Call me cheap, but I hate EA and don’t want to give them any money on principle, but I’d like to try BF6 and see how it’s changed since the beta.
Call me cheap, but I hate EA and don’t want to give them any money on principle, but I’d like to try BF6 and see how it’s changed since the beta.
Every game with a billion Dollar budget like battlefield will have a turd like EA attached.
If you want to be morally superior and boycott them you will have to make some drawbacks in production quality. No game by an Indie or AA studio can be “almost exactly like battlefield”.
Production quality has nothing to do with it. Battlefield 2 was made 20 years ago by a much smaller team than makes Battlefield today, and I’d be happy to see teams that size or smaller approximating the game mode, map size, and systems of a Battlefield game. The truth is that the genre evaporated. Everyone chases live service, and if you’re just making a live service, what niche do you fill that Battlefield proper doesn’t serve? I’m starved for some good shooters lately.
If you want good FPS, there are tons of really excellent. But I’m getting more that you are after arcadey military FPS.
What I don’t want is a live service, and I can’t find any multiplayer FPS made lately that are built to survive the servers being shut down. The most recent I’ve found is Hypercharge: Unboxed, which has a decent deathmatch, and even that was 5 years ago.
So being specific, you are looking for a local multiplayer FPS? Or are you open to self-hosted dedicated servers as a multiplayer option? Also do you want it to be military or are other genres ok? Just trying to really narrow it down so I can see if something I know would work.
I like many kinds. Split-screen multiplayer is great; privately hosted servers that work on LAN without a call home are great; both are rare. I know there’s been a resurgence of “boomer shooters” that harken back to the mid to late 90s, and I can appreciate one of those every now and then, but the kind I miss most are the ones that came out of Half-Life, from the late 90s until the 2010s. They typically had a campaign and a deathmatch built out of reused assets from the campaign. Maybe there was co-op to the campaign. Maybe there was capture the flag. Battlefield’s thing is Conquest, and that’s still great. I hunted down a copy of Battlefield 2 and booted up my old copy of Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) to get my fix lately, lol.
There is definitely a dearth of good FPS that fit that mold. I was a fan of the same kinds growing up. Started on Doom and moved through the whole development of the genre. Stopped enjoying stuff as much when slow shooters and cover shooters became prevalent. Hated Halo for example. It’s ok now, but not a formula I enjoy as much.
Anyways that said, if you are looking for deathmatch without centralized servers, I can’t think of anything recent off the top of my head. There is a lot of good fps single player experiences out there. I liked Hrot for example because it taps in to some of the Quake 1 vibes, but has no multiplayer. Doom 2016 and Eternal were fun single player wise. But their Deathmatch is centralized servers. Turbo Overkill was a lot of fun, but no multiplayer. Same for Wrath, Ion Fury, Ultrakill, Prodeus, stalker 2, and others. There’s a new Painkiller coming out Oct 21 but I think multiplayer will likely be centralized servers since it’s crossplatform.
I can go on listing great games but I am coming up blank on anything matching exactly what you are after. Everything I can come up with has a comprise to it. Sorry man. Hard to find something exaclty like the gold classics like that.
See, I was way more into the Halo era of shooters that you weren’t as much of a fan of. I’m sure the pendulum will swing back again, but it just hasn’t happened yet. Doom 2016, for instance, was a game I enjoyed, but I was absolutely not looking for more of it by the time I finished it. Metal: Hellsinger was a good twist on Doom’s formula and got me more interested in playing it than Eternal or Dark Ages did. But outside of that, I can’t say I’m too hungry for that kind of shooter. I’m more interested in Phantom Fury than Ion Fury.