9 votes

Weekly game discussion thread 3: Battlefield V

Let's give this discussion format another try. The new Battlefield is now out, and I'm sure I'm not the only wave playing it. What are your thoughts?

4 comments

  1. [3]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    The core gameplay is as solid as you would expect from DICE, as are the available game modes and the map design (other than the two snow maps), and myself and most of my friends (about 10 of us)...

    The core gameplay is as solid as you would expect from DICE, as are the available game modes and the map design (other than the two snow maps), and myself and most of my friends (about 10 of us) are having a blast. However my biggest gripes are with some of the weird game mechanic decisions and the UI, which is total garbage:

    • The Company section is insanely time consuming to navigate, making customizing loadouts way more painful than it needs to be. At the very least they need to give us an "equip for both axis+allies" button and "disable all new clothing/camo notifications" option, but IMO a "quick list view" for faster customizing of loadouts is desperately needed.
    • Assignments can't be modified while connected to a server, even in between rounds, so after completing any assignments you can't select any new ones until you quit the server. Because of this, when playing with my party of friends, we often wind up having to all quit immediately after every round so we all can select new assignments. I understand why they don't want people modifying assignment mid-round... but why the heck can't we just pick new assignments in between rounds?
      • And speaking of quitting... quitting takes for-fucking-ever and God help you if you accidentally click "continue" instead of quit after the round ends since then you need to load the next map before you can actually quit... in which case Alt-F4 actually winds up being faster! This is on a brand new system with a GTX 980 Ti and the game loaded on to a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD, too.
      • And another issue with quitting is the annoyance of having to squad up again every time we quit a server. I know "leave as squad" not working properly is a bug that will probably be fixed shortly, but goddamn is it ever an annoying one!
    • Unlike every previous BF game, you can't switch sides mid-game even if there is a team imbalance, so trying to get more than 4 people on to the same server on the same side is a giant PITA. The only way we have figured out how to do it is to join a server as a single squad of 4, then as soon that squad gets in everyone leaves that squad to form their own and the remaining people join on them. Doing this you wind up having to wait in queue for a while, but at least it guarantees you will all be on the same side and isn't just a 50/50 chance.
      • Not being able to switch sides mid-game also often results in new rounds starting with insanely imbalanced teams (e.g. 12 vs 32), especially when one side got rofflestomped the previous round resulting in everyone on that side leaving. This is not only made worse because nobody can switch sides to try and fix that imbalance, but the damn game doesn't even auto-shuffle the teams to keep things even like every other BF game! So the only way for things to get rebalanced is to just wait for enough new people to slowly trickle in, and this delay often results in the outnumbered side getting rofflestomped again! It's a vicious cycle and you might as well just quit the server whenever the teams are that imbalanced at the start of a round.

    But even with all these frustrations, it's still a lot of fun and I am thoroughly enjoying myself. However I am glad I opted to go for Origin Access "Premier" (at $20/mo) to get access to the game instead of buying the game outright for $90, since even with as much fun I'm having I doubt I will play much more than a few months.

    4 votes
    1. [2]
      KapteinB
      Link Parent
      Oh yeah, forgot about that. It's an odd design decision to be sure. I mean, I understand why they did it; to prevent team stacking. But it has the unfortunate side effect that if someone actually...

      Unlike every previous BF game, you can't switch sides mid-game even if there is a team imbalance

      Oh yeah, forgot about that. It's an odd design decision to be sure.

      I mean, I understand why they did it; to prevent team stacking. But it has the unfortunate side effect that if someone actually wants to switch teams to even them out, they can't!

      Now this has been an issue with Battlefield games since ... always, I guess. Back when we had player-run servers some of them had a partial solution; automatically rebalancing the teams between matches by moving entire squads between teams.

      Hopefully DICE realises this is a pretty big issue, and will do something to improve the situation soon. I was on two different servers yesterday where the matches were completely one-sided. And I was on a server earlier this week where my team was literally half as many players as the opposing team for most of the match!

