OK so I gave it some thought and here are my suggestions for a singleplayer component of a spiritual successor to SWAT4:
The game stands out and one of the reasons that it stands out is a touch of realism. You feel cool clearing a building because there is a sense of you actually doing this. You have to radio things in, you can't just shoot without a legit reason to, you can't take many shots before you go down, etc. It was by no means a full fledged simulation but those touches made it stand out and feel cool. One of the things that SWAT 4 lacked was the importance of sound. Being able to use a lockpick and crawling and actively shouting people to put their hands up suggested that sound played an important role but it really didn't matter much. Enemies were always on edge and expecting you, or at least that was my experience. I would like it to have slightly more impact whether the enemies know you are there and where you are. It would also be cool if your main character would use hand gestures instead of shouting everything out loud. I never used the snipers in the career. I don't know if that's just me. If there are snipers it would be nice if they could move between several positions, or be used to suppress or get people to surrender more easily instead of just shooting one target in one room for the entire mission. You could also do more with the snipers with scripted events. (For instance once the enemies find out you have breached, they will give order to execute their hostages and your sniper sees this and you have to take control of the sniper to take them out in time.)
You get to customize your weapons loadout. Which is cool. But you can hardly customize your equipment besides your primary, secondary and grenades. There is no way to select different types of suits for instance. (heavier, louder, more armor? lighter, louder, more equipment slots?) I think more can be done with the customization than in SWAT4, and not necessarily by simply adding more guns. And aside from the tasers there wasn't much of a point in picking a pistol. I feel like games such as Battlefield 1 even do a better job at making you sometimes switch to a sidearm. I never once felt the desire or need to switch to a pistol. A lot of it has to do with the short reload times yet long switch animation I imagine. (But in reallife a pistol is also used because they are much easier to wield indoors. That is just something worth thinking about but maybe impossible to implement in a fun way. Could also be equipment load related.)
And most importantly the biggest flaw and biggest draw for me was the A.I. It is very rare for a game these days to let you command A.I. around. Especially a team of A.I.'s. Not without reason. A.I.'s never work perfectly (and in SWAT4 they would get stuck at times, or they would ignore orders entirely) and are a bitch to program. But IF you could not only match SWAT4's A.I. but improve upon it I think that could be the number one thing that makes your game really stand out. One of the main complaints I hear about SWAT4's singleplayer career is that you sometimes missed something and have to crawl at a snail's pace through a pretty large building looking for that person or item before you can complete the mission. Now you could solve that by making markers pop up and that sort of modern stuff. That could quickly take away from the cool realistic touch. What if you could designate rooms as cleared and order a team or someone to search for evidence/civilians in that room?
Also the 'cover' order was a little iffy. They point their weapons in the direction you ask them to cover. But that doesn't work well when you want them to cover say a door entrance. If you could order someone easily to cover a door entrance while the rest of you move on, that would be sweet.
And when we look at enemy A.I. they never used a weapon that I forgot to secure. Also leaving hostages with the hostage takers without supervision seems a little iffy? I don't know how this is done in reallife but what about this: Say you implement that method to designate rooms as secure or cleared (I'm not sure about this because enemies could still walk into those rooms but it's just an idea to work with.) and have an extraction team on radio that you can call to move in and extract the civilians in safe rooms? (Or just have the ability to escort them outside yourself.)
If you somehow manage to create very functional A.I. you could even take that into a multiplayer mode. Random pubs are not that great at co-operating, so what if there was a mode in which everybody who joined the game came with an A.I. buddy who they can command around? Just throwing ideas out there.
I hope I gave you some interesting ideas and good luck going forward. I don't know if it's possible to get in touch with a SWAT member or if there is a good book about how they operate in detail because they know how it's done and I don't, and it could provide very interesting details that no other game would ever implement but yours could.
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