Lots of comments mentioning that ready or not 1.0 has better AI, but none of them are mentioning zero hour having friendly ai now smh

Something I've also been missing from the old games is a linear story. This was especially missed in Ready or Not, because the job of a linear campaign is to introduce the player to increasingly more mechanics and complicated situations. SWAT 4 starts you off raiding a take-out Chinese place with like...2 bad guys armed with pistols who are inches from surrendering, and by the end you're taking on the fucking Payday 2 crew armed with assault rifles and packing armor and gas masks. There's an escalation that helps the player learn the game. Most of these modern games don't have that, they all have some sort of open mission select with no campaign. You don't get introduced to the game and allowed to acclimate, you just pick a random mission and maybe it will be easy or maybe it'll be really hard. This is especially bad in Ready or Not which doesn't give you like ANY information about the mission you're doing. No map, no real briefing, nothing.

It really is a travesty how both Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon were reduced to dumbed down console arcade shooters with neon pink looney tunes guns and other kiddy nonsense. RIP Tom Clancy games.

the amount of times im scrolling through steam looking at all these new tactical games and just saying to myself "i wish they would all come together and just make one perfect game"

After playing SWAT 4, it's crazy how much games have regressed. As much as I love ground branch, all there is to the game is walk around and shoot dumb bots. It seems all that's needed to make a "tactical shooter" nowadays is to remove hud, add some really jank movement, and call it done. I wish we still had games like Ghost Recon and SWAT.

To your hypothetical game. Imagine instead of drawing breaching paths, you could pre draw or have dev suggested paths to choose from on the fly. Like madden before plays how you choose routes. A quick drop down menu with " plays" would be amazing.

I love the fact that Ding Chavez was in ALL rainbow six games till now.. RIP to a Legend.

There was a game called "Hidden &Dangerous" based on SAS operations in WWII. It had a planning phase, over-the-map waypoint movement, pre-positioning of snipers and machine gunners...And that was 20 years ago. You could also switch between 1st and 3rd person a decade before ArmA got out.

My favourite singleplayer tactical shooter is still SWAT 4 with First Responders, it adds so much depth to the mechanics and overall polishes the game nicely

Technically Sandstorm is Insurgency 3 In Breakpoint's final update they broke the move command, so once your team reaches their waypoint they'll fan out in random directions and completely ruin their cohesion. It's a bug that will never be fixed Ugh, you deliver *my* frustrations so well. I should have just written you a section on initiative for this one H3VR now has some pretty detailed doors, but that's a sim game

my thing that a lot of tactical shooters are missing is long, story driven campaigns, does anyone remember the resistance campaign from operation flashpoint? if so, then thats what i mean, it literally felt like red dawn in, at the time, what was considered to be as close to life as you could have gotten it.

This is very well made. I really thought I was watching a video from a KZfaqr who had well over 100k Subs. Props to you man

Ubisoft NEVER carried the genre. They BOUGHT the rights to the Tom Clancy games. They basically ruined them. Red Storm Entertainment was the company that actually developed the Rainbow Six games that were still tactical. Raven Shield was technically under Ubisoft but that was like a bridge, they made that to kind of resemble Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear but after that they just ditched the whole tactical idea and went full arcade with regenerating health and all of that garbage...

What kills me the most about irrational following up swat 4 with BioShock, is that the original system shock had so many of the mechanics that have defined the modern tactical shooter, especially the PC modern tactical shooter.. including analog leaning, prone etc.. and then with a game like swat 4 that felt so feature Rich in mechanical and gameplay capabilities.. it kind of gave the impression that we were going to have a return to that with the quote unquote spiritual successor to system shock 2.. and we got the opposite of that and we didn't even get a game that remotely resembled system shock.. much less what it could have been given the capabilities shown with SWAT 4.

I have a feeling you’re going to get very big. Your videos are very fun to watch as well as informative.

Raven Shield and early Rainbow Six games were so good, because the development team actually had hands with real weapons and were shown tactics by hostage rescue personnel. When Tom Clancy was alive, the games with his name attached to them were some of the best tactical games made. Ubisoft should have never been allowed to buy Red Storm Entertainment. I miss Novalogic's mil sim games too, Delta Force was pretty enjoyable.

