Squad and the surprising social brilliance of military simulators

Another week, another newsletter. I'm going to recommend a lot of things, so strap yourself in. I had a good time trying out some of the shooters in Steam's Boomstock sale this week. Probably my favourite was The Last Exterminator, which asks the question: "What if Duke Nukem 3D but instead of shooting pigs you kill bugs?" and answers the question by giving you a micro Uzi with two barrels.

But I also played several hours of Squad - which is getting a new update today - probably inspired by last week's Battlefield news. Firefights in Squad are disorientating and brutal. Guns are loud, people scream for ammo and medical help in voice chat, and you can't see anything for the smoke as enemies in the distance are taking potshots at you constantly. It's brilliant, adrenaline-fuelled stuff as you dart from cover to cover while trying to keep your shit together enough to return fire. 

However, that sort of intensity is draining and the best shooters have an ebb and flow to them that means you're not constantly going at full throttle. Unless you're playing in some sort of behind-enemy-lines special ops team, you'll only be fighting for about 20% of your time. The rest of it will be spent running logistics around in trucks, bandaging your colleagues, and using a shovel to either build or knock over structures. This should be boring, but what makes it interesting is that in the background of this combat admin, you're talking shit to those around you, forming fast friends in the middle of a battlefield like you're in the smoking area of a nightclub at 3AM.

I've played Squad on and off for a few years, picking it up back in 2015 and dipping in and out whenever I'm craving something milsim but haven't had the forethought to organise it. While I have played with friends on Discord, my preference is usually to play Squad alone, using the game's mix of local and squad radio to communicate. I make friends as I play, something that's alien to me now as a 35-year-old man who finds open comms in games often subjects me to a lot of squeaking children.

Of course, I play medic so most people are happy to see me, as I cheerfully set about rubbing a bandage on the afflicted area to magically put their intestines back into their body. Mechanically, the medic doesn't need to do anything but hold down the mouse button and wait for time to pass, so it gives you time to talk about people's hopes and dreams. Or, more likely, how messed up the situation is. Sometimes people tell me they love me, sometimes people bemoan the artillery that led to me standing there over their broken body. Once, a dead man explained in detail how the game's new recoil system (totally reworked in last year's Infantry Combat Overhaul update) worked because I was struggling to hit anything but the largest of buildings. The answer, to boil it down if you want to give the game a go for yourself, is to never sprint. 

A walk in the woods

You never quite know what you're going to get, and that's part of the joy. Just before writing this I hopped in for a game and found myself as a fireteam leader - someone who controls a small chunk of a squad - as we picked through Goose Bay, a huge map set on Canada's Labrador coast. As we trundled around in an armoured vehicle, our marksman TANKTODO started playing Bad Moon Rising, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song that would feel more fitting if we were lazily flying over Vietnam in a Chinook. After we cleared the Canadian forces from the Hilldoubt Redoubt, he queued up Black Betty as we mounted up in the vehicle again, to cheers from our assembled squad. We hadn't lost a single man. I'd suggest it was the teambuilding music in the run-up to the firefight. After our next fight, he played The Shape of You by Ed Sheeran, to the groans of everyone involved, sheepishly changing it to Welcome To The Jungle. I'll never talk to TANKTODO again, but I'll always remember the 20 minutes he spent trying to convince his soundboard to play Iron Maiden's The Trooper after I requested it. 

Something is compelling to me about that downtime where you're semi-alert but not having to focus too hard right now, and the particular space it opens up for social interactions. This is something I loved about playing ARMA 2 and 3, but I really fell into this idea of multiplayer shooters being a place to have a walk in the woods and chat some nonsense with Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG). PUBG is best known for popularising the battle royale genre now owned by Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite, but I mostly remember it for the six months I spent playing it with everyone I know, making lifelong friends as I walked around Erangel, learning more about their lives. 

My Escape From Tarkov habit probably helps me to scratch the same itch: I prefer the maps with less intense combat, where we can walk around a little bit and assess a situation before being plunged into things. Chatting away, my friends tell me, is not always that conducive to survival in Escape From Tarkov, where sound plays an essential role in your long-term survival prospects. Meanwhile, Squad captures that feeling of sitting around perfectly, whether you're unloading a truck full of ammo or sitting in a building waiting out mortar fire. 

