Hi YouTube, Darth Here:
Let's kick off the new year right: by complaining about Battlefield 1!
I've got a list of resolutions I'd like to see for Battlefield 1 in 2017.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still playing and enjoying the game quite a bit.
But there's a lot of things that just get on my nerves that I'd like to talk about,
and offer suggestions on how they could be better.
Just in case we get a Community Test Environment, and rumors make it sound like we might just
get that, I want to be able to point to this video.
In any case, let's talk Battlefield 1 can do better in 2017.
Charge is one of the things that I find myself consistently flying into a rage about.
I really like the theory behind charge -- a high-risk, high-reward maneuver that fits
well in the game's setting.
It's the implementation and the inherent problems within that make me very salty.
There are two primary problems with charge: one, the fact that it shares a binding with
melee, and two, it's forecasting "tell" is broken.
I think that first problem is easy to fix on PC -- simply allow it to be bound to a
different key.
Somewhat more difficult when you can only work with 16 buttons on a controller.
I can't count the number of times that I've tried to charge and feebly swung a melee attack,
or tried to melee only to launch into a charge.
Git gud, right?
Well, I think this is a user interface problem, and not a problem with the user.
But maybe I'm biased.
I think three main technical hurdles exist for charge: one, giving players which melee
attack they want to do, two, communicating which is going to happen more clearly, and
three, actually having charge be consistent in its performance.
On the receiving end, the problem is the telling "yell" that soldiers are supposed to give
when charging.
It just doesn't happen in a majority of cases.
Or it arrives at the same time as the bayonet, making it useless.
This is a deeper issue with Battlefield 1 and frostbite audio, where very important
noises are sometimes washed out because something else is deemed more important.
Noises that are deemed louder -- but aren't necessarily to the observer -- often win versus
closer sounds.
It's inconsistent in a way that is highly irritating to observant players.
Finally, there are also some very strange one-off bugs that make charge a very unenjoyable
experience for attacker and defender.
For example: stopping prematurely, missing entirely despite running directly into the
target, starting sometimes without a button hold, and launching into immediate charges
without any windup are among many others.
Do I expect this to get fixed in 2017?
Well I'm still waiting for the counter-knife in Battlefield 4 to not suck.
This one's pretty short.
But seriously, how did the medic revive bug make it past the first few patches?
Being revived and unable to use any weapon is a glaring issue, and one that the community
has brought up time and again.
Thankfully it can be mitigated by switching from one weapon to another, but can you imagine
if you were just out of the game at that point?
This is definitely one of the top issues for Battlefield 1 in 2017.
I'd be really surprised if this makes it past the first patch of 2017.
There's only a few things in Battlefield that have remained relatively unchanged over
the last couple of titles.
Unfortunately, among them is the spawn system.
It's actually taken a step back in complexity versus previous titles, while at least looking
prettier while it's doing its thing.
I'm going to talk primarily about conquest, but the general rules apply in other game
modes as well.
In conquest, every flag has about eight spawn points associated with it.
Each team gets four.
The change from Battlefield 4 is that no longer are spawn points shared between teams.
These points don't move (other than which one is randomly picked) and they are easy
to memorize.
To DICE's credit, the level designers have generally tried to put these in places where
you're not going to be directly targeted by enemies.
Unless of course you're on Scar or Giant's Shadow -- which have some of the worst points
in the game.
But the game also doesn't care much if you are in danger when it puts you in a spawn.
So what happens is with a point that has a lot of friendlies spawning at once, you can
get put in the direct line of sight of enemies.
Or in gas.
Or in fire.
The reverse of the problem is that you can also have enemy spawns appear directly behind
you while you're capturing a flag, even teleporting into the map in impossible situations
where only the Enterprise's Scotty could have put them there.
Many of these spawn points, once memorized, are very easy to exploit as you can just wait
for an enemy and ambush them.
The solution here is pretty easy.
Stricter rules about where spawns are allowed to occur, and simply adding more spawn points
per flag.
Don't spawn players in direct line of sight of one another.
Don't spawn players when enemies are within the spawn point's protective radius.
The rest is on the level designer to use good sense about lanes and cover for spawns.
No amount of effort is wasted here when every player can point to terrible spawns they've
had in Battlefield 1.
My number one frustration in Battlefield 1 as of today has to be the skill balance system.
Ostensibly its design keeps teams balanced by swapping squads and players between teams
at the start of a match, and by filtering in new players accordingly as the game goes
on.
And that might actually work if the "skill" stat wasn't a horribly broken filter.
In fact, I made an entire video about how broken the team balance and skill system is
a few weeks ago.
The team balance in Battlefield 1 is absolutely atrocious.
I see teams I playing against and playing on get utterly destroyed more than I see close
games.
If it weren't for the anemic Behemoths, these games would be bigger blowouts than
they already are.