The Heroes Unleashed mod breathes a lot of life into the OG ghost recon games on Steam, pretty easy to get the mod setup and going for anyone interested.

That feeling in ghost recon when you map out a plan. Goes off without a hitch, you use the same team members the whole game and get them leveled up. I miss it. Then you get sad when you start the expansion and can’t use the same guys ;(

"thats right there were rainbow six games before r6 siege" thanks now Im feeling old :D

This is a complaint I’ve had over the years! Everyone kept focusing on making the bad guys smarter but no one cared about friendly AI be it RoNs jank ai or CODs infinite teammate strategy

Great Video, some very good points. One thing I will say though is that SWAT 4 gets all the accolade and no one seems to remember SWAT 3, it was really good for it's time.

Actually in ready or not the AI used to be very competent but they did some sort of an update or something but all I know is one day my fellow SWAT officers in game were capable units the next day they're bubbling idiots it was really weird.

I believe that the next update for Ready or Not Is going to be focused on SWAT AI and/or a new lobby and also a HRT skin rework. (This is based on the most recent dev AMA)

It always really saddened/frustrated me that Raven Shield coop never had a proper planning phase. Just a crappy map where your annotations disappeared after a few seconds and no ability to set waypoints.

I got a huge nostalgia rush when you mentioned Raven Shield, that game was the shit when I was a kid!

I really want a Door Kickers 2/Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield hybrid imo It would play like Raven Shield (FPS Mode) until you pause the game, during which case it goes Door Kickers 2 mode (Real-Time Tactics mode) And like Raven Shield you can directly control one of your squad at any time, including if the current guy dies

this isn't related to gameplay but a visual detail i've always noticed with every shooter game out there is that there isn't a single weapon that has a sling. the only shooter games i've seen where a character has a sling mounted to their weapon is CoD MW2019 on the EBR-14, and also on every rifle length weapon in The Last of Us duology.

Really well edited and well explained video. And goddamn, Raven Shield looks badass as fuck

ready or not recently got an update that makes the friendly AI not *brain dead* and actually act like swat

That Raven shield theme took me back. THE GOOD OL DAYS.

I grew up on raven shield and occasionally still play it with my brothers and dad! It really does make me sad the way tactical shooters are now tacti-cool shooters. On a side note i was too young to know how to or even care about the planning part of the game. I did try doing it a few years ago. It was really cool, another part of the game i was missing! It did kind of highlight the ai problems for me though. You said that the ai covers the rear, this is true but after watching them go, it seems they wont unless you tell them to move as slowly as possible. Infact they seemed to get extreme tunnel vision if they go any faster, as i have restarted many games after watching a whole team die as they ignore the terrorist that ran up behind them, as their squadmates fall around them one by one. Even so the ai is quite good even to some more recent games and i will always appreciate the game for what it is

Great video. So glad you covered Black One Blood Brothers, and I couldn't agree more with your words on the title. I hope it becomes as good as I want it to be, as its the only modern fps with deep planning and unit control.

I like Brothers in Arms as a tactical shooter as well. Would love to see the Rebirth of the Socom Games too.

I have a point you missed in the video. My first go around with tactical shooters was 'Close Combat: First to Fight'; way I heard it was to help marines practice tactics without the fuss of dying and injuries. Americas Army did a similar thing, but a more broad application of military skills. But back to First to Fight that had a pretty simple squad commands. Form on Me, Offensive, Hold Posisition, Move and Secure (might be different phrases it's been a while). You always had access to those, beyond that were context commands. So aiming at an enemy you could instruct Comply (Comply them to surrender), Cover (Your team would orient in that direction for threats), Suppress (Everyone mag dump this way), Support (This would be mortars, Airstrikes, Snipers based on the mission and what you were aiming at). Doors had context commands, Breach and Clear, Flash and Clear, Frag and Clear, Open. Based on the environment frag and clear could kill civilians (which is an auto fail) blah blah. The problems were while equipment was limited, ammo drops usually made this a non issue, and I never had my AI run out of grenades for breaches. BUT they moved really nicely through the door covering the room, and you could slot in anywhere into the stack. I mention this one specifically because it had smart team-mates, effective enemies. And a really simple squad command system you could do all this from first person. Now most games aren't going to be able to work with marines to get the movement right, or get DoD money for development. But the game came out 2005 so I think we could make something like it again.

