Yeah I am on a steam deck so Squad is a no (also the community seems really toxic from what I have heard?), Arma 3 only really gives acceptable framerates in singleplayer (though not sure that is really because I have a steam deck…).

Hell Let Loose looks ok, I really don’t like Escape From Tarkov like games though because they invariably become pay to win with players being able to pay real money to have material advantages they bring in to matches, and I could not be less interested in that to be honest even though the overall game type sounds cool.

Triple A studios can no longer sustain the game development model and remain profitable due to b-suite and a-suite management grifting all the profits and paying for CEO golden parachutes while the QA, game devs and art teams can barely afford rent.

The unfortunate thing is that the amount of development work it takes to make and maintain a multiplayer shooter with balanced gunplay and vehicles is immense. I am not convinced an indie studio can really do it and succeed long term, especially if they drag their feet and refuse to add mod support (like the Battlebit devs) so the community can augment the small development team’s work when necessary. Battlebit is certainly not a success story currently on that front, but I am eagerly watching development of Operation Harsh Doorstop as it is a realistic shooter with vehicles and large maps made by developers that understand the importance of opening up their game to modding. Even if Operation Harsh Doorstop doesn’t end up being to my tastes in terms of vanilla gameplay that fact we now have a moddable shooter with decent gunplay, movement and vehicle mechanics means that future projects in the vein of Forgotten Hope and Project Reality will have a natural place to turn that can jumpstart development past the barebones stuff that takes up a huge amount of work.

…steampowered.com/…/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

I honestly think several commercial shooters built on a shared open source shooter engine makes more sense than a bunch of indie studios trying to build shooters from the ground up every single time. The important bits aren’t all the details in getting the engine working in shooter design, the important bits are the details of balance, the subtleties of gun feel and the flow of maps, these are the things indie developers should be worrying about in terms of shooter design, not making basic aspects of a multiplayer shooter function.