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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Musketshit is my name for the tiny genre of games that cast you in the perspective of an individual soldier in the era of gunpowder formation warfare. It is the vidya of men in muttonchops or powdered wigs. Most of it sucks but what's amazing is that it functions as a gaming experience at all.
THE GOLD STANDARD FOR GAMEPLAY: BATTLE GROUNDS III
If you told me that you could make a fun, well-balanced, action packed arena shooter based around the American Revolution I would think you were insane, but Battle Grounds III did it. The key is that it (and it has this in common with the other two games discussed) has to fib a little to make the gunning functional, and then it takes pains to make every weapon feel genuinely distinct. To begin, reloading is cut in roughly a quarter of the time it took IRL, so while real units expected to reload maybe 12 to 30 seconds, in Battle Grounds 3 it's something like 8-12 seconds. Very few games actually depict the entire process of loading a muzzleloader, instead lazily suggesting it by having the player mime fooling with a ramrod and cocking the gun without, y'know, all the steps that a musket has. This is important because 8-12 is still quite long experientially, but it's short enough that reloading doesn't feel punitive. It is just long enough that reloading in between gunfights is casual, but the decision to reload in a gunfight is very dicey without a screen in front of you, so gunning basically becomes a one-use ultimate that either connects and is decisive or doesn't. I like games with older actions, like Isonzo and Hunt: Showdown, where the pace of gunfire is slow enough that everything feels weighty and discrete and memorable, and this pushes that to the extreme; you actually do feel shots going off, and when a shot does go off, you're committed to melee until the fight resolves. Reloads cannot be broken, so you never casually reload; reloading is a decision to be helpless momentarily.
Battle Grounds III puts a lot of thought into how aiming works, which is important because the way it handles aiming is meant to be suggestive of the feeling of fighting in formation in a game that otherwise, paradoxically, has the movement scheme of an old fashioned arena shooter (it's based on Half Life, to give a sense of how fast and video-gamey it is). Aiming essentially takes place in one of three stances. Guns are always either leveled for bayonet fighting/hip fire, or they're shouldered to be aimed. When leveled you have this circular reticule where the bullet (or spray pattern for a blunderbuss) could go anywhere in that circle; you think of it as "the more of this circle covered by the enemy, the more likely I hit him." Stand still and the circle shrinks considerably; as such, you always want to be stationary if you can while preparing to fire, giving a sense of deliberateness and composure that replaces the literal line. On the other hand, shouldering slows you to practically a crawl at both moving the gun (to aim) and your body (to move). Aiming a gun is, in this game, like aiming a sniper rifle in most other games, or even more so. I aim because I am committing to a specific act of firing.
Added to this is two fascinating weapon stats you don't see in other games, but in this era actually matter: ignition speed and weightiness. Weightiness determines how slow handling that gun is, relevant to melee, flexibility, basically how often you're going to be fucked over by your sluggish response. Ignition speed deals with the delay from pulling the trigger to the gun going off. Anybody that's played Hunt: Showdown understands how, in that game's era, at long enough engagement ranges the difference between earlier low velocity calibers and later high velocity calibers is decisive; you have to lead a target a little with low velocity. The same happens here with ignition speed, just with the gun itself going off instead of the bullet taking too long to reach its target.
Tactically, the sum effect of all of this is that shots become rarer, hip-firing is standard at any medium range, aiming at long ranges, and at very close ranges even point blank turn the corner and shoot moves are dicey compared to melee.
The game then gets a lot of mileage out of mixing up these rules with different melee weapons for the different classes. A pistol, for example, cannot be shouldered, but it can cancel its reload, so its viable to shoot in melee range with it. Bayonets are skill cannons, ironically; they strike a point, do a lot of damage, have a long range but the "strike a point" part combined with flighty movement means it is hard to actually hit things. Swords, clubs, other melee weapons arc, easier to hit, but require switching off too. The game has a wonderful range of British and American soldiers. Officers specialize in pistols and swords, standard musketeer of the line type units have bayoneted muskets only, light infantry types exist with un-bayoneted smoothbores (including buckshot) and melee sidearms, riflemen/jaegers that can zoom in like a scope by crouching with their rifle, spontooner NCOs that essentially have one big long pike, Indians specialized to be melee-only ambush predators and so on.
Unfortunately, while the game plays beautifully, it's also dead. At any given moment there are no active games and at best you have a Friday or Saturday where eight guys are actively playing in a server.
