First things first let me desribe my background and expecations a bit to give my feedback a little bit of context.
I played ET for many, many years. Initially as part of a community, later as a “squad leader” for said community, playing competitve matches with a set group of people that I trained with. I played the game for years even though it was mostly unsupported after 2.60b and bani leaving etpro to gather dust.
I am saying this to outline why I am so very interested, invested even in having this game be a success. I am also painfully aware that this is by no means guaranteed because, if we are honest, Splash Damage has not been getting too lucky with their latest releases.
Quake Wars I played the beta of but personally disliked it and I did not purchase the final product. I could not even put my finger on why that was but unfortunately that was the general concensus in the ET community at the time. Brink I also played the beta for and actually purchased the game on launch. For this to not become an extensive history lesson I hope we can agree that the game had a lot of potential but was not handled well enough by Splash Damage to really take off.
Here we are now, years later. Yet another product that to some degree continous the legacy of the fast paced, movement heavy shooter. However there is plenty of them now unfortunately and in video gaming there hardly is anything new under the sun. Its about setting yourself apart and you will have noticed that the list of legacy attributes this games apparently features is rather short. I would personally not love anything more than to add “tracking based gunplay” to the list.
That is what made ET for me. There was hardly any luck in that game. If I picked up a fresh player from our pub, took him on a private ETpro server there was little to no chance of him scoring kills against me, no matter what. It took a lot of practise, aka muscle memory, to get movement, tracking and knockback (weapon kick due to incomming fire) right. On top of that was the split second decision making that results from mutli-stage objective and class based play.
The combination of those made for a very skillful, rewarding and unique experience.
Why do I keep banging on about what ET did? I am getting to eventually making a point of course.
The reason I use ET over ET:QW or Brink is because that is the game that managed to maintain an active competitive community without anything that we would have come to expect these days (support by devs or the main balance mod maker, paied tournaments, streamers covering it, social media hype, a functional anti-cheat, etc.). There was something so inherently awesome about the game that the community fought through all these struggles to maintain itself.
Hence from a business perspective that is the title I would have looked at if I was in SD’s shoes.
So did they? I would think that in many ways it is hard to argue that they did not. Most of the classes feel like a development of the ones found in ET. Some of the mechanics are exactly identical. Where it obviously differs is the business modell.
While ET was in fact free that was due to the singleplayer compotent getting canned and them rather releasing what they already made than to have it never see the light of day (and how very thankfull I am for that). This time it conceptualized as a f2p with, of course, micro transactions. This might already be a big no-go for a lot of people out there, tho I doubt for anyone invested enough to participate in these forums.
There is just so many generic f2p shooters out there, riddled with micro transactions. So the goal must be not to be generic and present a fair business modell. I personally have a thought or two on the sum of money you can spend on the mercs but thats a topic for another day.
It would also be foolish to ignore the elephant in the room that is TF2. The one big thing that DB has to offer is the multi-stage nature I have learned to love all these years ago. This for me is the biggest selling point. At the end of the day the core gameplay loop is shooting people tho, so the gunplay has to be spot on.
It is here where it becomes more difficult to draw similarities between DB and ET. The classes feel familiar but mechanics that used to be combined have been drawn out and seperated into individual classes. As an example I will use the the class that fires grenades at range, Nader, and is by far the biggest throne in my side right now. This used to be part of the engineer class and was an attachment to the semi-automatic rifles. Now in DB we see a shift away from having a dedicated engineer class. Everyone can arm C4 its just that some are quicker at doing so. Its a decision I do not fully support but I can live with. If you want your game to be popular on public servers you do not want to be dependant on a single class in order to progress with the objective, fair enough.
Back to the point of class balance tho. We currently do not have a semi-automatic rifle to play with which is a shame because that is an inherently skillful weapon to use. Also the grenade launcher now is its own weapon and instead of having both a fairly limited ammuniton supply and energy bar (2 rifle nade shots in ET and youd have to use to use actual bullets for a while) the gun is a high fire rate semi-automatic boomstick capable of dominating many choke points in the maps by just putting nades down range, no particular aim needed.
This is obviously a massive departure from what I am used to. You combine that with the fact that the class is not even designed for accurate medium range support fire onto defensive positions but also includes a SMG that is decently capable of defending the class in CQB I am in even more bewilderment. What is the class geared towards? Is there a desire to balance all classes so that they can compete, no matter what situation? Would that not make the concept of classes obsolete in the first place? Also if I can be excused to be snarky for just a second: Who came to the office one day and presented the idea of adding martyrdom; a mechanic that even CoD has been slammed for… on demand and with the latest patch not to be prevented by quick, aware play.
Really? A limit on thread lenghts? TBC in part 2
