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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?
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?
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:
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.
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!
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. :/
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.