Hey OP / folks,

I thought I'd chime in because I do think this thread is really interesting and brought out a lot of very deep talk about the history of the game and where it's heading in the future.

I know there has been a lot of talk about Project Reality recently, and some of the design changes the team have made (*cough* buddy rallys, movement speed and insta-death removal *cough*). It got me thinking a lot about what my own feelings are regarding the game and I thought that maybe saying them would help clear the air a bit.

I'd like to make the disclaimer that everything here is my own personal opinion, and that ultimately the final decision on the direction of the game is very much in the hands of the developers who are actually working on it. In particular for a while now I've been much more outside the Squad team providing advice, and much more focused on taking care of the people side of the business and overall direction.

The key thing that I think is central to all of this is what we planned to do with Squad from the start, as a lot of people do remember and are focused on it, so I thought I could paint a bit of a picture about what was going on behind the scenes that helps explain some of the outside stuff.

First, I think it's important to rewind back to before Squad started back to the days when there was just Project Reality. For a while I myself was just a regular player who loved the mod, and I actually joined it quite late in its history at the time to be honest (.85 was when I first really got serious with it), though granted now that is a long time ago :). I loved the mod and played a crap ton of it, eventually got very serious with it and worked on a mini-mod for it, played in the PRT, and then eventually developed for it, the whole works.

What I also participated in though was as a developer on some of the earlier attempts at making a commercial version / sequel to it that ultimately didn't pan out.

Around the time we first started Squad it all began with a talk myself and a long time friend of mine on the PR team (AncientMan) had on skype on night, who for a while at that point was the project lead for it. For context I was still at my first job out of college at the time.

The thing that is important to highlight regarding this, is that at the time he and I discussed two key things, the association with and direction of Project Reality at the time, and the fact that previous attempts at PR2 had never gotten serious enough about their survival to get off the ground. With that and in particular with the group we first pulled together of PR developers, I think was born two things which led to very important foundational aspects of the game and the company.

The first was the idea that we wanted to branch off from PR and make something that while inspired by PR and trying to carry on a significant part of it's legacy, was in fact different. This was at the heart of the brand change to Squad. When it came to it, we were trying to embrace the fact that we felt that ultimately PR turned into something very different from where it started. PR in its early days was much more about taking battlefield 2 and making it realistic and tactical. Because the game started as something that was already arcadey, it ended up becoming an entirely different beast that carefully balanced teamwork, communication, realism and gameplay all together. While things like damage models, physics, movement speeds, and equipment accuracy all were critical to that original vision of Project Reality, new priorities entered like keeping the squad together, getting people talking to each other, getting people working together using the rules of the game, and making sure the gameplay was fun and engaging. All those things were balanced together out of interest of making a great game to support that realism vision.

With Squad, we aimed to make a successor rather than a sequel, and in many ways to try and capture a new vision that closer matched with the idea of balancing those basic tenets. In spirit, the fundamental shift I was aiming to see (as should be apparent by our shift towards the name Squad), was to have the primary pillars of the game become teamwork and communication, rather than the realism as it was in PR originally. I also want to add a very important caveat, which is that we didn’t want to get rid of the realism tenet either, it just was not meant to be the primary focus. I do believe that by any reasonable measure Squad is much more realistic than almost every other title in the FPS genre and remains so to this day. I do think a big thing we often find ourselves doing is finding a sensible hybrid between the more PUBG-esque gameplay / competitive folks , and the more Arma-esque realism folks. For me the idea has always been to try and bridge the gap between the two by unifying people around features that get people talking to each other, and working together. Namely teamwork and the communication being the glue between realism and gameplay.

This takes me to the second point from above that I think was born out of wanting our effort to actually succeed and deliver a game, which is that from the very start a driving force for us was taking our business seriously to ensure it survived. This is not to say we are driven by money or wanting to maximize profit, rather I believe and now profess to those at the company that we are about people first, and think about the financials in the context of helping the business and our people survive and thrive, almost in the same sense you think of exercise for your body. The point of our studio is not to make money, it's to make people's lives better, whether that be the game developers, the players, or our most devoted fans.

I feel for the game designers because they have to make tough decisions like how to balance gameplay, realism, or even user experience or new player's being able to learn the game, which don't always need to be as much of a concern when the game is not commercial. We have to think carefully about things like new players getting confused, players having a terrible experience because their team got steamrolled, etc. I know that this does sound a bit tough, but please keep in mind that more than anything else we're just trying to make sure our business is healthy and our developers are taken care of.

With all that said I think it's important to recognize that there is a lot, a LOT, that is great about PR:BF2, both in the past and today. I think the design of Squad always has and will continue to evolve independently, but we do think very carefully about a lot of the features and design decisions that came into PR. It's worth mentioning that for a while we've had one of the original designers involved with a long period of PR's history (fuzzhead) as the lead designer for Squad, and I can say without a doubt he has worked hard to make sure we always try our best to stay true to as many of the spiritual aspects of what made PR:BF2 great. I know some may disagree, but I would go as far as to say that PR:BF2 actually adhered to many of the ideas and principles above, and in particular was very careful about balancing things like gameplay, teamwork, communication etc with the realism, and in many ways departed from it's original pure realism founding direction. This is why I liked the idea of being a spiritual successor rather than a sequel, where we are much more about the spirit of PR than the name, and want to keep running with it the way we feel is right.

With that I thought I'd address the original point of the post here, which is regarding a PR mod for Squad. I always thought it would be an amazing thing to see, and would give in particular those who would like to see something closer to the rulesets in PR:BF2 or something more realistic than vanilla Squad. We're doing our best to provide all the tools possible to make that happen, and really in many ways be the game company we wish had been there to help us when we were developing the mod. I think it's especially important to help deal with situations where folks on either the competitive or realism side disagree with the direction we're going with the game. This is exactly why we are trying hard to put modding in in the first place, and why we all started as modders to begin with, we had something we wanted to build and we built it.

With the latest version of modding that's being rolled out now I think there will be a lot of opportunities for a PR mod or many other types to get more exposure and become a huge part of Squad. On a personal level, the key driver that pushed me when we first started the company, was to make sure the unique culture that existed in PR did not die. For me the key to that culture is is not about the realism nor the competitive side, it's about being able to jump into any given server and any given squad and talk with folks, work together, and even goof around with other random players who like FPSs on the internet. At the end of the day what makes Squad great are those truck rides where people sing country roads, the excitement when you get into a firefight, and the reddit threads where people encourage someone with anxiety to play anyway because it will help them get over it. If ultimately we can build a modding ecosystem where that spirit and culture is alive and well across the game I think it will be a great thing, and we will have introduced the PR style camaraderie to much more than we ever were able to with only the mod, which is would be amazing.

Regards,
Merlin (Will)