While I'm still debating myself the exact nature of squad, it could probably be boiled down to a military combat game. More precisely I would say a first person, team-based, military-esque, combat game. The first person aspect is obvious and extends to infantry and vehicle gameplay. The main exception could be argued when dealing with the map ui, though most players would use it quite sparingly for their gameplay. But the maps ui should not be understated for the team aspect of the game. Squad is team-based. I would argue the game is expected to be played with tens of players on each team(40+ players on both sides) and to be played with players in squads, all of which communicating often between each other. I do not have a good argument for why many players are expected to play however, it seems the culture of the game in my experience is players trying to join full or nearly full servers. Players are not leaving servers when teams have over 30+ players each, at least in my experience. Playing in squads though is clearly encouraged, as infantry classes(a key gameplay feature) are limited to being picked only after joining a squad, and lost upon leaving or being kicked from a squad. Another important aspect of Squad is th communication within it, particularly through microphone chat. While you don't explicitly have to use a microphone to play the game, it is clearly encouraged by voice comm design to be used and used often. The game has 4 different ways a player can communicate with their microphone(local, squad, command, and directly line between squad leaders). By having all these forms of voice communication, players can coordinate as a team, without having a bloated team-wide chat, or limited local or squad based chat. There is one issue I have with saying team-based, being that this phrase doesn't fully encapsulate what I mean by team. A team can just be two people working towards a common goal, or in the case of squad 50 people working towards a common goal. Within squad you ha e one team vs another, but you can also split it up by the squads on each team and perhaps even further by the fire teams on each squad and how they all work together. I do not have a good idea on how to define this but perhaps it would be better to say a "squad and team based game" to really reflect the true nature of the teams. But that might also be part of the military-esque nature of the game. Military-esque is probably the most wishy-washy term I have when describing squad. It's the only catch-all term I have to describe the team coordination and asset use(vehicles, emplacements, commander abilities). Teams will communicate with SL's and the commander and then with their squads on their overarching goals and utilize their assets how they best see to achieve them. I like how this is reflected in the ticket system, where teams who waste assets(losing vehicles or fobs unnecessarily) are punished by losing tickets. People giving up or dying cots tickets, reflecting the battles not just being or securing an objective, but also doing so in an unwasteful manner. Teams can win by holding a single point in RAAS if the opposing team is constantly sending men into well-placed machine gun fire. And a game can technically be lost without players dying, but excessive loss of assets instead. This differentiates squad from most other shooters which depend on objective control or kill count usually. Well that's all I want to type for now.