Published on April 7th, 2018 | by Senchoo

Ready or Not: Realism to get you thinking?

I love the old SWAT games (SWAT 3 and 4) mostly because of the lower pace in speed of movement but still keeping the pulse up in action. You needed to plan out when to go loud or if you need to pull the pace back again. And that was the beauty of it, when an innocent civilian got killed you had lost the mission but still had the option to continue (SWAT 3). I always fulfilled the mission as much as I could, even if i got a bad score in the end I didn’t feel like it was time spent badly. I learned and got better and made it a bigger priority to keep them alive.

In SWAT 4 I finally got to play with my friends and we all had the same mind set to succeed with the mission and doing it as by the book as possible. After this there was no going back to the old AI system since everything got so much dynamic. We watched videos and sent them to each other about swat tactics with “flooding the wall” and the fatal funnel. We all learnt how to best utilize the flashbang at the same time keeping safe. You learned new things and how people would move in certain situations, like if you should take the shot or not when the bad guy turned towards a civilian after getting a verbal warning from the point man.

After this we wanted to play something that was a little more…modern(?). And we were looking everywhere for something that would fill the void that was created. We tried Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (only 2p), but that was very linear and didn’t really give any challenge more than the “try not to hit the civilians” and you had too much future tech working for you that it became a little to easy.

Next was Takedown: Red Sabre that was said to become the next real simulator that everyone wanted. But the thing with that was that it was very arcadey with way too big maps and too easy for the operators to die. And it was always extremely unrealistic since you got usually like 4 operators against 20 or something bad guys and they killed you as easy as you got them, and in a realistic scenario you would either have cover of darkness and element of surprise and a team of like 30. The fix for this was to disconnect and reconnect to the server and you were alive again #details .

And then Rainbow Six: Patriots was said to come out, cancelled and now we got Siege that was supposed to be a tactical shooter and stuff, but i’m pretty sure Tom Clancy is rolling over in his grave and giving the finger to Ubisoft for being such dicks with his legacy.

We even tried it in ARMA 3, and let’s be honest, the gunplay in CQB is very weird at best. It held out for a long time, but in its more traditional sense of a military tactical simulator-ish (we played it as straight forward as one might think).

So in enter “Ready or Not” with their black and white screen shots/vids showing weapon models and things. I was not impressed by that, but wanted to see what it was meant to be later on in the future. A tactical FPS shooter where you are in the boots of an elite SWAT team…yea I am interested. And I stopped there since that was the day of the “Pre-Order” that EA had made sure i would never trust again. Couple of months later i see it again, with a trailer.



Holy shit! They are working on a leaning system and partial door opening. The reload animations with realistic speed and tactical reloads. But of course the part that strikes me will be controversial is the gore when people are shot their bodies get destroyed and they don’t really die directly when they hit the floor. It is very visual  to see that in a game and I think there will be talks when the public see it more. For me, I “like” it since games i like i want to be brought in to that world and feeling what is actually happening. It’s guns, bad people and innocent people. You are there to make sure all those three don’t combine into a bad afternoon.

In the old SWAT games people died, in a sense that they only laid down and you only knew if they were alive or dead depending on how you could report them (and if they started moaning in a weird way). From what I see is that when people are shoot and go down, they can get back up just as in real life. Here you need to assess if this will be an threat again or just someone not wanting to die. There’s no 50 points for downing and another 100 to kill that pops up on the screen but the hard truth that it’s a digital life trying to cling to life. What you do after that is up to how you assess the situation and what your morals are.



So of course this puts in more in the balance of “if”  you should shoot and not any longer “how many”. All of a sudden you will need to face the consequences of actions that did not go according to plan in having to put someone else in the line of danger, visually uncomfortable danger. And if you only think this will be an effect on civilians and bad guys? I think that the same rules apply on teammates…and that will probably effect even more. So of course this will not be a game for people who love Siege.

A couple of things that i hope for:

  • The environments get effected by actions (fire alarm starts because of flashbang, lights go out etc.)
  • Swatting incident (get called out on a very harsh call, but getting there is no actual threat, will people be ready for no bad guys?)
  • Top down AAR – doorkickers style (if things go sour and people get angry and getting all the details on what actually happened will help everyone)

Only thing that is getting to me in the things they’ve shown is the framedrops when PvP and shooting. They aren’t even in Alpha, from what I know, so it will hopefully not be there later. So now let’s just wait and see on how good they pull this off.

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About the Author

Started airsoft back in 2005. Now mostly working a day job and getting into the details of gear, optics and NVG.



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