helicopters.
These mechanics you say are overrealistic, I say actually work to promote team based tactics, squad communication, ultimately more realistic tactics in general, in addition to being at least ‘realistic’.
For weapons, a whole lot of effort has gone into fine tuning especially sniper rifles and squad automatic weapons, to represent them reasonably accurately, allowing for highly skilled players to do things with them which, while rare and often generally officially discouraged, absolutely have been used and are effective in extremely niche or desperate scenarios.
Basically what this means is you cannot run around with a sniper rifle and quickly no scope or scope in and take out a target without basically both significant luck and skill. Likewise for running and gunning with a squad automatic weapon, or in general moving and blasting at full auto with anything but roughly a submachine gun.
The code side of it is interesting, basically recoil becomes cumulatively more extreme with each uncontrolled shot.
What this allows for is ok, point blank range? Full auto can certainly still be effective, but it is not as effective as calmly placed single shots or bursts.
But as you say COD has a toxic community and youve never found an FPS without one?
Squad is actually shockingly refreshing on that, when compared to basically every other competitive shooter game that you can generally play by just dropping into a random server, and is also realistically themed.
To the extent that its not uncommon to find on a random public server a squad leader who is advertising that they enjoy teaching newbies the ropes, and they genuinely do enjoy this. There is of course some toxicity in general, but it is orders of magnitude less than COD.
You will be flamed though if you do exceptionally dumb things to do in Squad, like try to fly the one helicopter your team gets on a map and use it as your own personal transit to be almost certainly blown up and killed upon arriving deep in enemy lines. Or just taking an APC for yourself, leaving half your team to walk, or trying to solo crewman a tank.
Basically, in addition to being more realistic, Squad actually encourages actual cooperation, instead of competition, between players on the same team.
Nearly no one who plays Squad is in it for their personal KDR.
Playing solo is nearly guaranteed to result in you having a bad time, even if you are playing as a sniper, its still usually good practice to either be in communication with other squad leads, be embedded in a squad, or at best be a two man sniper/spotter pair.
Having competent medics and engineers, who do not excel at battle compared to other classes, absolutely can make or break battles.
Squad is about enjoying tense action in a realistic-enough depiction of real world military combat situation, where cooperation is actually quite vital.
At this point its probably clear I am quite the fan of Squad, so at this point I’ll let you know that as a one of the earliest beta testers for Project Reality, as well as one of the most prolific posters on the forum, a whole lot of ideas I came up with, or ideas I was very involved in discussing, became many of the core and ancillary gameplay aspects of Project Reality, and nearly all of those have translated over to Squad, and been improved by doing things we dreamed of being able to do but couldn’t due to the limitations of the BF2 engine.
So, sure, you can say I am biased, and youre not wrong, but I do also genuinely believe the things I am saying.
Well… I have no idea what you mean by overrealism.
Off the top of my head, the most comparable in scope to Battlefield, in that they include vehicles and larger numbers of players than say 16 v 16, are Squad and Arma 2/3.
Arma 3 still has fairly clunky controls compared to basically every other FPS, though its far improved from Arma 1 and 2 days. Theres also lots of mods and communities that do organized events, as in general random public play does not really work.
Arma Reforger is the hot new Arma, but as far as I can tell its basically still an early release / alpha / ironing out the core engine bugs.
Squad I find to be basically the best currently existing middle ground between the silly problems of the BF series, without going as full bore on realism that Arma does, and generally has much better handling, less clunky controls, far less needing to learn and customize a wide variety of keyboard commands.
You may find either one or both of these as over realistic, again im not sure exactly what that means.
Theres also Hell Let Loose and a few other decently popular WW1/WW2 shooters that are more or less similar to HLL, but I have not played it, only heard about it, so I may be totally off base there.
Other than that… while tactical squad based shooters such as Ready Or Not are certainly more realistic than say BF in certain respects, there is not a wide variety of gameplay, and i wouldnt really say theres a similar level of action.
Theres a high degree of /tension/ from not knowing when the actual high stakes action can occur, but the action itself generally comes in extremely intense bursts.
And if you wanna go full bore into that route you can play Escape From Tarkov until you discover the only way to actually be able to have any BF style action is to pub stomp with friends you have outside of the game.
