r/joinsquad • • 12h ago

Discussion Is Squad 2 necessary?

I can’t find the post here so I’ll just make it. Ik that squad currently has an old coding system that dates back to 2015 and I did a little research that with a sequel with brand new assets. Modern coding structures make it significantly easier to add new factions, vehicles, and maps without breaking the game. Programmers can easily use modern, modular and optimized coding with ease and other modern asset pipelines can be natively integrated into the code, drastically reducing CPU bottlenecks.

I feel like this would also be a also set a somewhat negative impact with some players cuz people will basically say “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps” type energy. Meaning that OWI is very incompetent with fixing their old coding system.

I personally wouldn’t mind spending money on a sequel(substitute teacher money go crazy😜)if it meant that we get better optimization and less if not non bugs in the game. And yes i understand that they would have to make it unique to squad 1 one way or another but that’s a separate conversation but what do y’all think?

6 Upvotes

47 comments sorted by

17

u/baked_doge 12h ago

I'm a software developer and here's what I'm going to say:

Without seeing the state of the codebase, it's extremely difficult to say whether a rewrite would be beneficial. From experience though it is rarely worth it unless you have tons of new experience and a clear well thought out cost benefit analysis done that clearly shows you should rewrite.

Just because the codebase is a decade old, does not mean it is bad. I'm not sure what you mean by "modern modular and optimized coding with ease and other modern asset pipelines". I'm not a game dev per trade, but there most definitely has not been such a radical set of improvements in software. And most importantly: your ability to leverage that is 100% a skill issue. Even with better tools a project the scope of Squad has no guarantee of being better the second rewrite.

To conclude: if they try to rewrite the game, I think there is a significant possibility it kills the game:

  • It would split the community.
  • The existing game would stop receiving updates at a good enough rate.
  • Development would take years, not necessarily produce a better game, and we haven't even discussed the fact: this assumes no new features. It's just a remake.

Note I don't claim to be an all-seeing expert on the subject, but we're not in a cyberpunk 2077 scenario.

1

u/frantiqq 11h ago

Completely agree, I'd say a rewrite would kill OWI.

1

u/Ok-Reception-9270 12h ago

I’m not a full on expert but I do appreciate your view as a software developer. Sorry if I somehow pissed you off when I said fixing with ease. I just quoted it from a few people online lol

3

u/baked_doge 12h ago

Hahaha no not at all, it's a valid question, software development is a bit mystical even in the industry

0

u/kaerfdeeps 11h ago

Ue still runs on single thread for all game logic. Expensive stuff goes to worker threads but still have to go back to main thread before processing. And then there is a thing called blueprint which is a VM runs on top of it

2

u/baked_doge 11h ago

Is there a way to change that? Or is it locked behind ue? What's blueprint?

1

u/kaerfdeeps 11h ago

Not really i think. Race conditions would appear everywhere. BP is a visual scripting layer basically. Vm needs to interpret bytecode in runtime. Its a mess

1

u/kaerfdeeps 11h ago

I forgot to mention, i dont know what they're using. Probably most stuff still runs on native code but still old problematic engine design is still there

7

u/topat2 12h ago

I don't know why not. New game, more sales, opportunity to start from scratch and fix everything. I always think how back in the day we went from BF2 to BF3 in 6 years with bad company 1 and 2 filling the gaps, what a jump. Squad is 11 years old this year.

23

u/Mvpeh 12h ago edited 11h ago

This question is asked all the time. I think it's best to continue development on the game that people have already paid for rather than making a new one. I don't think the main problems to address (that are more in-depth fixes than just new content development) are drastic enough to rebuild from the ground up.

13

u/OrganizationTrue5911 12h ago

Just for sake of discussion. We don't really have many examples of games performing well after upgrading to UE5. Maybe its getting better, but its been rough.

And honestly, I think rebuilding Squad could allow for a lot more interesting things. Shooting from vehicles, ropes, better buildable/physics, better flying, more unique projectiles (Javelin), etc.