I can safely call any conquest game that ends with more than a 200-ticket difference a pretty
significantly lopsided game.
That ticket bleed time is absolutely enormous in BF1.
And most conquest games end this way.
Some are even more laughable, and 1000-to-500 totals are relatively common.
It's feast or famine out there.
The rarity is a balanced game on PC.
So what can be done about it?
Well, ditching skill as a meter of score would be a pretty significant and easy start.
There are plenty of other games that provide much better ranking and matching systems.
Score-per-minute, win percentage, or discrete per-game-type methods would all probably be
better than skill.
Which in Battlefield, skill is an effectively meaningless stat.
Hence why balance is random or bad.
Let's talk about Battlepacks and RNGesus.
I'm not particularly interested in skins.
However, I know that a large sum of players in the Battlefield community are quite the
collectors and some are even willing to put down vast sums of money to get more skins.
At just about every level in 2016, DICE managed to make everybody angry when it comes to Battlepacks,
skins, and RNGesus.
Let me count the ways.
I'm sure just their existence ires somebody.
But most recently DICE failed to communicate just how rare certain tank skins were.
It was apparently so bad that they've since added some "helpful" adjectives to illustrate
when something is so rare you're probably not going to get that thing if you're the
average player.
Beyond that, I think there is a definite acquisition problem when it comes to Battlepacks.
At least for new players that run into long streaks of not getting anything.
Given a million players in Battlefield, I'll venture a guess that there are at least a
few people playing who have literally never received an end-of-round Battlepack.
You'd have to be really unlucky, but it could happen.
And I'm guessing streaks of 5-to-10 rounds with nothing are far more common.
I can see the impetus for wanting to keep the big reward at the end of rounds, but why
not reward players performance in a round with scraps?
It's a currency that is already used to buy Battlepacks, and translating engagement
into progress with skins would be pretty fair.
My only guess as to why DICE doesn't do this is: one, they want to keep that gambler's
itch scratching you, and two, they want you to straight up monetize on battlepacks.
Perhaps they feel that keeping it random makes you more likely to do the latter.
I'm not convinced.
It's already a slot machine pull when you open a pack.
Why make it more difficult to pull the lever on a cadence?
The random nature of even receiving a pack seems to ire more players than it fills with
desire.
Even the ultimate loot treadmill WarCraft has primarily done away with random loot progression
and has instead moved more towards engagement-rewarding systems.
The more you play, the more reward you get.
We don't have to get rid of random Battlepack rewards, but why not give players who do well
in games a little in return in the way of scraps?
If there was one thing DICE completely dropped the ball with on Battlefield 1, it was the
rented server program.
Now, if you're on console, you're really not going to feel the big difference between
Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1.
However, PC players and communities definitely feel the pinch from a neutered featureset.
Want to kick or ban trolls?
You can't do that.
Want to change the map?
Nope.
Reserve slots?
Forget it.
Admin mods?
Uh-uh.
And that list goes on, and on, and on.
As of this writing, you can't even password protect your server.f
Essentially what you're getting is a very, very slim set of modifications you can make
to servers for a set audience.
What you're really doing right now is paying EA for them to have another server.
Just like all their others.
That will be primarily empty.
Why?
Because it requires a full set of players to even start a game, so clans cannot even
seed their own servers.
Change too much, and nobody will ever be sent to your server.
Now, there are a ton of suggestions out there on how rented servers can be improved.
It's something DICE is actively working towards improving.
How soon is hard to say.
By the time it's in a working state, will there even be enough communities willing to
invest that much capital?
We'll see, but I'm hopeful.
As you can see, Battlefield 1 is not without its issues.
But it's not nearly as far as Battlefield 4 had to go at this point after its release.
There's a persistent rumor that we're getting a Community Test Environment for Battlefield
1 similar to Battlefield 4's CTE.
If you're unfamiliar with the CTE, it was a set of servers designed explicitly for testing
upcoming changes to Battlefield.
It was absolutely critical for getting Battlefield 4 into the --pretty great-- state it's in
today.
So I'm hopeful we'll see that in the upcoming months.
As for the rest of the franchise, there's going to be no new Battlefield game in 2017.
So until anything else, we're going to have to subsist on Battlefield 1 DLC.
The first of which arrives in March and is centered around the French.
Additional DLCs will probably come online every 3-to-5 months, in a schedule that will
probably fill out sometime in Early-to-Mid 2018.
In time for whatever is next in Battlefield.
That's it for this video on my thought's on Battlefield 1's biggest issues.
I think being only three months from launch, we're in a lot better shape than we were
in Hardline, Battlefront, or especially Battlefield 4.
A healthy player base and the promise of better things to come.
I'm looking forward to more Battlefield 1 in 2017.
But what are you looking forward to this year in Battlefield?
let me know in the comments below.
If you're new around here, please check out my channel and consider subscribing.
Before you go, please force choke that like button.
And as always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, YouTube.
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