You should check out ready or not again. The squad ai in the new update is insane and they know way more cqb than the teammates I get online. They are a bit buggy and sometimes overextend, but for the most part they do their job well. Now the enemy ai needs some tweaking cause they are a bit too op rn

You should make a video how Ubisoft Kill the Squad Based Tactical Shooter

Man you didn't have to retraumatize me with reminding me if the cult mission in Swat 4

lmao, whistling ravenshield. you deserve more subscribers dude.

Oh hey, guess it's time to re-look at Ready or Not

the hypothetical gameplay loop you stitched together from GR:Wildlands and Door Kickers 2 made me think of a pair of older games that I think did accomplish the FPS and team tactical planning combination well, which were the first two "Brothers in Arms" games, set during the US Army Airborne part of the Battle of Normandy in WW2. Both games involved tactical shooting, squad and team movement, real-life tactics, a fair degree of historical accuracy and realism in how combat was portrayed, and a tactical overview map function which let the player hit a key to pause action and analyze the combat situation on-the-fly to choose a course of action. It's now a 20-year-old series of games, and it didn't have many things we now take for granted in tactical shooters, but I think it combined the core gameplay elements that you (and I) feel are missing in so many newer games.

"That's right there were R6 games before Siedge" Vegas 2 boys upon hearing:🙂

Broo I loved raven shield

1:49 I can't put into words how much I miss this system. I replayed the hell out of the hospital map in R6: Covert Ops back in the day. It was my first tactical shooter and what got me into the genre. Edit: Most modern Tac FPS games have bad enemy AI. The devs crank up the reaction speed to inhuman levels instead of making them more tactical. Try fighting the Ground Branch bots on Veteran difficulty. They will sprint silently and swarm your position, then shoot you as soon as they spot a pixel of your body. The most popular mods in Ready or Not are Ai mods and it's for a good reason. They see and track the player's head through walls. They do physic-defying 180 spins, and they shoot so fast the SWAT AI can't react to them. I love the genre but I am getting tired of this BS.

I want a mix of an arma editor and insurgency sandstorm. I love just making little scenarios and playing them out

Give me ready or not in a military setting where you have to follow the rules of engagement from a military/war crime perspective and you have an amazing game.

Functioning AI is what's really missing in Ready Or Not

Remember scp 5k and also six days in fallujah as well.

Ready or Not got watered down. The AI used to actually hide and wait to ambush you. I can remember many games where I was magdumping a crack head and deafening my friends with my panicked screaming.

I still play raven shield 3 raven shield. There is actually still a community online

this video mirrored a conversation yesterday i was in but it instead went for tact shooters should use supernatural elements to add more variety and interest in the combat loop so it isn't just "guy with gun vs AI guy with gun" and make the combat of a tactical shooter more interesting. imagine having avoid shooting certain things like barrels not due to the explosion but due to the fact that you have demon magic running around the level and reviving enemies you killed before. moments like that are exactly why i've enjoyed hideous destructor so much, then there's the medical system which most games go for either a simple you loose hp you never recover style system but not actually having any granularity with you got shot but didn't have it penetrate your BP vest or you got shot and are now bleeding, etc. also destruction adds so much to game even if it's limited.

Very specific but sometimes it feels like EA uses the same AI script for every FPS game. The focus seems to be on sprinting to cover, using a voiceline saying what they are doing and the same grenade trick that was cool in Half-Life, COD feels the same way. I only really played Ghost Recon of the games you mention but I've played so many FPS games with lousy AI that are just supposed to function as props.

Totally agree with your points, I was waiting for a video like this to come out, because it had to be addressed, basic features like switching to different teammates, and AI, aren’t even implemented in most tactical shooters now, the customisation of ai and your character is ESSENTIAL, and rainbow six 3 did it perfectly, it’s crazy how it still outclasses modern shooters to this day

Also the sub genre of "horror tactical" is awesome.

