Battlefield 6 is a game I've kept my eyes on as I've seen the last couple Battlefield games do so poorly. BFV missed the mark and 2042 is one of the worst games in the franchise, and honestly one of the worst FPS games I've tried. BF6 had a huge promise to the gamers, they wanted a true return to form, but does BF6 actually deliver on that?
Here's my assessment of BF6 after several hours in the open beta.
Look and Sound: B+
The game looks and sounds fairly good but I gave it a B+ for 2 main issues.
For starters is the constant chatter from your team. I cannot focus on this game because my audio is 90% teammates yelling, screaming, and making callouts. This is especially egregious when half the classes are gender locked to females and listening to 50+% of the battlefield screaming in a feminine sound is quite annoying and immersion breaking. People are getting banned for calling this out, which just tells me EA hasn't learned we're not in 2022 anymore and people have returned to common sense. Women just aren't supposed to be this prevalent in a battlefield and traditional BF games didn't deal with this issue. They need to get rid of the women or add the ability to cut team chatter for those who don't want to hear it.
The other main issue is the sounds don't all feel immersive or cinematic. I went back and listened to previous entries from gunfire, to explosions, to ricochets, to fire, to vehicles and BF1 to me is the most cinematic. I still think BF6 is fine sound design wise but it's not as cinematic or immersive.
Overall the sound design is definitely closer to BF3/BF4, which is fine, but i was hoping if they nailed one thing in their "return to form" it would be a more immersive cinematic feeling game and they still have a bit to go to get there.
Characters/Classes: C+
I was excited about the return to the class system in BF6 because this franchise had gotten away from that. However, the execution was terrible. As stated earlier they gender locked classes so anybody who wants a male character for all classes, unfortunately can't have one.Weapons: B+
Weapon design seems good overall. It doesn't feel terrible or great. It almost feels like every other modern shooter. However, weapon balance is out of control and needs major tuning.
I hope Dice looks at overperforming weapons and balances them. Bullets need more bullet drop and less range, automatic weapons need more recoil, time to kill needs adjusting on certain weapons. I'm not going to dig into every weapon because Dice will have access to the data of kills/damage for weapons across the board and can easily adjust all this.
Gameplay: B-
Gameplay has its ups and downs. I'm trying not to pull too many other categories into this one but there is certainly an impact on gameplay when other facets of the game aren't designed properly.
The biggest problem with gameplay is the look, feel, and movement of this game just doesn't feel immersive or cinematic. I don't really feel like I'm in a Battlefield game and that is what bothers me the most. Let's break down a few issues.
1) Health and Death related: Time to kill is too fast, time to respawn is too fast, and health can be auto refilled without a med pack. These things make the gameplay too fast and chaotic, like CoD on steroids, and it completely makes a medic useless because people can auto-recover health without a medic and can die and respawn faster than a medic can come revive them. I would eliminate auto-regenerated health, reduce the time to kill on overperforming weapons, and add a mandatory few seconds to respawn timers so people have to wait after dying. This will push the game more into a tactical game than a run and gun game.
2) Movement: Movement just doesn't feel great to me. Sprinting is fast and feels infinite, sliding is still a thing, and clambering is inconsistent. There's also very weird physics with running, jumping, sliding, and clambering that feels like I'm playing in a vacuum and frictionless surfaces. I would eliminate sliding, give a stamina bar to sprinting so it's only used for getting from cover to cover, and increase clambering so it's more consistent. I also think the game needs more weight/friction to movement so it feels real, not like gliding.
3) Map Design: Going into BF6 I knew this would be an issue because EA outsourced maps to a 3rd party studio across the world from Dice. This meant people making BF maps who have never made maps before and map designers who aren't in tune with game designers. Maps can make or break a game, especially a shooter. The maps in BF6 are absolutely awful and it completely ruins the gameplay. It turns combat into a blender because the maps are too small, don't have enough cover, and don't allow for flanking. To be honest these map designers had the easiest job, simply take the most popular maps of the last 23 years and remake them in 4K. I have no idea why they didn't do this. A huge part of "return to form" is the iconic maps. Take the best few maps of each game and remake them.
