Blown away. This feels like the next meta of FPS after extraction shooters.

I'm 33 years old, been playing shooters since BF1942 (Desert Combat) and CS1.5 as a kid. These days I:

• Don't enjoy BF6s CoD design with insta spawns, small maps, auto spotting "wallhack". • Can't be bothered to regularly tryhard in CS matchmaking with the boys as everyone is too busy with real life shit. • Don't have the patience for Squad or super coordinated Arma battles. • Find extraction shooters and battle royale shooters risky, as they can easily lead to a "ruined" evening. A guy camping a circle or an extract at the end is good way to feel like you wasted precious minutes on a weekday evening. I tried Hell Let Loose Vietnam recently. It was alright, but it just made me long for Red Orchestra or Rising Storm instead. It didn't do anything unique.

I bought into the Wardogs playtest expecting to be disappointed. What I got is the biggest innovation in shooters I've tried in over a decade:

• The money system makes people not spam the surrender button, as they don't want to buy a new kit if they can avoid it. I never thought I would see randoms waiting minutes to be revived on the frontline without any voice comms. • The money system makes people revive, makes people heal each other. • The money system fixes wasting of vehicles, no more snipers flying a solo heli to their favorite mountain or two pilots fighting over the spawn. • The money dopamine from dropping off people in your heli, getting assists when they later get kills is just enough for my brain to find heli runs fun. I never thought that day would come. I plugged in an xbox controller, crashed a few times (sorry) but had a blast flying. • The tarkov-light inventory system instead of classes gives me full agency & tickles my brain. Want to stuff my bags with RPG rounds and go heli hunting, skipping out on ammo, bandages, revives? I can do that. • Spotting, only on minimap, not as wallhack, makes me actually use binoculars, even as a sniper, who would have thought it was possible to get me to actually use binoculars? • The shooting is tight and arcadey enough to reward people that aim well. High TTK and the ability to replace my armor/helmet & bandages via looting, to keep going into the next enemy. • The dragging back a downed teammates mixed with high TTK means I can take a hit, which means I go for it. Awesome tuning. • A moving circle fixes campers. Gives me high intensity CQB when I want it. • The building system is tuned so you can do real shit pretty quickly. It feels just close enough to being an engineer in TF2, that I can create something out of nothing without it turning into a planning exercise. • The time from death, to respawn, to re-kitting, and getting back into the circle with a heli ride or a vehicle deployment is long enough to make kills matter but short enough to not make me feel like it's wasting my time. As for playtest feedback, it's clear that we don't even see real meta gameplay this weekend, when there's a shortage of lvl 7 support hammers building AA in FOBs, no tanks, no stingers etc. which makes balancing feedback pointless.

I'm also old enough to realize that gamers screaming for changes don't actually have any clue what they want as a group, so the only thing I'll say is:

• It feels like there should be a cap to pre-existing money brought into a round, so people that play the fuck out of the game won't loose all the above-mentioned incentives that drive healthy gameplay. There's a reason counter-strike starts everyone with 800 $. • Ground vehicles (quadbikes and jeeps) feel like ass, especially when compared to the helis that feels amazing. All in all, i'm blown away. Keep up the great fucking work and don't let the impending financial success make you loose contact with reality or cater to the screaming BF6 fans that's about to hit you hard.

TL;DR: Apparently the secret recipe to FPS turned out to be:

• The $$$ from counter strike • The circle from battle royale • The inventory system from tarkov • The vehicles from Squad • The pacing from old battlefield games • The TTK somewhere between older BF games like BadCompany2 & Tarkov, depending on where you hit 'em.