I had rainbow six 3: black arrow on the og clear xbox as a kid I was never any good, was a dumb bumbling moron in fact, but I still remeber how cool it made me feel Sure I'd kill 2 enemies and get no scoped with a pistol bc I forgot to reload my gun but boy did I kill those two enemies and I felt like a master of my craft. That's what these games are missing, the feeling of being the best, planning everything or winging it entirely and just feeling like you're winning even when you loose

Holy shit, Raven Shield was the absolute shit back when I was kid. Excellent game, glad to see people giving it recognition.

the way you listed and explained every point without me even realising there actually is something missing in these games earned you a sub mate. Good job!

Rainbow Six 3 also has a fun mechanic where after finally reaching the hostage room and clearing the guards without them just killing the hostages, unless you immediately slap cuffs on the hostages they can just wander away, especially if you used flashbangs. This can result in them opening doors with angry armed Venezuelans behind them, getting your squad and themselves killed. Also you can cheese the guards by dropping a smoke grenade at the bottom of a door before letting your team open it. That way the guards don't see the man in tactical gear standing directly in front of the door trying to throw a flashbang in. Keeps them from executing the hostages too since that behavior only triggers when they aggro.

I'm gonna tell you what shooters these days are missing: 1. Tactical rolls. I know sliding is cool and all, but rolls just feel more realistic and have a more definite range, whereas it's difficult to look at someone doing a slide and guess when the slide is gonna stop. With tactical rolls, if you see someone doing a roll at a dumb spot and time, you can just shoot him where he's gonna land. 2. Car chases. We need missions where one side is carrying some sort of cargo and trying to get it into an extraction zone and the other side is trying to stop them. We used to have these and they were super fun. 3. Customizable match restrictions, where you can set rules before starting a match. Like "pistol-only" or "no off-map artillery" or whatever interesting rules people come up with. I know a lot of games already come with stuff like this with unranked custom lobbies, but I want to see these scenarios come up during regular gameplay, as a way of throwing a curveball at the players every now and then. 4. Canine companions. I know drones are cool and modern, but why can't we have stuff like police dogs, when going to hunt terrorists? Dogs could be a great way to give a tactical tool for locating an enemy without resorting to stuff like drones or hacking security cameras or whatever. People still use dogs for this stuff in real life, even though we have all that cool tech, because dogs just work. 5. More realistic aiming. Shooters, where you just point your cursor at the enemy head and click, and it's 100% of the time gonna blow the enemy's brains out regardless of distance or whether you're moving or not while shooting just detracts from the "tactical" aspect of shooters, where it just starts to feel like a reaction speed test. I'm not that young anymore, but I still want to enjoy these games, and I'm sure many of us older gamers feel this way.

This takes me back. I played the hell out of that first R6. Rogue spear as well. After planing the crap out of a mission and having it fail was just crushing. Miss those days.

ArmA you can command unit on your MAP, so it can be counted as an FPS RTS hybrid Simulation game.

I loved Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, Raven Shield (3), Lockdown and Ghost Recon Jungle Storm

It sucks how we had this peak of US Army squad combat sims in the early 2000s, when the tech was fairly limiting. I loved those games, and I even played them on console in addition to PC. But you used to have games like Ghost Recon and Delta Force, where you'd get a realistic bio for a soldier (something like "Joined US Army in 1987; completed paratrooper training in 1988;" etc.) and now it's all NAVY SEALs and MarPat camo and CIA sneaky shit. No squads, no believable soldiers, just secret agents. I really miss how grounded and authentic mainstream shooters were. I do blame CoD a bit, but even CoD attempted big army setpieces with the original Modern Warfare trilogy. The Ranger and Delta Force missions in MW2 and MW3 were some of the best single player world war 3 types of missions games have ever had. But the genre is just stuck in this action movie/CIA mindset these days.

The cover mechanic and physics of the Vegas games with the planning, map commands, and in game character switching of early Ghost Recon and Raven Shield would be great.

