I’ve been playing approximately 400 hours since the game opened, playing countless pub/comp games and attending several tournaments, but I’ve finally come to the realization that the game isn’t going anywhere and will most likely die off like a boiling frog within a year or two. Let me start by saying that the core gameplay is there and it could become an extremely popular title, but the developer keeps it in a very short leash and thus curbs it’s growth severely.
Let’s go back roughly 12 years. Around this time SD released Enemy Territory, which has been hailed as one of the greatest FPS titles in history. However, SD’s version came about in a very unfinished state (ETMain is still cancer), was rife with bugs and was released with 6 quite unbalanced maps (sounds familiar?).
But then the community rushed in. They realized there was something worth salvaging, so they started working. They formed sub-communities of modders and pub clans. They created bugfixes, mods like ETPro, ETPub, JayMod, NQ, balanced the stock maps, ported maps from the original RTCW and even created their own, which turned out to be way more popular than the stock maps. Apart from creating a few patches (2.56, 2.60, 2.6b), SD’s influence on the existing product remained rather limited and was in fact refined by the community that played the game. This ensured that ET had a very long and healthy life when it comes to FPS titles, it’s still played and developed further even though the player numbers have dwindled from it’s glory day.
Of course, SD received glory for the succesful title, but it’s worth remembering that they did not even come up with the core gameplay it’s titles are known for. That honor belongs to the Nerve Software, which developed the title Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Unlike SD’s ET version, RtCW was playable from the box and did not require thousands of hours of community work in order to play. One could even argue that ET was heavily downgraded from it’s base game in many aspects (rate of fire, more spam, decreased map quality) and many still regard the original title the superior one.
But what this rambling about ET has to do with DB? Well, SD doesn’t take particularly kindly to criticism nor requests of balance because they have their own vision. As developers, they don’t probably play the game as much as it’s playerbase and they have a distinctly different view on what the players actually need to make the game a better experience. After ET, they achieved minor success with ETQW (which has since died) and seriously flopped with Brink (it never even lived). Unfortunately, they seem to repeat many of the mistakes they made with Brink. By retaining the full influence over the development of the game, they will never reach success because they take too much time to actually do anything. It takes ages for SD to create a map or to balance the game and even longer to create an actually good map. The game will never come alive without drastic changes.
So what’s to be done? Look back to ET and you’ll find answers there. Here’s a couple of points that would make the game much more appealable to your average gamer and add a great deal of replay value for DB.
- Bring back the clan communities; allow players to rent their own public & private servers
The game lacks a sense of community in it’s current state. Sure, there are a few teams playing tournaments once in the blue moon, but there’s nothing for the average player. The servers are all EU Objective Mode 05 or EU Stopwatch Mode 02: you don’t really frequent a server, you finish one game and half the server disappears to join another. But a public clan server / community would be often frequented the same faces, thus making you feel belonging to a community when you know where you find the friendliest people or the best aimers in EU/NA. Admin rights would also be an obvious plus to counter cheaters and rude players. Being able to tweak the server settings somewhat could give you that special flavor of being one of those public servers where the team damage is on.
- Promote mapping activity
I’m sorry to say, but map creation isn’t one of SD’s biggest strengths. They really could save some money by letting the community create them / port and modify them for DB. The competetive scene (or what’s currently left of it, anyway) especially would appreciate this. Nothing would stop the developers from cashing through this either, granting special privileges to servers wanting to run custom maps.
I doubt the community will ever see complete automony from SD’s vision, but these two changes would not only be significant concesssions to community but promote a longer life for the game.