Indiefields: Battlefield-Like EA-Dislike

Empires is a really fun, quite old source mod where a commander on each team plays a sort of RTS and the rest of each team pilots all the vehicles and captures objectives. The graphics are outdated sure, but it is quite fun and development is fairly mature on the game.

Changelog:
Features

    Major overhaul to the visibility system that drives the networked information used by the mini-map (and in-game visibility of entities).
        For more information see the detailed write-up here. https://www.empiresmod.com/posts/visibility-system-overhaul/
    Updated the resource income display on the HUD and mini-map:
        Resource delta and income values now show up to two decimal places when appropriate (e.g. a refinery output of 1.75 will now display as-is, instead of rounding to 1.8).
        Decimal places are hidden entirely if the value is a whole number.
        Slightly increased the width of the top-right HUD panel to accommodate the extra digits.
        Resource delta now uses a moving average of changes over the last 1 second, instead of displaying changes instantly and clearing them after 1 second. This change was made in response to player feedback that the numbers were updating too frequently and were distracting.

Bugfixes

    Fixed a server crash relating to the command vehicle being unexpectedly removed.
    Fixed a server crash relating to maps that spawn buildings without an initial team being set.
    Fixed a bug with capture points awarding victory to the incorrect team.
    Fixed a problem with ablative armor’s HUD icon. The VTF texture file became corrupt due to an issue in the build pipeline that publishes the game.
    Fixed a bug where the Biological Machine Gun’s damage-over-time effect was being unintentionally reduced by armor angle modifiers.

Script/Game Balance
Infantry Weapons

    SMG3 (NF Heavy Carbine)
        Damage reduced from 32 to 30
        Minimal Damage reduced from 18 to 14
        FalloffEnd reduced from 10000 to 5000
        Clip Size increased from 12 to 14
        Reduced overall accuracy

Vehicle Armors

    Adjusted the angle modifier range from 0–45° to 0–60°. Damage now decreases more gradually, reaching the full reduction only at impact angles greater than 60°. The modifier is used by all armor types, most notably Deflective armor.
    Regenerative
        Increased Regeneration from 3/s to 4/s
    Absorbant
        Increased Speed to Damage Reduction from -0.00007 to -0.0001
    Capacitive
        Reduced Damage to Heat from 0.05 to 0.02
        Reduced Speed to Damage Modifier from 0.000035 to 0 Ablative
        Increased Damage to Heat from 0 to 0.01
            This is something all armors have, it was forgotten until now
    Deflective
        Reduced Angle Modifier Damage Reduction from 1 to 0.8

Vehicle Engines

    Engine heat from driving input is now only applied if handbrake is off and the vehicle is moving.
        This has been changed to combat Fission engine cooling being applied while stationary. (Handbrake or driving against walls etc.)
    Fission
        Reduced Heat at Max from -4 to -3
    Bio Diesel
        Increased Cooling by 0.25
    3 Phase
        Reduced Heat Output at Max from 4 to 3

Vehicle Weapons

    Nuclear Warhead
        Increased Weight from 150 to 180
        Increased Heat from 75 to 100
    Railgun
        Added armor penetration. 20% of damage will ignore armor. (Calculated after damage multipliers and armor resistances.)
    Salvo Homing Missiles
        Heat from 5 to 4

