u/Fox_Delight

TLDW: 16 years of visionless decision making

The first iteration of the campaign mission had:

Open sandbox gameplay with multiple routes to objectives.
Numerous objectives.
Very basic mission progression but demonstrated the Ghost Recon gameplay that players have waited almost a decade to see.
Played into the strengths of Ground Branch's snail pace development; just an open map, a few scattered objectives, players come up with the fun, a nice little clip playing at the end for victory.

In 1.0 we got:

Two short missions.
They feel like an attempt at a Call of Duty cinematic single player mission but with no budget.
Less replay value, each mission usually plays out the same way.
On-rails gameplay, unlike the sandbox experience of Silent Reach, you move to point A, go to point B, mission ends, really shallow gameplay.
The expanded story and voiceover add immersion but the gameplay doesn't backup the spectacle.

What I'm getting at is how did the devs go from demonstrating Silent Reach over a year ago to what we ended up with in 1.0? It doesn't build on the aspects that were demonstrated to the player base in fact it looks like somebody mistook Ground Branch for Call of Duty.

I had heard of Operator before but I didn't pay much attention to it, until recently when I learned how small the development team is and what has been achieved in a relatively short time and I'm impressed with the results, from the reviews other players are too. In comparison, Ground Branch has been in development for what, 10 years? They must have spent millions of dollars by now and the end result is a very slow development cycle, disjointed gameplay, consistently buggy experience. It goes to show what a small team can achieve that has vision and can prioritise without getting bogged down in irrelevant details and just deliver on the gameplay.

The initial hype around Ground Branch was that it could fill the gap of Rainbow Six or Socom but for 10 years it only focused on pvp that nobody plays, but if Operator can deliver some quality coop gameplay and improve the AI design, come up with some interesting scenarios it could fill the gap just like Ready or Not did for the SWAT genre.

Keep focused, really think about what the core of the game is, don't get bogged down or distracted by superficial details or loud voices in chat rooms, stay true to what you want to deliver. I'm looking forward to see what you have planned for the future.