That Tarkov gameplay, that recoil looks very different from live EFT ;)

I could not agree more with this video. I really hope tactical shooters make a comeback, and don't neglect the awesome single-player experiences.

I used to spend hours in the planning section of Rainbow Six Raven shield with that epic soundtrack playing in the background. NOSTALGIA

That graveyard in the basement in SWAT 4 completely broke me; had to pause the game the first time.

What most games lack is pacing and suspense. If you're playing a game where you're bouncing off the walls all over the place it's not a "tactical" shooter. Swat 4 and ready or not are tactical shooters. Brothers in arms is. It requires slowing down. Taking cover. Flanking. Using different tools yet being able to take a moment to think and consider in the field without dying easily every 10 seconds (ruling out games like Team Fortress). The key element is slowing down to be able to think and consider. Without dying/losing when the player does.

Rainbow Six Vegas and Vegas 2 were some of my favorite games as a kid.

Raven shield with mods is a top tier shooter that is always installed on my pc

I think recent AI development will eventually find its way into games and especially tactical shooters. When you don't need to have the "right friends" to form a team in this genre, more people may find this enjoyable. Sorry, EFT is not a tactical shooter as much as fanboys want it to be. Glad you didn't really cover it in this context.

man, raven shield, so fucking good. Its hard to believe how insanely well they nailed special operations way back then, and we are just now starting to see stuff that good again (dk, no plan b, ground branch, and TAVR) also, tavr also made me fall in love with door related cqb. lol

Damn that title screen brings me right back.

Ready or Not Teammate A.I. was completely revamped with the most recent update... but suspect A.I. took such a strong hit, that the player count went down by 10,000.

I agree with this but the reason that what you shown in the visual impression is really hard to make is not because it would require a lot of coding but it would have to be made perfectly so that it doesn't stop the flow of the game because a lot of people really like to go in with a small amount of planing and little idea on what the map layout may be but to even try to play the game good it would be required to stop the game and plan witch is either leaving you fully exposed to any enemy that may come to you or stopping the game flow witch as said before may not be liked by some amount of player base

Honorable mentions to Delta Force and Frozen Synapse.

I miss the actual “Tom Clancy” gems. Nothing today gets close other than what/how you mentioned.

Ghost Recon very well may be "just Far Cry" now but god damn if that's not the best Far Cry you've ever played. One year ago Wildlands got the first person mod which on the max difficulty/no HUD turns the casual cover shooter into one of the best tactical experiences I've ever had with my friends (that got me into the tactical shooter genre). It's still a child's play compared to actual tactical shooters, but if you're new to the genre it's a great point of entry and a balance between FCs of the world and hardcore milsims.

I'm glad to say that his description of SWAT AI in Ready or Not is now outdated with the 1.0 Update

Ghost Recon Heroes Unleashed was also a blast.

black hawk down had room clearing where you were part of the stack. The game would have a lightly visible line that showed your personal path to walk along the wall. and the AI covered the other angles.

it's nice to see someone talking about tactical shooters while not being bitter about siege for once, even if it's just until i scroll down to the comments

"Best quad nods ever" that KSP ReShade preset ("True Night Vision, A Night Vision Goggle Reshade for KSP") would like to have a word. More realistic and can be used in tons of games. Currently using it in Fallout 4 lol Edit: holy shit you can't turn on IR lasers for AI in Arma 3, I knew about Blood Brothers but didn't know how far the customization went.

Old Rainbow Six and Old Ghost Recon are sure blast.

The quick and easy answer to why modern friendly squad AI are scarce, and why the ones that do exist seem basically braindead? Open worlds and huge maps. Older games could get away with having their AI act a lot smarter because they had smaller, simpler and/or more linear maps on average. Its easier for devs to plan interactions in smaller spaces with less variables to worry about. Newer games with bigger maps and more variables to worry about makes programming AI a lot more resource-intensive, so making them immortal/tanky mobile turrets is the quick and easy way to go about things, if the devs could be bothered to expend the resources to make them at all.