Other changes

    Explosions that apply heat or biological damage-over-time now reduce effects based on distance to the explosion (falloff).
    Reduced the rate at which the repair station repairs the armor and hull of command vehicles.
        Reduced Repair Station Repair (Hull) from 75 to 5
        Reduced Repair Station Repair (Armor) from 0.25 to 0.02
```5

Well, that first test has now been and gone. And the consensus? Despite performance issues related to memory leaks and other developmental nasties, an "overwhelming amount of players" showed up to see what's been cooking for the past year and a half. But we only have to jump into the comments to see that a good chunk of the paying playerbase is far from thrilled.

...

For those calling it "dead" and having moved onto Battlefield, that's fine. Your PC can handle it. Battlebit, in my honest opinion, is the alternative big-battle FPS simulator for those whose rigs can't keep up with the modern multiplayer shooter. Even with the refreshed graphics, Battlebit's minimum requirements still support the GTX 970 GPU. Once the kinks are ironed out, anyway. That's one that celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. Professor Oak would be giving it a Pikachu if he could. The second-hand market has it for less than the price of the game, for goodness sake.

With more playtests planned subsequent weekends from here on out, keep getting those reports in if you're dying for this low-poly Battlefield rival to live to fight another day.

What I don't understand is why isn't mod support a primary goal of development of Battlebit? I have been harsh on the devs of this game before and whatever they probably don't need any more negativity from rando internet people but to be honest they have demonstrated that they don't understand how to do gun and game mechanic balance right with the battlefield-like formula. I typically like more ""realistic"" shooters just because they aren't so frantic, but I can dig this kind of arcade fun if there is actually a diversity of competitive playstyles.... which there wasn't. There was smg/medic/rpg players and other people roleplaying as less useful classes... This would actually be TOTALLY fine if the Battlebit developers prioritized adding mod support so custom servers and gamemodes could proliferate and the community could organically find the most fun gun balance settings, Battlebit is fun to play competitively when things come together no doubt about that but the success of the game isn't dependent on it being perfectly suited to try-hard overly serious players. **In my opinion the developers turn the poor gun balance/game mechanics balance issue from a minor one into an existential one by not prioritizing mod support.

TL;DR People love Battlebit, let them help fix it and build it out in new directions.

🎉 Easy Red 2 turns 5! 🎂 To celebrate its 5th anniversary, the game just received its biggest update ever! 🚀

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been hard at work improving all base game campaigns, reworking dozens of weapons, vehicles, animations, and sounds, adding tons of new uniforms, and polishing the core gameplay to give Easy Red 2 a fresh, modern look and feel. 💥

This marks a major milestone for Easy Red 2, right on its 5th birthday since launch on Steam. 🕹️

Have you tried it?

This gameplay has narration, but not a lot of youtubers seem to give OHD good coverage and I think this actually gives a good idea of what the game feels like to play as a somewhat newer player (not calling the youtube creator a newb, they are just playing OHD with an approachable vibe).

You get ambushed a lot, things happen very fast, but also the gun recoil isn't balanced to require you to be an ultimate try hard to get kills, any gun is competitive at pretty much any range.

Yes when you die from being shot out of nowhere you don't get a killcam that reveals where the player was that got you, but that also means that when you are sneaky and get a clever position that you don't immediately get revealed the second you actually get somebody.

In short, just because vanilla Operation Harsh Doorstop gameplay is semi-realistic doesn't actually make it a hardcore game to me. In my opinion this kind of game is FAR easier to jump into than more "accessible" arcadey shooters like Apex Legends, Counter Strike or Call Of Duty games where there is a dizzying range of very specifically balanced weapons that need to be employed in certain situations to be effective or else you get steamrolled and they all have purposefully obtuse gun recoil that you have to wildly try to keep under control to get kills because you need tons of bullets to get a kill.

Nope, in OHD you just point and shoot, you only need 1-3 bullets, so you don't need to master the game to win engagements against sweaty players, you just need to be smarter and more aware than they are. Even if you flub it and miss your shots, the suppression mechanics make it so the enemy player will still have been negatively impacted giving you another chance to press your advantage.

Also sniping is a blast with the realistic bullet trajectory/mechanics!

Anyways, to summarize I am posting this video because I think it demonstrates how fun Operation Harsh Doorstop is despite appearing like it is some tryhard milsim with no fun and all military roleplaying vibes. By the end, this youtuber is a bit frustrated, but you can also see that most of the time when things didn't work out it isn't because he wasn't sweaty enough, it was because he wasn't paying attention.

Edit Also, OHD is moddable, the Casualfield workshop mod makes OHD much more into a Call Of Duty or vanilla Battlefield like game with killcams, more arcadey health and gun recoil etc... So this isn't just a sem-realistic game, it is a modding platform!