      1 vote
      1. cfabbro
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        I have never found team stacking to really be that much of an issue in BF games (at least compared to CoD)... but then again I don't ever play Deathmatch, where K/D ratio is all that matters and...

        I have never found team stacking to really be that much of an issue in BF games (at least compared to CoD)... but then again I don't ever play Deathmatch, where K/D ratio is all that matters and so the issue of a stacked team might potentially be more problematic. I generally stick to Conquest and other PTFO focused modes where individual players can still make a huge difference by playing tactically sound and being sneaky (e.g. using vehicles and good smoke placement to support team pushes and allow rezzing of downed teammates, focusing on back capping to draw enemy players away from the "front lines", getting spawn beacons behind enemy lines to cause chaos there, etc).

        So by not allowing team switching in order to "fix" the one minor, potential issue of team stacking they have inadvertently introduced a whole slew of other, much worse and much more frustrating ones, like players not being able to manually correct numerical team imbalances, not being able to play with more than 4 friends at once, etc. Not exactly a good trade-off IMO. :/

  2. KapteinB
    Link
    I actually bought a new gaming PC so I could play this game. Well, that's half true; I'd been planning to buy a new computer for about a year, but this was the first game I wanted to play that my...

    I actually bought a new gaming PC so I could play this game. Well, that's half true; I'd been planning to buy a new computer for about a year, but this was the first game I wanted to play that my old one refused to even run, so time to finally make up my mind and invest.

    With a game that is the 16th in a franchise, it might make the most sense to talk about how it differs from its predecessors.

    I feel like this time they've succeeded quite well with the power balance between infantry, ground vehicles, and air vehicles. Vehicles no longer have infinite ammo, and no longer regenerate on their own, which means they have to be used more tactically. There are very few ground vehicles though, with the result being that combat is mostly infantry focused. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but with vehicles being one of the things that set this franchise apart from most multi-player FPS games, I do feel like they should be a more integral part of the game. In particular I miss boats, which seem to be completely missing from this iteration.

    The maps are a bit disappointing to me. Most of them are small and intimate, with none of the large open vehicle-focused maps that we're used to seeing in this franchise. The small size also makes them too chaotic for my liking.

    I like that health now only partially regenerates, making medics more valuable than before. On the other hand anyone can now revive squad-mates, so the primary task of medics is now to throw med-packs at team-mates. Reviving by the way now has a rather long and elaborate animation (which if my memory serves me correctly was also true for BF1). You can't stay in cover and reanimate team-mates from two metres away like you could in BF3 and BF4, which is definitely a good change.

    Barricades can be built on strategic points, which is neat. Sadly only in predetermined places, and I often find myself unable to build them in areas where they would be very useful. Part of learning the maps is now learning which parts of the maps can be barricaded. This limitation somewhat reminds me of the "levolution" feature in BF4, which was too predictable to be of much strategic use.

    Spotting enemies work differently now, in that two of the classes can't even do it at all. What used to be the spot button now instead calls out a warning to team-mates that there are enemies in an area. The two classes that can spot enemies is now the sniper, which has a gadget for this particular purpose; a monocular, and support, who automatically spot enemies when firing upon them. As you may assume, the sniper's gadget sees little use, since it's rarely the team-players who pick the sniper class. The result of this is that players only rarely get spotted, which makes it easier to sneak up on enemies or capture points, but makes the game harder for players that aren't very good at it (which sadly includes myself). I more often find myself sneaked up on or stumbling into enemy fire than in previous iterations.

    Overall I haven't quite decided if I like the game yet. Mostly playing it makes me want to play other games that I already like, such as Rising Storm 2 or Battlefield 3. I still haven't tried all the game modes yet though, so I'll sink a few more hours into the game at the very least. Maybe it will grow on me.

    That's from the top of my head. Maybe I'll think of more to add later.

    3 votes