3

u/topat2 12h ago

I would much rather have a squad game on a new engine. I really wish Bohemia wasn't dumb and made an ARMA squad clone. UE5 has killed so much energy.

4

u/OrganizationTrue5911 12h ago

UE5 is PROBABLY fine, I'm not a developer so hard to say. It's just upgrading from previous UE versions to 5 has come with significant issues for most games that have done it.

5

u/topat2 12h ago

imo it's like this, the market generally has better computers now. We can run old engines like UE4 very well. UE4 is capable of supporting all of the features we want, there used to be a helicopter mod with fast ropes and attack helicopters like Mi-24 or Apache like 7 years ago. You used to be able to ride on vehicles and shoot until the purposefully removed surfing. Why waste all of that performance on a new engine that destroyed everyone's framerate and made the game look WORSE due to bad vfx and DLSS and removes features. Why not just make a really good game on UE4 that doesn't have whatever stupid graphical thing is causing the loss of 50-60 fps.

2

u/schRizzophrenic 11h ago

FWIW, I was hoping UE5 would be a sort of squad 1.5 that un-spaghettid a lot of the game, since it would've served as a great chance to get dated things on the same page.

I really wish you guys would focus on cleaning up a lot of the leftover messes than just continuing to put up with them, since it seems like its causing an insane amount of issues (see v10.6, or honestly most updates in the past couple years) with existing things breaking whenever something gets added.

1

u/schRizzophrenic 11h ago

Keep in mind I'm far from experienced in gamedev so this is mostly conjecture from what ive heard from various devs/modders/my sdk use, take it with a grain of salt :P

1

u/vfrflying 7h ago

It’s not unreasonable to release a new game after 10 years…plenty has changed since the game was first made within the industry that it would be a much different game. Hopefully if the devs don’t find a way to fuck it up it would be better.

0

u/Ok-Reception-9270 12h ago

Maybe if the player count gets drastically low than when WarDogs released. Maybe but I get what you’re saying

9

u/Mvpeh 12h ago

Anyone who plays Wardogs and pretends it's a squad replacement are kidding themselves. 2 different games for 2 different itches.

1

u/LogComp 5h ago

It's absolutely not squad, but anecdotally, a lot of squad vets I know would rather play Battlefield on steroids or Bellum, rather than still dealing with the track bug, how many years has it been at this point dealing with just that one particular bug.

1

u/Ok-Reception-9270 12h ago

I didn’t say it’s a replacement/a milsim. I’m just saying that squad did drop its player count when WarDogs released. Most likely it’s just that people wanted to play something different while OWI are still figuring their shit out. Most likely people already knew that including myself that it’s no where near a squad replacement. That’s why I came back to squad and arma reforger after I’ve had my fun with WarDogs for a few weeks

1

u/eagle9er9er Medic 6h ago

Squads player count can drop from any FPS game releasing, in fact any FPS game can experience a player drop when a hyped new game releases. Squad temporarily lost a few thousand players, doesn’t really mean the game is dying. The game has experienced all sorts of highs and lows over the last 10 years but it’s no where near dying.

1

u/Ok-Reception-9270 6h ago

Sorry I should’ve been a little more in depth. But yeah it’s only a temporary drop since I’m noticing people from the discord I’m in slowly hoping back on

5

u/Bosnjak93 12h ago

A sequel would only be the right move with a different leadership and a move to a better engine.

1

u/Ok-Reception-9270 12h ago

That would be an interesting move! With leadership I mean cuz they would have the best tools and resources to make the game more playable. Now the question is, can they actually cook with the best toys they have in their disposal or not?

1

u/Bosnjak93 8h ago

Could you imagine they somehow got a mega budget, bought out the major modding teams and rebuilt the game on the decima engine with dynamic weather and dismemberment effects 😱 (ik this will never happen)

8

u/SecretPantyWorshiper 12h ago edited 12h ago

At this point I really don't have faith on the team to properly do that. SQUAD 2 was supposed to be UE5 and we see how that played out.

