You know whats even scarier? Out of the thousands of devices produced I bet none of them have gone through proper quality control and testing (because it requires documentation, which kind of goes against the whole “covert” thing), which means the failure rates are probably through the roof. This means that there are most likely dozens of unexploded devices still around filled with plastique. This means 2 things, 1st you essentially gave away military grade explosives to uncontrolled civilians which can be harnessed and reused for other malicious purposes, and 2nd if a media illiterate civilian doesn’t know to chuck their device in a tar pit, they will continue to walk around with an unexploded bomb strapped to their leg for a long time.

All in all, whoever came up with this Idea, should be gunned down in the streets like a dog. Or at least be prosecuted for every confirmed civilian death.

At least for me, it does. It got so bad that watching a Twitch stream caused my phone to overheat to the point of freezing up and turning off. In comparison, the offical Twitch app doesn’t cause the same issue, neither does Brave. Watching YouTube on Firefox drains the battery basically 2% per minute. OK, my phone is older and runs a custom rom, but other apps run flawlessly.

Unfortunatly this wasn’t Android exclusive. The Firefox Android App sucked ass in the past and will probably suck ass for the foreseeable future. There are currently multiple support and Reddit threads going about insane battery drain and heat build-up caused by the Firefox App (even when suspended and battery optimized). The UI is barebones and lacks basic features like closing tabs from the navigation bar or opening new tabs by scrolling left on the rightmost tab. Even something as simple as having actual tabs akin to the desktop version is not present, instead you have a tab list or grid view that barely manages to load previews for each open website. The native video player also hasn’t been touched in a literal decade.

All in all Firefox Android is a horrible experience that has only the ability to use extensions going for it.

This is a genuine invitation for disscussion.

Let me tell you, over more than a decade I’ve played a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2, like a lot a lot.

Last year, in December the servers for it got officially shut down by EA. And you know how I felt? I barely cared. It is still one of my favorite games of all time, and while there are private servers still active, I have no intention to play. And the reason for it that is simple. I’ve played enough of that game, I feel fully unsatisfied with the time I’ve spend with it. Its like 2 people growing apart over time.

Just to play devils advocate here. What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games. If you haven’t managed to get enough joy out of something during a decade of you life, then maybe the developer isn’t responsible for your personal issues.

By this time The Crew 2 would’ve been 6 years old. I agree that’s fairly short time to turn of the servers, but would people be still as frantic about the server shut down in say 2028? Wouldn’t 10 years be enough? Why straight up go for indefinite access.

Unfortunatley, it doesn’t work that way if one side has nukes.

I really recommended you the 2nd Misson in the Soviet Campaign in CTA Gates of Hell. It took me a good 3 days to get through it but its as close to All Ghillied Up as you can get.

Quite the contrary, I love this subgenre more than any other one regarding shooters. But I’ve never seen it done right. If you know any game that doesn’t end in frustration about the AI, please tell me.

I’m more than OK with micromanagement in games, but that’s not how it should work in shooters. Men of War is a good example, it’s a strategy series with a notorious amount of micromanagement, but the difference is, you get all the information needed to manage your units and you as a player are not part of the battlefield. No enemy unit can look up in the sky and shoot down your birds-eye camera. But in shooters, not only do you have limited information about your enemies and your own team, you can also be killed during micromanagement. This is not how it should work. Your friendlies being a little bit more pro active is the least one could ask for.

Like imagine you storm Osama’s hideout and every time your soldiers have to ask you - the captain if its OK to shoot the terrorist in the room, or if its OK to move onto the next room, or its OK to take cover, that’s how it feels.

And because you’re essentially responsible for every single action of your team, you also feel responsible for every single mishap, whether it actually was your fault or not.

Also modern shooters themselves have already fairly demanding controls, pairing that with the ability to command different units means compromises have to be made in user experience. Your commands are usually limited by line of sight, you can’t tell your units to advance behind this wall and search for cover. Arma 3 tries to address this issue with the “Command Mode” that let’s you zoom out the camera to a birds-eye view, but that’s essentially what a strategy game is anyway. You also can’t command multiple squad simultaneously, each squad needs separate attention, while the AI computer can do everything at once, putting you even more at a disadvantage.

Developers also rarely bother implementing actual military techniques. The only 2 examples I can think of are Arma 3s combat advance (half the units cover, the other half moves) or Ready or Not’s room clearing. What ends up happening is, people just take 4 machine gunners with scopes or 4 snipers, since all units essentially behave the same AI wise, there no downside to that.

In my opinion a squad control game should essentially play itself, meaning that if your character dies, the rest of your AI should be smart enough to finish the mission or at least retreat on their own, just like a real squad would if their commander dies. The challenge shouldn’t come from janky controls or cheating AI, it should come from having the odds stacked against you. The goal shouldn’t be to just finish the mission, but have everybody come out alive. A lot of those games become almost trivial, if you just leave the AI at spawn and run through the mission yourself.

I’ve played all the games you mentioned and I am a huge fan of squad control games. I’ve recently looked through Steam games with tags “single player” and "shooter"most recent titles are primarily arcade style shooters. One thing I’ve noticed while playing CTA Gates of Hell is that no AI, whether friendly or not has ever had any sense of self preservation, and this is true for any game. So what ends up happening is, you as a player always end up babysitting your AI. You expect a squad full of capable soldiers, but end up having one capable one and a punch of crayon eating babies. That’s why most modern titles cheat with their friendly AI, making them immortal, invisible, teleporting them and giving then wall hacks. I’ve mostly given on the Idea that a squad control game can have satisfying AI interaction. If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.

While I see that nothing like this currently exists on the market, I can kind of see why. The reason old school shooters look and play like they do is because of technical limitations. There’s a reason new Ghost Recon games don’t look like Ghost Recon 1 anymore, even if Ghost Recon 1 is still available and playable today. And if you’re interested in ultra janky gameplay, we have Arma 3. I just don’t understand who this game is for exactly.

Fusion reactors are roughly 10 years away.

Or importing new maps and characters, imagine somebody porting the Resident Evil Mansion or Raccoon Police Station with the Resident Evil Characters. Playing Resident Evil 1 with 5e rules would certainly be something. People have already done it with Men of War Assault Squad 2.

Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make. I bet my soul on that Concord was quickly thrown together in the last couple years by temp diversity hires and 3rd party contractors, or at least the version of Concord that we got now. I love that one of the devs said that “a lot of talented people worked on it”. If it really took them 8 years to make that is the oppsotite of talent. In 8 years I could probably get get a double masters in programming and game development and make a better game myself.

I would love to get a code break down and see how Bethesda spaghetti recoded the Skyrim horse mechanic into a vehicle.