PLAYING THE OFFICER: BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
At the opposite extreme is Battle Cry of Freedom, which I've talked about a fair bit. The main mode was trash, another knockoff Holdfast, but the game had a little resurgence, too little too late, when Commander Mode launched. This is actually a ripoff of Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars, but I booted up Napoleonic Wars and hated it. The premise here was simple: you don't play the individual, you don't play the unit, you play the officer in command of the unit. If he dies, you go down the chain of command. This one had full service: infantry, cavalry (which was unrealistic for its War between the States setting, but the point was to sell the Hollywood arcade version of war and that means cavalry charges), artillery. I thought that such a thing would be boring and require some bells and whistles, but it turns out that just commanding a unit and responding to things and reading the situation is a full-time job. You manage volleys, charges, advance, fall back, form columns, form ranks, and so on. The cavalry, when not getting hung up on terrain (the game was glitchy garbage), played beautifully. The artillery played horribly; that's the one part where the game required doing everything yourself, and it was not built around the pacing necessary for sappers and artillery to become useful. The game was widely considered wonderful but could not pull out of its terminal decline. The devs went on to make Over the Top: WWI, a similarly unique game of WW1 with realistic vehicles (i.e. the tanks are garbage like IRL) and freeform trench construction and terrain deformation, that is off to a rocky start but seems to be stabilizing.
THE CASUALFAG EXPERIENCE: HOLDFAST
I hated Holdfast, and when I saw it got a Revolution update I went back to it again and liked it this time, and I concluded that the Revolution theming was doing all the work for me and it's not arbitrary. Holdfast is less realistic in graphics and sound and what not than BCOF and War of Rights, more realistic than Battle Grounds III, and without uber-realism, playing the officer or circle-strafing-with-a-blunderbuss nonsense it basically sells itself on a m b i e n c e. The userbase is canceraids and I just turn their mics off. The downside of it all is that the sound design is pretty piss, the movement feels slow but not realistic even though it is (if that makes sense?), the melee doesn't feel like it connects, but without BCOF this is the best it gets I guess. So why does the Revolution matter? Because in a game where reloading is slow AND things move at a slow pace, you're mostly there to kind of passively and mindlessly watch, which means uniforms matter a lot since that's what I'm watching. Napoleonic army drip is good but the individual armies all look the same. There's nothing for me to latch onto with Italians vs Prussians vs Austrians etc. The Revolution, on the other hand, has lots of wonderful little subtleties with different state and frontier militias, frontiersmen, Indians, Hessians, Highlanders, etc.
It is possible to play skillfully. I think the ceiling is not real high, but you can actually get things like killstreaks, and I consider it a massive mercy the game has hte decency, unlike War of Rights (spits), to tell you when you killed someone and show the ballistic trajectories of your shots so you know what's going on. And all of the functional roles from Battle Grounds III appear here with similar logic. You won't see, in public, drills and units maneuvering around in actual formations, but what you will see is loose frontlines of everyone (light infantry or not) fighting in essentially light infantry doctrine, and it looks and feels fine.
6.5/10 mediocre enough to play
Edit: Every time I get on and play I like it more, so honestly it's probably a 9/10, I just really wish the gunplay and melee was better.
SHITPISS: WAR OF RIGHTS
The prettiest, most s e r i o u s musketshit of all and I fucking hate it. It made a big impression on me when I first booted it up long ago because I got flashbanged by ancestral PTSD feeling utter confusion in clouds of smoke getting randomly shot down, never knowing what I'm even supposed to be shooting at, and occasionally overrun in chaotic melees. However, I was never able to achieve that feeling again despite chasing it, and the cost of entry is either listening to some lisping faggot on the Union side (that's a thing, well known, in the community, the Union guys are all fags, probably Leftist self-selection) or some retarded spastic child blaring Erika, which you can imagine how delighted that makes me as someone that's spent most of my life intensely thinking (as a hobby) about the Civil War era. War of Rights goes for the understandable but terrible philosophy that the way you make players care about following orders and taking things seriously is by denying them any of the things that would incentivize them to rambo: no notification of kills or even a count. Instead, it just means you never really know what's going on, if you're helping, if you're not, it spawns you in with an EMPTY UNBAYONETTED GUN so every time you get shot you can feel the joy of reloading the fucking thing and bayoneting it right off the bat wasting more of your lifespan, it is loathsome. The one upside to it all is that the artillery is genuinely terrifying, most of a battle it will, like IRL, hit random shit a mile away from you until suddenly it finds your line, throws you several feet away and makes half the line dissolve into pink mist while everyone routs in a panic. You do also have the ability to wield your rifle as a club if there's no bayonet on it (there's always a fucking bayonet on it, no officer ever tells you "take the bayonet off"), which is mechanically as simple and braindead as anything else, but it sure is nice to see because it's the only musketshit game I've seen that has that real doctrine.
I think the one possible upside to this is that I do believe there are a lot of real reenactors that basically practice drilling in this, but as a gameplay experience I forced myself to play it for quite a while in the belief I could force myself to like it and I don't. I hate it. I want to circle-strafe Hessians with a bayonet. Fuck this world that this thing has 300 concurrent players at any given moment and Battle Grounds III is dead 99% of the time.
