Why all the devs need to “improve” upon the source material with all the recent gameplay gimmicks. Gunship Battle Royale maybe, or Seal Team Zombies perhaps? Just remake the old games with better visuals and audio. The games are so old now that their gameplay would feel fresh for all the younger gamers now anyway.
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Because they all want to cash in on the most recent craze. Look at how many battle royale clones are out there now; all the mobile gimmick games; the free to play with paid lootboxes, and so on. It all makes money and it’s very easy to clone the formula. Maximizing profits is the name of the game.
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So I’m gonna date myself here, what the heck does “battle royale” actually mean? As far as I can tell it simply is a different term for what we used to call “deathmatch.” Am I missing something?
If I had the Micropose name, I’d be looking at Gunship, Tank Platoon, and one of their flight titles (Fleet Defender, F-15 Strike Eagle, etc). Cold Waters did/does an excellent job of a RSR revamp, so no need to fight them for market share.
Gunship: There has been a good helo sim-light in a while (yes there have been excellent versions in ARMA and the like, but nothing where the attack helo is the center piece). Apache Air Assault was okay, but probably a bit too arcade. I know for many here it’d be a day 1 purchase.
Tank Platoon: Besides Steel Beasts, the only other modern’ish tank sim I know of is Steel Armor Blazes of War (which could have been really good). I still fire up Tank Platoon 2 every now and again, as it’s honestly still a dang good sim-lite title with better graphics than Steel Beasts 1.
Flight sim of some sort: The combat flight sim market is currently either “full realism” or “arcade” with a few titles like MAC/FC trying to bridge the gap. MAC/FC has the disadvantage of being tied to DCS, which is not exactly the easiest of titles to learn, or to even know what to buy. Something along the lines of SF2 with a little more depth, but still a lot of system abstraction would be great, and probably do pretty well on the market right now.
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“Battle royale” in this context is a deathmatch with time slowly constraining the battlespace. So someone always has to move, can’t camp, can’t go back to previous areas; it slowly gets more compact until there’s only one survivor. It caught on a couple years ago and has only recently been slightly waning.
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More than Waning is … evolving.
Apex Legends was an interesting concept that actually quite got me.
Considering it is totally free, it is fun and has great playability.
Helibourne looked kind of interesting but it was a while ago I looked into it and there was a reason I didn’t buy it but I cant remember what it was.
The problem is with limited resources to make these titles the current devs have gone all-in on systems modeling and visuals. That’s nice and all, but neither of those were all that great, or capable on PCs of the time, in the “classic” crop. Yet we loved them all the same. So what did those all have that the current batch have not paid enough attention to?
Immersion. When you fire up DCS or Il-2, you’re playing a sim. I don’t mean in the obvious “duh you’re sitting in front of your PC” way, I mean instead of feeling like a pilot in a conflict, I feel like a pilot at a training facility booting up a sim where I can learn the planes. They model the systems and make excellent graphics, but I never once forget I’m using a sim.
The old games had UIs with airbases and narration and things that were all 2D backdrops and looked even worse than when you were in the cockpit, but you felt like you were a pilot THERE. You had briefings and debriefings that weren’t just a wall of text with an image or two and maybe music. You had debriefings that weren’t just a list of events like “pilot A-10 4 shot down by Shilka” or “F-15C 2 hit MiG-29 1”. Those tell you what happened, but there is zero about HOW it happened.
AI personality. Sure, the current group may assign names to the pilots on a screen, or maybe not, but in the air every pilot is interchangeable with every other. They all have numbers, which may be accurate while flying, but leaves no room for attachment let alone empathy. I’ve never played the XCOM games, but I’ve heard many people say they get attached to this or that agent and when one dies in an op they feel genuine pangs of loss. I haven’t cared about a wingman being shot down in a sim since the 90s. Most of the time it takes straight and level flight out of a combat area for several minutes before I notice that only some of my flight is on my wing now.
Now I don’t mean Strike Commander-level chatter necessarily, but you can’t argue that despite their shortcomings in systems, those games had characters you knew and liked or disliked.
Truly great offline play. Watch most of the videos on YouTube of current sims, you’ll see they’re MP. Watch most of the ones for the old sims, you’ll see they’re SP. Granted some didn’t have MP, but even when they did there were limits on what MP could do. That’s why F3/4’s MP campaign was so great because it let you play the traditional SP flight sim with others, not just dogfight each other.
Now some of the scripted campaigns that have been made lately really are very good, but they’re not infinitely replayable. That means some form of random generation is needed, and nowadays they are usually too shallow. The templates can be too narrowly defined to the point that you know you will ingress at waypoint 3, be attacked by enemy air before waypoint 5, also over the target at waypoint 6, and likely see enemy vs friendly fighting that you may or may not participate in heading to waypoint 8.
That’s serviceable the first dozen times, but after awhile the only difference is “what am I flying” and “what am I fighting against” because the rest is rote. Perfect for learning what you’re flying or how to fight against that, but not for building warm fuzzies that make you wax nostalgic about them 20+ years later. 
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Good Lord @JediMaster , PLEASE, YES! That’s it!
Go to the new MicroProse HQ and bring that post in PowerPoint Presentation form!
Get a grip on those calling the shots- 'cause I’m afraid they’re taking a bad road!
Please.
(Edit: and I’m NOT being sarcastic)
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Ooooh! I like the sound of that!
A Zombie apocalypse has devastated the world. At the time, a team of SEALs was en route a secret mission aboard a USN Destroyer (USS Hangar, DDG-200) and so avoided the initial onset of the Zombie plague. Now with USS Hangar as their mobile base, they travel around the devastated world infiltrating various military bases and medical institutions, finding and saving pockets of survivors, all the time searching for the pieces of an ultimate cure. 
A VR only, FPS with RPG elements gaming experience…perhaps we will need to split this off into a separate thread for this development…it may still need some more work before we pitch it to MicroProse. 
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I’m starting to feel like this won’t be the droids i’m looking for.
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Dunno.
It literally says nothing to me.
But I can wait.
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It’s just a gut feeling but that picture looks Battlefield-ish to me, which I find unsettling.
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It might be an ARMA type game.
That sounds like the least crappy outcome.
I loved the C64 version of Airborne Ranger but…
I’m honestly waiting to see some “proper” gameplay, of any sort.
After what I saw of their P-51, I’m not expecting much. Their modern shots look a bit more promising at least.
Keeping 
for Zombie SEALs…
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I’m pleasantly curious but I’m still waiting for any sort of content…
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