From the devs of Rising Storm series

'83 is a 40v40 squad based, objective focused online tactical first person shooter set in a Cold-War-Gone-Hot scenario. It's designed with 'accessible realism' for the most enjoyable, but still hardcore experience that gets you to the action fast, without losing the lethality of war.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059220/83/

C&C "inspired", awesome for a free game!

Some good tank action! I think this showcases gameplay of Easy Red 2 well.

I am going to start posting good example gameplay videos from indiefields to give a better idea of how these games feel in moment to moment gameplay.

I will start with my favorite game in the genre right now, Operation Hash Doorstop!

My intention is the opposite of posting cinematic trailers, I am going to post normal gameplay videos that feel as authentic to playing the game as possible to give a good window into them.

I was pretty negative about this game in a recent comment thread but I don't think it deserves the negative feedback of being abandoned and there is undoubtedly a lot of potential.

I hope they dunk on critics like me and make it better, it is at minimum a game to watch and is an approachable salient benchmark to discuss the indiefield genre from.

As much as I rag on this game, it blew a massive hole in the idea that the only way to make a battlefield-like game successful was big budget cinematic gameplay with eyebleeding graphics and I respect that.

I wouldn't write off Battlebit, I am willing to be proven wrong and heck this is WORLDS better than dealing with EA's bullshit, so go for it, check this game out!

When we say that '83 is a spiritual successor to the Rising Storm series, it's not only the accessible realism approach that makes '83 worth that title. Members of our team have worked on all previous Rising Storm titles, and also on the Red Orchestra franchise. Some of us have been in the biz of developing accessible realism games for the past 15 years. It's just what we do best.

It looks like a decent battlefield heroes type game, I am excited to try it whenever I get around to it...

New Features: Added new overhauled Anzio campaign along with 15 missions (Cassino map will come in next update)

Added new Polish & British Voice Actors/voicelines

Added new Uniforms for the British forces (Pattern 1937 Greatcoat and Leather Jerkin for cold weather environments.)

Added new grenades for UK and USSR (RPG 40, Gammon No.82, No.74 Sticky Bomb, Eihandgranate Mod.39, etc. )

Added new map and vegetation assets (tree stump variants, more electrical poles, Italian wall variants and all the new props used in Anzio campaign.)

Reworked Panzerfaust variants, reworked panzerfaust equip & added new throw away animations

Added MAB 38-42

Added new complex camouflage system with automatic environment adaptation system

Fully reworked German helmets along with adding the M42 version of Luftwaffe helmet (single decal, just the eagle) with breadbag, wires, net, winter cover and many other variants for M35 and M42

Added many new German SPG, Panzer crew and Luftwaffe uniforms

New US wool, paratrooper, and tank crew uniforms & more with various combinations

New Fiat 626 civilian textures

Added DUKW amphibious vehicle

Reworked Panzer III models & new variants added

Fixes and Improvements: Various fixes in many uniforms.

Reworked MAB 38A

New Winchester & Gewehr 43 animations

Various TPS & FPS animation reworks.

Reworked textures on every German vehicles

Improved Panzerfaust textures

Reworked various buildings and props

Added an "Ultra" animation quality settings for even smoother animations at distance on high end hardware.

Improved LUT, colors, shadows, sky, reflections, lighting and overall graphics

The linked video explains what happened with BattleBit Remastered. The TLDW is that it's stuck in eternal early-access because of feature creep and the devs not being able to use version control system (e.g. git) properly, so they cannot release smaller patches and bug fixes.

I haven't actually played Battlebit yet. I watched some gameplay on Youtube and added it to my wishlist. I wonder if it's worth buying – it's still being played by ~1000 people.

The first thing that has to be said about Angels Fall First is that it is a primarily designed as a match based competitive big map objective multiplayer team games with vehicles like Battlefront or Battlefield, but there is quite a small playerbase currently.

This is the only caveat I have to make in my recommendation for Angels Fall First (AFF).

It might seem like a fatal one, but the the second thing that has to be said about AFF is that the AI teammates are overall very good and most importantly utilize nearly the entire breadth of combat. Pretty much anything you see humans do in AFF you will see bots doing, and it isn't that the bots will fool you into thinking you are playing against humans.. that isn't the point.. it is that AFF's AI coupled with the command system creates essentially an RTS with two computer armies that automatically fight each other in space, on the ground and seemingly everywhere in between where you can jump in and take control of an individual unit or you can focus on commanding units/directing the team.

If AFF didn't have such a well integrated AI and command system, with such good automatic engagement of necessary team functions by AI routines the game automatically engages if you don't, I could not recommend AFF for $17 or otherwise, but that isn't how the game stands as I have pointed out. Also, there ARE people who play multiplayer, there are active servers that autopopulate with bots and you can definitely find servers that fill up, I just would hesitate to recommend the game if having fun was vitally dependent upon anybody else playing multiplayer at the same time you logged on.

