Redcoats.io

A first-person shooter set in the era of muskets, played on enormous maps with hundreds of other people. The period detail is not decoration: weapons take a long time to reload, they are inaccurate at range, and a single hit is usually fatal — which produces a completely different kind of shooter from a modern one. What emerges from those constraints is line combat. Individual aim matters far less than position, because one musket is unreliable and twenty fired together are not, and the players who contribute most are the ones standing with a group facing the same direction. Reloading is a commitment of several seconds during which you cannot fight, so when to reload is a more consequential decision than where to aim. Cover matters enormously, since there is no healing to recover from a mistake. The technical achievement is that it holds together with that many players in a browser, and it does — the frame rate survives and the servers fill. It needs a mouse, rewards patience over reflexes, and is at its best when a lobby has enough people to form actual lines. Matches are long by browser standards and the chaos is the point.