THE GOLD STANDARD FOR GAMEPLAY: BATTLE GROUNDS III
If you told me that you could make a fun, well-balanced, action packed arena shooter based around the American Revolution I would think you were insane, but Battle Grounds III did it. The key is that it (and it has this in common with the other two games discussed) has to fib a little to make the gunning functional, and then it takes pains to make every weapon feel genuinely distinct. To begin, reloading is cut in roughly a quarter of the time it took IRL, so while real units expected to reload maybe 12 to 30 seconds, in Battle Grounds 3 it's something like 8-12 seconds. Very few games actually depict the entire process of loading a muzzleloader, instead lazily suggesting it by having the player mime fooling with a ramrod and cocking the gun without, y'know, all the steps that a musket has. This is important because 8-12 is still quite long experientially, but it's short enough that reloading doesn't feel punitive. It is just long enough that reloading in between gunfights is casual, but the decision to reload in a gunfight is very dicey without a screen in front of you, so gunning basically becomes a one-use ultimate that either connects and is decisive or doesn't. I like games with older actions, like Isonzo and Hunt: Showdown, where the pace of gunfire is slow enough that everything feels weighty and discrete and memorable, and this pushes that to the extreme; you actually do feel shots going off, and when a shot does go off, you're committed to melee until the fight resolves. Reloads cannot be broken, so you never casually reload; reloading is a decision to be helpless momentarily.
Battle Grounds III puts a lot of thought into how aiming works, which is important because the way it handles aiming is meant to be suggestive of the feeling of fighting in formation in a game that otherwise, paradoxically, has the movement scheme of an old fashioned arena shooter (it's based on Half Life, to give a sense of how fast and video-gamey it is). Aiming essentially takes place in one of three stances. Guns are always either leveled for bayonet fighting/hip fire, or they're shouldered to be aimed. When leveled you have this circular reticule where the bullet (or spray pattern for a blunderbuss) could go anywhere in that circle; you think of it as "the more of this circle covered by the enemy, the more likely I hit him." Stand still and the circle shrinks considerably; as such, you always want to be stationary if you can while preparing to fire, giving a sense of deliberateness and composure that replaces the literal line. On the other hand, shouldering slows you to practically a crawl at both moving the gun (to aim) and your body (to move). Aiming a gun is, in this game, like aiming a sniper rifle in most other games, or even more so. I aim because I am committing to a specific act of firing.
Added to this is two fascinating weapon stats you don't see in other games, but in this era actually matter: ignition speed and weightiness. Weightiness determines how slow handling that gun is, relevant to melee, flexibility, basically how often you're going to be fucked over by your sluggish response. Ignition speed deals with the delay from pulling the trigger to the gun going off. Anybody that's played Hunt: Showdown understands how, in that game's era, at long enough engagement ranges the difference between earlier low velocity calibers and later high velocity calibers is decisive; you have to lead a target a little with low velocity. The same happens here with ignition speed, just with the gun itself going off instead of the bullet taking too long to reach its target.
Tactically, the sum effect of all of this is that shots become rarer, hip-firing is standard at any medium range, aiming at long ranges, and at very close ranges even point blank turn the corner and shoot moves are dicey compared to melee.
The game then gets a lot of mileage out of mixing up these rules with different melee weapons for the different classes. A pistol, for example, cannot be shouldered, but it can cancel its reload, so its viable to shoot in melee range with it. Bayonets are skill cannons, ironically; they strike a point, do a lot of damage, have a long range but the "strike a point" part combined with flighty movement means it is hard to actually hit things. Swords, clubs, other melee weapons arc, easier to hit, but require switching off too. The game has a wonderful range of British and American soldiers. Officers specialize in pistols and swords, standard musketeer of the line type units have bayoneted muskets only, light infantry types exist with un-bayoneted smoothbores (including buckshot) and melee sidearms, riflemen/jaegers that can zoom in like a scope by crouching with their rifle, spontooner NCOs that essentially have one big long pike, Indians specialized to be melee-only ambush predators and so on.
Unfortunately, while the game plays beautifully, it's also dead. At any given moment there are no active games and at best you have a Friday or Saturday where eight guys are actively playing in a server.
