Fact, I wrote this bit by bit over the last week+ of playing DB, I get carried away, I do game design I question everything, I am an avid FPS player with hundreds to thousands of hours in UT/Quake/COD/TF2/NS2/BF/L4D/BRINK at casual and competitive level. So this is a 5000+ word essay, I hope it doesn’t go to waste, devs.
So after a week plus of playing Dirty Bomb again now it’s on Steam. I last played it in Summer for a few months before I gave up due to the lack of team play and back then there was a higher average skill playing ‘public’, honestly. It’s at the point where I really question if I should come back to playing it the next time.
Dirty Bomb is a fun game, no denying it. The problem is it’s Brink 2.0 which is good and bad, mainly bad. It suffers many of the same problems, but it’s a fun faced paced shooter when everyone is playing together, ignoring the fact it suffers balance issues that make certain encounters boring and annoying.
The team-based teamwork that doesn’t work.
I don’t know why there hasn’t been changes to the team play highlighting from the game design. Brink suffered the same problem, DB just follows on, from a score/reward perspective is designed like COD/BF. With big SHINY MEDAL GO YOU WOO!! popping up all the time you do something you should be doing anyway. This is great to make a person happy, terrible to get that person to understand this is a team game.
Why Brink was only really enjoyable, to me, was competitive and I feel like it’s the only way I’ll enjoy DB too. Public games are all about getting your score higher and kills higher so you can feel better than other players bad when, in reality, they do hardly anything for your team. Sure this depends greatly on your classes or team. Most people however are selecting the classes best at killing and not the best at teamwork.
That’s the problem this game suffers big time, you claim this is “the ultimate team-based F2P shooter”. In reality playing on public has practically 0 team-based actions other than medics doing what medics should do and ammo, actually no, hardly anyone drops anything but ammo stations where they sit alone. I feel like people play ammo classes and have no idea they can give other players ammo instantly at round start, let along when they’re calling for them.
For some reason you promote kills, you promote getting more kills meanwhile you do practically nothing to promote objectives or team play. How do you get the most points in a game?
A few methods, go proxy and destroy everyone with imbalanced shotguns while rushing objectives, plant, mine and die. While you respawn you’ll probably kill one or two people on a mine and then it gets defused, your team doesn’t want to go and defend that C4, they might die doing so, oh no.
Play TDM, take a super annoying class, Nader or RedEye and go kill hunting. Spam GL for some free kills and then have an equal fight with almost anyone with your SMG. Did you die? Martyrdom them, free kill 90% of the time (even though it used to be fine, nice rebalance…). RedEye hide in your own smoke in your base and snipe people who can rarely do anything because they cant see you, joy!
Go and play a pretty balanced class, fletcher, arty. Don’t care for your K/D, go be a medic, go be someone who defends or attacks the objectives over and over throwing yourself into a wall of enemies alone. You’re no good dead though, so you gotta kill those people between you and the objective, but with no one else seemingly giving a damn about that that’s more than you can handle unless you go phoenix and revive yourself. The game ends, and probably your score is lacklustre compared to the guy with 32/4, you can’t say things like ‘lack of teamwork’ or ‘lol 3 snipers on attack’ because they got more points while doing fuck all but shooting.
I am not going to say you can’t top a team with an abysmal K/D you can, I’ve done it frequently, but it’s not exactly a rewarding experience most gamers will want to accept with arms wide open. Ending a game on 6/23 with the most points at the end makes some people realise you do the objective and some people actually like that. Although why would someone who comes from BF4 or COD27 want to stop being the best scoring player with a K/D they got for sitting a mile away sniping? They don’t they have a mindset that is, this is what I do and I don’t care what anyone thinks. Even when they’re one of 4 snipers on a 6-man team that’s attacking on chapel…
If no one wants to do objectives because they’re not rewarding stop rewarding people who aren’t doing objectives in a team-based objective game. Maybe, take a look at a team-based FPS that did it right, that still has a massive public player base, that somehow has teamwork when nothing else does. Team Fortress 2. Why does TF2 succeed where everything else is laughable at best?
No score pop-ups, no ridiculous points for kills, rewards for objectives (push the cart > get healed and given ammo > complete map = WIN/WIN). Then the game ends, you’re shown a ‘X team wins!’ showing the people who completed the last step of the objective and the top 3 MVPs of that round and yes a Highest killstreak, but in TF2 only specific weapons even count towards killstreaks and more often than not those killstreaks are way under 10.
Maybe you check the scoreboard, that’s right you check it you arent forced into it. What’s that? Names and points, normally empty column, what’s that other number? Ping? Where is the K/D? Valve understood that in a team-based objective game no one cares. The generally blank column is for Streaks, as mentioned before these require specific guns (that most people don’t have) while also beign a random number you cant compare to anything.
You can see all of your own stats, Kills, Assists, Deaths, Damage, Healed and so on, you know how you got your points, who else needs to know you managed to top score with 6/23 as a medic who pushed the objective.
Yes, TF2 has classes that rely on killing things. Heavy is easily one of them, why is he also going to do objectives? It supports him, health and ammo as said before. Scout, fast agile killer, why is he going to do objective? It supports him and he gets 2x push speed for being awesome and helping the team! Most of a heavies points come from killing, mainly because they kill while around the objective, not sitting in their base on attack as a sniper…
It’s not 100% everyone in TF2 will do the job required, but its much more likely that at some point someone else will.
So what can DB do? Simple, get rid of K/D, it’s a stat that makes people want to brag about their skill rather than do something useful. Helps stop the superiority feeling those with a higher K/D like to go on about. Start rewarding players for objectives MORE. If that’s how you win the damn game, give them what they deserve, score, resupplies, defence, offence multipliers, MVP awards, mentions for most objective score.