One of the major gripes I've had with the small-unit tactical shooter genre has been a lack of mechanical stakes for the player and lack of good AI. Two games have nearly had this; Insurgency Sandstorm's Hardcore coop and Ready Or Not. In the former you had the tension of loosing your equipment upon death and the latter had you following ROE and watching out for civilians. But both have been plagued by the lackluster AI that's unpredictable in the wrong way. I.E. not in the "untrained amateur pulling off unorthodox maneuvers" and more in the "snap aiming to dome you with their barrel pointing in the wrong way"-type of unpredictable. It's a genre that I feel has devolved into shooting galleries with neat looking levels spliced up by playing tactical dress-up. I also think that the tac-shooter genre has suffered greatly from pursuing modern standards of photo-realism. Being a niche genre it means that a lot of limited resources need to be out on the graphics of the game, but then they rarely have the resources to spare for optimization, thus limiting the already niche playerbase. But worst of all this pursuit for graphical realism is made at the cost of tactical realism. Most notable example being the use of baked lighting, sure it looks neat, but if the lighting was less concerned with photorealism then dynamic lighting could be used for day-night cycles and using breakers to turn off interior lighting (like Ground Branch does, albeit without AI that reacts to darkness). Or having destructible walls to create your own paths of breaching. Ready Or Not is sadly yet again a negative example of this, where they valued fancy light-maps over the ability for the player to cut off lights (and once again AI that doesn't react to darkness). Tactical Shooters is a genre I so dearly love, yet one that causes so much pain and longing by its unfulfilled potential. I have tactical-shooter-itches I go to get scratched by modded games from two or three decades ago and it's just plain tragic how recent iterations have fallen short.

Raven Shield > Siege R6 has lost its identity entirely Also which mods are used in the Raven Shield and SWAT 4 footage? Supply Drops and First Responders, I think?

Didn’t realize I needed to play old rainbow 6 and ghost recon games

One minute and thirty-eight seconds, and seriously, I'm heartbroken with nostalgia.

You know what's awesome? Star Wars: Republic Commando

"Rainbow Six got me into tactical shooters." "Raven's Shield or Vegas 2?"

my dream infiltration game is like this: - on time limited missions, you can sacrifice some time for having the map filled out, as if your HQ dug up the blueprints for the location you are entering. otherwise you show up earlier to the scene without any map info, and it gets filled out as you and your team progress and as HQ works half pace now to get the map for you. the idea is that it allows you to pick between quick and efficient or slow and methodical. - some missions don't have a time limit, instead you can do recon on the situation until you are ready, the more info the better the plan - MGS like enemies, but they have stats that scale, such as intelligence, situational awareness, willpower to carry out their mission, and firepower depending on the details of the operation - unpredictable hostages and non-combatants, sometimes people are just dumb and can fuck everything up. i am okay with that, i'm the trained professional (supposedly) and i am expected to deal with the situation as is. this is when planning ahead really comes into use - this is a big one, being able to teach your AI teammates in training sessions, you show them how you want them to clear certain rooms, how close to follow you, when to reload(and so on with anything else) but with a great all around starting point so you can just jump in and play without worrying about this too much, but they also learn as they go. - voice commands, would be cool to maybe have a simple AI chat thing going on so if you say something that requires context, your teammates are able to understand you better ("living room cleared, entering hallway, hallway formation now" and they just GET IT lol) - fully realized environments that can be damaged and broken, but can work for you or against you (hostage doesn't have shoes? that glass we broke earlier may pose a problem, let's bust out this back door) - a lot of realism, but only the fun kind, i'm sure this is different for everyone, so just imagine what you like and it's this bulletpoint lol and a bunch of other stuff, along with what was stated in the video.

Thank you so much for complimenting Ground Branch’s dedicated high/low ready feature at 5:40. It needs to be implemented in every game ever.

Rainbow six ravenshield is one of my all time favorite games, I wish they’d remaster it. The planning phase is so fucking cool, more games need this!

My dad showing me rainbow 6 vegas 2 when I was like 5 got me into tactical shooters and now it’s the only genre I play

Nothing ever touched rainbow six part 1 to raven shield

Swat 4 gives you ptsd

I just realized this was posted on my bday last year

The Regament & Close Combat: First to Fight - You missed these games!

R63 would make an amazing VR game.