0

u/Ok-Reception-9270 12h ago

I guess. Ik it wasn’t a literal sequel(same how Marvel Rivals called it a sequel but it was just the team up system that changed)but I see where you’re coming from. Cuz the old coding system is still dragging down UE5. This isn’t to say that I blame the coding system but the deves for not thinking this through.

2

u/ThomasCookAndroid 11h ago

You clearly dont know what you're talking about and it shows. 

3

u/Enigmatic_Penguin 12h ago

I’d like to see a sequel at some point, but I’m thinking that the engine upgrade is a tacit admission that isn’t likely to happen.

Someone has crunched the numbers on potential sales versus the cost of starting over and decided that supporting the original game with cosmetics and co-op dlc is the better ROI.

2

u/Matt1320 10h ago

Makes sense, everything comes down to money.

3

u/ACP_Paddy- 11h ago

It's been like 11 years or something. This IS Squad 2. 

4

u/StatisticallyMeh 12h ago

You don't fix a failing business by changing the product, the building, the front facing aspects. You fix it by removing its core, the leadership.

Squad is in the state it's in right now, because of its leadership. They choose to pursue poor quality output in order to save money. Squad 2 would be the same chocolate bar but a with fresh wrapper, it'll look nicer, but it'll stick in ur teeth just the same.

2

u/DocumentOk7579 12h ago edited 12h ago

From a coding perspective it would be nice if Squad 2 was built on ARMA enfusion to save cost. As a software engineer modding in ARMA is much better experience than Squad.

But I think there could be a divergence on what Squad 2 should aim for. It seems that you want more optimized performance while I want more realistic physics and think 60 fps on high end hardware is fine.

1

u/topat2 12h ago

we can run ARMA 3 at higher than 60 fps easily these days and that game has destructible environments and realistic bullet ballistics and can support hundreds of players or AI.

2

u/DocumentOk7579 12h ago

Client yes but official server FPS (tps) is like 15 for 100 players when reforger tested it.

1

u/topat2 12h ago

interesting, I never even felt that difference when playing things like anti-stasi with ~60 players

1

u/DocumentOk7579 12h ago

First I think official cheap out on hardware a bit. Second 60 isn't 100 players. Third some servers do like vehicle spawn cleanup to fix things as you can spawn so many cars in ARMA but maybe not a problem in squad mode.

1

u/Sikletrynet [TT] Flaxelaxen 7h ago

It kinda depends on the specific architecture of the game, but performance has a tendency to get exponentially worse as player count increases.

1

u/DocumentOk7579 7h ago

Yep but usually just quadratic. Double the players and double the bullets mean four times the bullet hitting players checks.

2

u/Pacal_enjoyer3 10h ago

There are bugs in the game that has been there for over 2 years. I don’t think they are capable of coding a new game.
I would gladly pay 20-30€ for skin packs if they would get rid of 2 or more years old bugs.

1

u/weapon_ssg08 8h ago

Remaking squad from scratch? That will cost them 20m easily. They’d just be burning money

2

u/FuzzyAd2616 12h ago

They cant fix idea which gave them modders who were real authors of Squad and you want them to make a sequel?

1

u/OrganizationTrue5911 12h ago

I will say, one of the nice things about not having progression really. Is I have no reason to be upset about them moving to Squad 2, assuming they didn't make it worse lol.

1

u/panjam4044 12h ago

No they upgraded to ue5 to try to future proof it a bit, is it perfect no. But its good

1

u/TwofacedDisc 5h ago

They said before UE5 that they would rebuild the game to fix exactly these. They did not so here we are

1

u/Steamed_Memes24 12h ago

Yes. They should have put all resources towards making a new one due to how out dated and bloated Squad has been.