Now the rest of the details about the game, the gunplay is solid and weapons are quite customizable. Time to kill with infantry weapons is sort of like halo, or Sector 9 if you ever played that. Each weapon is quite customizable though the defaults are fun and varied enough that you don't have to bother if you don't want.

Vehicles are a blast and while sometimes they look a little bit janky in their movement, but the actual feel of driving the vehicles and using them as dynamic weapons and transportation feels locked in and each of the vehicles feels distinct and coherent in purpose whether we are talking about ground vehicles, flying vehicles or spacecraft in the large scale space battles.

I HIGHLY recommend trying driving some of the vehicles with a gamepad or a steam deck (which this game runs great on!).

Conclusion I HIGHLY recommend this game as an offline bot basher like ravenfield, the pricepoint might seem high for that but you have to understand there is a lottttt of polish here for a LOTTTT of different vehicles, weapons, mechanics and maps. This game isn't some lazy assetflip or halfbaked project, clearly the developers have put an immense ammount of effort into making the vision they have for their game as approachable and yet mechanically deep and varied as possible!

As a final note, notice how long the development time has been for this game (originally an Unreal Tournament 3 mod) which started in 2015. This game is a labor of love and both the time commitment and the overall thorough and solid expansiveness of the game mechanics coupled with a clear focus to the game design makes Angels Fall First an easy recommendation!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/Angels_Fall_First/

http://www.strangelyinteractive.com/

New Gameplay Options

Acknowledging common feedback about AI and overall difficulty, we understand there are players who would like more forgiving gameplay, and others who expect a hardcore challenge where the player has the same survival rate as any other unit on the field.

Our team's vision definitely leans toward a easy-to-pick-up WW2 simulator, so we don't intend to make the game more arcade-like. However, we decided to accommodate arcade-like fans by reworking how difficulty settings work.

Players can now fully customize difficulty settings with tons of new sliders and buttons: modify AI accuracy, explosion radius, suppression effects, player damage, disable player auto-surrender, change stamina duration, gun overheat values, bullet gravity and more. Now you can change the gameplay to fit your preferences, or simply provide a way to play with different rules to break up repitition. You can create and save your difficulty presets, but the game will still offer default suggested presets that recreate how we intend the game to be played.

Roadmap for Easy Red 2 development

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1324780/view/4672011608170247757

This community is for battlefield-like first person/third person games that are made by indie developers.

My top three favorites right now are:

• Operation Harsh Doorstop

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop

• Easy Red 2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2

• Angels Fall Fall First

https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/Angels_Fall_First/

All three of these games include large levels with mixed infantry and vehicle gameplay focused around team objectives, which is what type of game indiefield is the intended community for. Games that fit the category of "indiefield" as I am vaguely defining here don't have to have vehicles in every mode or level but they shouldn't be an afterthought and they NEED to be in the game for it to count as an "indiefield" (think battlefront as a very arcadey example).

Why "indie"?

Because AAA studios no longer seem to be interested in simply selling you a multiplayer game you can play with friends who also bought said game. Everything is lootboxes, subscriptions services, battleplasses, predatory monetization and enshittification of game mechanics and overall game quality. Am I bitter? Yes. Am I wrong? Not as wrong as I should be for how big of a generalization I just made.

There aren't a lot of indie/small developers in this genre and often the successful games get bought out by much larger studios and are slowly choked to death. Larger studios making these types of games rarely have the incentive to actually create modding tools and allow creative new ideas to spawn from the framework of their games, and in many ways the genre is often unaccessible.

I called this community "indie"-field partially because so many of these indie games value mod support from the beginning as part of the core package of the game. What I think makes moddable games in this genre so important is they inherently make a good general basis for a whole variety of other modded games.

It is such a fun genre! What I like about these games is the satisfying blend of competitive deep gameplay with the ability to play more casual and focus on supporting teammates if you want. It is a bit like feeling like you are playing in an improvised orchestra where a variety of intensities and energies are needed to make everything pull together.

Do you have any favorite games that come to mind that are indie games like this? I am also fine with conversation about non-indie games in this genre such as battlefield and battlefront too, I just intend this community to be mainly focused on indie games that don't get as much coverage or attention and that geinuinely respect the player/customer.

Games I Want To Try

• Gates Of Hell

.... many others!