4) Aim assist & spotting: BF6 made 2 very bad design decisions for identifying targets. They added a built in aim assist feature and they added in automatic spotting. This basically gives everyone a loose aim bot and wall hacks by default. This completely ruins the immersion, it ruins the ability to take cover or hide, and it ruins the time to kill even further. I honestly want these features gone 100% but I know that won't happen so let's talk middle ground.
Reduce the effect of aim assist. Reticle stickiness and magnetism when on/near targets needs to be toned down. Force people to aim, this is an FPS after all. Warzone added this and between lack of recoil and game assisted aim, it turns even the worse shooters into ok shooters. This is stupid in a competitive shooter.
Eliminate spotting or tone it down a ton. Old battlefield games didn't have spotting and games that added it required you to manually press a button when you actually see someone. There's a hidden timer on the spot mechanic, and the person has to be in clear visual range of you to be highlighted. It also only highlights for your squad. If you're going to keep this in the game then make it intentional (manually driven, cooldown, can't spot through smoke/walls/terrain/etc), nerf the range, and make it only squad based. Then add a binoculars/uav recon option for the recon class who can actively spot enemies for the whole team. I would be fine with that but ultimately I want this whole thing gone in Battlefield. My preference is an icon above all teammates so if I see someone without a green icon above them then I know it's an enemy, easy.
Vehicles: the current vehicles feel terrible. The controls are bad, the damage vs armor on them feels unbalanced, and the movement doesn't feel like it should. Vehicles need a big overhaul. I can't explain it but I'll just say most BF games dating all the way back to 1942 had great vehicle play so I don't understand why it's so bad in BF6.
Objectives: The objectives don't feel immersive anymore. Now we get a big colored circle on the ground. This is so anti-battlefield and completely ruins the gameplay for me. In the past when you got within range of an objective it would notify you via other visual means. I really hope they go back to this.
HUD: I'll give them an A for HUD. It feels good and is fairly customizable. There's also many other visual options, such as adding/removing damage numbers on bullet hits. This is the biggest win for Dice in BF6.
User Interface: C
The UI is ok but very cluttered and it's hard to find things you don't use often. It follows a very similar UI that I've seen in other modern games and overall I just hate how cluttered and hard to find things are. Things are buried behind multiple layers of menus and some of them don't follow common sense. At a minimum they should add a common settings menu where the most accessed menu items are present. They also need far more details in the menus for tips. Like descriptions for menus and settings and even screenshots for each. I call this an operations manual approach where any user of a UI can figure out how to navigate it and what each option/setting is without any prior knowledge. This is good UX design and Dice fell way short on this one.
Endgame: TBD
Some BF games of the past added things like upgrading weapons, pursuing dailies/weeklies to unlock skins, and other end game style items. It seems like BF6 is definitely going to have this but we don't quite know what it is yet. The beta was simply leveling up in playlists which would be very lame.
Monetization: TBD
When monetization hits my expectations are bad. EA is spending millions on this game and will want multiple layers of monetization to earn their money back. We're already seeing $70 price tag with pre-order bonuses and upgraded game versions that cost more. I think we will also see microtransactions, possibly map DLCs, and maybe even a battle pass. Overall I'm expecting free to play levels of monetization in this game but I'll save my judgement for when we see release. To me this game isn't even worth $70 in its current state so I have no plans of giving them a dollar until I see the direction the game is going.
Overall Grade: B
I was cautiously optimistic about BF6. I heard "return to form" a lot and it piqued my interest, but I had been burned by the last couple Battlefield games. I've played since the 1942 demo in 2002 and wanted this game to go back to the original days. 1942, BF2, BFBC2, BF3, BF4, and BF1 were all amazing games that I put thousands of hours into and I simply wanted a new FPS that would become my go-to game when other games are in-between content releases. Unfortunately it's not looking that way yet.
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