In fact, it's usually nice to avoid combat because Squad inverts the standard video game power fantasy. While everyone is ostensibly a mean lean fighting machine, the soldiers you control are noodly of arm and weak of constitution. Stamina reserves are low and you move at a sluggish pace. This means the order of the day is jogging around at a slow pace. There's nothing to unlock in Squad and no achievements or in-game medals. As a squad leader once told me: "What's the rush? We're just going to die at the point anyway." 

At least with Squad it feels like I'll be dying amongst friends. 

Tarkov's new roadmap

Battlestate Games just pushed the roadmap for both Escape From Tarkov (EFT) and Escape From Tarkov Arena for the rest of 2024. Escape From Tarkov Arena is getting most of the attention, which makes sense as the young game feels like less of a coherent package than EFT.

Arena has come along in leaps and bounds after the most recent wipe last month, which reworked Arena's entire progression system by bringing in a new create-a-class system and cross-progression between EFT and Arena. Arena is still not my cup of tea, but it's really come along and Battlestate clearly feels more confident in it: this past weekend had a free weekend for Arena. The updates are largely bringing content to the game and improving usability, but I am curious about which HE grenade is being added to the game as this may be the first time Arena has had a weapon or piece of gear that wasn't already in EFT, its elder sibling. If that isn't the case, the addition of the Molotov Cocktail, providing it isn't added to EFT first, is also brand new.

EFT is getting three more big updates this year, culminating in a wipe with 2024's 16.0.0 update at the end of the year. I'll write more about Tarkov when the first of these patches drops, which will update the game's engine to Unity 2022. This has been going on behind the scenes for a while and won't have a wedge of new content but it is still huge because it's an engine update. Expect new bugs and some new engine features that Battlestate will want to take advantage of, but for most of the players you shouldn't notice too many changes. 

I play around 10-20 hours of Tarkov a week when I'm actively playing, and it really does feel like EFT is in the best state it's ever been in. I do have thoughts about the progression and worries about how much I'll enjoy the endgame, as Battlestate Games have never managed to solve that problem. 

Patch 15.5 for EFT will bring Autumn to the game which will make sniping easier as bushes die away. 16.0 will be the Winter wipe, which I'd expect sometime in the tail end of December (it was on Boxing Day one year, as the EFT team observes Orthodox Christmas in January rather than the Western date, which makes sense.) This will add more high-end content and QoL improvements, in addition to what I think is probably the third sound engine update in as many years. Expect more guns and quests, but as we get closer and closer to Tarkov's 1.0 update, I'm expecting less huge mechanical changes and more content to keep players amused. Note that in 15.5.0 the Roadmap says "new weapon content" and 16.0.0 says "new weapons", so i'm expecting 15.5 to add new attachments and maybe a new model for some of the older guns. Also of note is the ability to lock items in your stash and fiddle with your hideout and stash while matching. This is stuff that's been requested for ages, but I suspect that the launch of Arena Breakout: Infinite, which has these things, has forced EFT's hand as it now looks to be behind the market in terms of user experience. Not that anyone has ever accused EFT of having a simple user experience. 

Gibs

• I've been playing quite a lot of Wild Bastards, which launched earlier in September. It's basically a strategy game FTL: Faster Than Light, except you're controlling a host of android cowboys in a series of arena-based FPS battles. Each cowboy has a different gun and you'll switch between them when you change weapons, but the kicker here is that you can upgrade them all differently as you progress through a campaign. The moment-to-moment combat is much simpler than Void Bastards, which I also enjoyed, but the singular focus on shooting bad guys in beautiful arenas is great for me.  This isn't a review because I've only spent a couple of hours with it, but if this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. 
• Noticed this "what else" section is called Gibs? That's because of Newsletter-Friend Rick Lane, who gave me the idea. He's launched his own newsletter, Demo Disc, where he digs through the demos of upcoming games like the discs mounted on the magazine covers of the distant past.
• Sabrina Carpenter's new album is pretty good, and Taste has grown on me over the last few weeks, potentially because of the excellent Death Becomes Her-inspired video. Jenna Ortega is in it!