Hello. I am a game developer of 10 years. For about 1.5 years I worked on Squad, from early 2016 to late 2017. I quit for this exact reason.
I thought it would be a game about honoring the act of war not glorifying it. Especially since we had veterans at the studio on the design. Instead, it was a game about making it feel as realistic as possible while still being fun. 51% gameplay, 49% realism was the motto.
Squad doesn’t do anything narratively. It just sets two factions on a map and says fight. The mechanics feel great, the sound design is the best it can be, and the vehicles give this strong feeling of weight. It’s a great game… that they then took my work, split into another company into a defense contractor, and made a real-life military simulation. Not like Arma but an actual military training tool.
Squad does the same thing, makes you feel okay with fighting and making fun of an opposing force that is just trying to preserve it’s own way of life. It’s not there narratively but in the community which Squad specifically as a team did nothing at the time to stop the racists and created a pro-war community. In fact, in a lot of ways they cultivated it.
So I have a lot of opinions about this subject, pretty scattered but I will leave you with my greatest accomplishment on Squad www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMnYm_6rNE