PLAYING THE OFFICER: BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
At the opposite extreme is Battle Cry of Freedom, which I've talked about a fair bit. The main mode was trash, another knockoff Holdfast, but the game had a little resurgence, too little too late, when Commander Mode launched. This is actually a ripoff of Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars, but I booted up Napoleonic Wars and hated it. The premise here was simple: you don't play the individual, you don't play the unit, you play the officer in command of the unit. If he dies, you go down the chain of command. This one had full service: infantry, cavalry (which was unrealistic for its War between the States setting, but the point was to sell the Hollywood arcade version of war and that means cavalry charges), artillery. I thought that such a thing would be boring and require some bells and whistles, but it turns out that just commanding a unit and responding to things and reading the situation is a full-time job. You manage volleys, charges, advance, fall back, form columns, form ranks, and so on. The cavalry, when not getting hung up on terrain (the game was glitchy garbage), played beautifully. The artillery played horribly; that's the one part where the game required doing everything yourself, and it was not built around the pacing necessary for sappers and artillery to become useful. The game was widely considered wonderful but could not pull out of its terminal decline. The devs went on to make Over the Top: WWI, a similarly unique game of WW1 with realistic vehicles (i.e. the tanks are garbage like IRL) and freeform trench construction and terrain deformation, that is off to a rocky start but seems to be stabilizing.
THE CASUALFAG EXPERIENCE: HOLDFAST
I hated Holdfast, and when I saw it got a Revolution update I went back to it again and liked it this time, and I concluded that the Revolution theming was doing all the work for me and it's not arbitrary. Holdfast is less realistic in graphics and sound and what not than BCOF and War of Rights, more realistic than Battle Grounds III, and without uber-realism, playing the officer or circle-strafing-with-a-blunderbuss nonsense it basically sells itself on a m b i e n c e. The userbase is canceraids and I just turn their mics off. The downside of it all is that the sound design is pretty piss, the movement feels slow but not realistic even though it is (if that makes sense?), the melee doesn't feel like it connects, but without BCOF this is the best it gets I guess. So why does the Revolution matter? Because in a game where reloading is slow AND things move at a slow pace, you're mostly there to kind of passively and mindlessly watch, which means uniforms matter a lot since that's what I'm watching. Napoleonic army drip is good but the individual armies all look the same. There's nothing for me to latch onto with Italians vs Prussians vs Austrians etc. The Revolution, on the other hand, has lots of wonderful little subtleties with different state and frontier militias, frontiersmen, Indians, Hessians, Highlanders, etc.
It is possible to play skillfully. I think the ceiling is not real high, but you can actually get things like killstreaks, and I consider it a massive mercy the game has hte decency, unlike War of Rights (spits), to tell you when you killed someone and show the ballistic trajectories of your shots so you know what's going on. And all of the functional roles from Battle Grounds III appear here with similar logic. You won't see, in public, drills and units maneuvering around in actual formations, but what you will see is loose frontlines of everyone (light infantry or not) fighting in essentially light infantry doctrine, and it looks and feels fine.
6.5/10 mediocre enough to play
Edit: Every time I get on and play I like it more, so honestly it's probably a 9/10, I just really wish the gunplay and melee was better.
SHITPISS: WAR OF RIGHTS
The prettiest, most s e r i o u s musketshit of all and I fucking hate it. It made a big impression on me when I first booted it up long ago because I got flashbanged by ancestral PTSD feeling utter confusion in clouds of smoke getting randomly shot down, never knowing what I'm even supposed to be shooting at, and occasionally overrun in chaotic melees. However, I was never able to achieve that feeling again despite chasing it, and the cost of entry is either listening to some lisping faggot on the Union side (that's a thing, well known, in the community, the Union guys are all fags, probably Leftist self-selection) or some retarded spastic child blaring Erika, which you can imagine how delighted that makes me as someone that's spent most of my life intensely thinking (as a hobby) about the Civil War era. War of Rights goes for the understandable but terrible philosophy that the way you make players care about following orders and taking things seriously is by denying them any of the things that would incentivize them to rambo: no notification of kills or even a count. Instead, it just means you never really know what's going on, if you're helping, if you're not, it spawns you in with an EMPTY UNBAYONETTED GUN so every time you get shot you can feel the joy of reloading the fucking thing and bayoneting it right off the bat wasting more of your lifespan, it is loathsome. The one upside to it all is that the artillery is genuinely terrifying, most of a battle it will, like IRL, hit random shit a mile away from you until suddenly it finds your line, throws you several feet away and makes half the line dissolve into pink mist while everyone routs in a panic. You do also have the ability to wield your rifle as a club if there's no bayonet on it (there's always a fucking bayonet on it, no officer ever tells you "take the bayonet off"), which is mechanically as simple and braindead as anything else, but it sure is nice to see because it's the only musketshit game I've seen that has that real doctrine.
I think the one possible upside to this is that I do believe there are a lot of real reenactors that basically practice drilling in this, but as a gameplay experience I forced myself to play it for quite a while in the belief I could force myself to like it and I don't. I hate it. I want to circle-strafe Hessians with a bayonet. Fuck this world that this thing has 300 concurrent players at any given moment and Battle Grounds III is dead 99% of the time.
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