EDIT: Yeah, its a huge shame what happened between COD and BF. To a large extent BF started trying to win over COD players by implementing more and more features from COD, resulting in a lot of what made BF work become pointless. COD series has done a bit of emulating BF style stuff, but it generally hasnt been as impactful on the core gameplay of COD multiplayer.
That being said, Ive never been a fan of COD multiplayer. The community is among the worst in videogaming, still to this day.
Overrealism like forcing real life mechanics to get in the way of the fact that it’s a game. Things like waiting for engines to start properly or being locked into tedious animations for reloads or clearing jams. Played a couple mods like that and it steals some of the fun. I know it sounds like I’m straddling the fence wanting a both game and realism, I just figure there ought to be a good balance instead of complete disregard for capability and physics of the tools you use in game.
Arma for sure is clunky, I’ve avoided that one for a long while after playing the early versions.
I have HLL but I’ve outgrown the WW2 shooter genre and haven’t played it in years, the development was painfully slow and I got it in the super-early stages. It was really hard to find any group to play with, too.
Regarding your edit, agreed. However I’ll offer that I think CoD is the more honest of the two, it never tried to be anything other than what it is while battlefield has slid back from a do everything game towards CoD gameplay. I don’t think there’s a major FPS games’ community that isn’t toxic.
Well, Squad does have those two things you specifically mention:
Generally speaking, reload animations take roughly the amount of time seen in actual combat footage and reported by various available US and UK publicly available military studies.
It also has delays for starting up vehicles, although this is essentially near 0 for most light vehicles, long for APCs and Tanks, and quite long for helicopters.
These mechanics you say are overrealistic, I say actually work to promote team based tactics, squad communication, ultimately more realistic tactics in general, in addition to being at least ‘realistic’.
For weapons, a whole lot of effort has gone into fine tuning especially sniper rifles and squad automatic weapons, to represent them reasonably accurately, allowing for highly skilled players to do things with them which, while rare and often generally officially discouraged, absolutely have been used and are effective in extremely niche or desperate scenarios.
Basically what this means is you cannot run around with a sniper rifle and quickly no scope or scope in and take out a target without basically both significant luck and skill. Likewise for running and gunning with a squad automatic weapon, or in general moving and blasting at full auto with anything but roughly a submachine gun.
The code side of it is interesting, basically recoil becomes cumulatively more extreme with each uncontrolled shot.
What this allows for is ok, point blank range? Full auto can certainly still be effective, but it is not as effective as calmly placed single shots or bursts.
But as you say COD has a toxic community and youve never found an FPS without one?
Squad is actually shockingly refreshing on that, when compared to basically every other competitive shooter game that you can generally play by just dropping into a random server, and is also realistically themed.
To the extent that its not uncommon to find on a random public server a squad leader who is advertising that they enjoy teaching newbies the ropes, and they genuinely do enjoy this. There is of course some toxicity in general, but it is orders of magnitude less than COD.
You will be flamed though if you do exceptionally dumb things to do in Squad, like try to fly the one helicopter your team gets on a map and use it as your own personal transit to be almost certainly blown up and killed upon arriving deep in enemy lines. Or just taking an APC for yourself, leaving half your team to walk, or trying to solo crewman a tank.
Basically, in addition to being more realistic, Squad actually encourages actual cooperation, instead of competition, between players on the same team.
Nearly no one who plays Squad is in it for their personal KDR.
Playing solo is nearly guaranteed to result in you having a bad time, even if you are playing as a sniper, its still usually good practice to either be in communication with other squad leads, be embedded in a squad, or at best be a two man sniper/spotter pair.
Having competent medics and engineers, who do not excel at battle compared to other classes, absolutely can make or break battles.
Squad is about enjoying tense action in a realistic-enough depiction of real world military combat situation, where cooperation is actually quite vital.
At this point its probably clear I am quite the fan of Squad, so at this point I’ll let you know that as a one of the earliest beta testers for Project Reality, as well as one of the most prolific posters on the forum, a whole lot of ideas I came up with, or ideas I was very involved in discussing, became many of the core and ancillary gameplay aspects of Project Reality, and nearly all of those have translated over to Squad, and been improved by doing things we dreamed of being able to do but couldn’t due to the limitations of the BF2 engine.
So, sure, you can say I am biased, and youre not wrong, but I do also genuinely believe the things I am saying.
Thanks for the lengthy description. Sold. I’m downloading the game.
Good luck soldier!