I actually bought in to just support SD for their past games and what seems to me to be the only devs out there still trying to cater to the competitive crowd. But after having a chance to play the game and coming away optimistic I thought I’d share my initial thoughts/impressions on DB and maybe hopefully provide some constructive feedback to help the game reach its potential. My opinions are based on VERY little playtime due to the fact that there’s practically no NA presence atm and the lack of time to play during the UK prime time, so if there’s any misconceptions that I have feel free to correct them. But I feel that as one of the many who’s been dying for the next competitive FPS to come along since the quake/cs/rtcw/unreal era we get a pretty good feel as to whether a game is comp worthy or not pretty quickly. As a sort of gaming background I played q3 competitively and to a lesser degree cs and rtcw/et, so my input will mostly be from a competitive pov. As a blanket statement before I go on I’ll say that the game for the most part feels good at the foundation level, but as it goes up it just sorta feels like it lacks that depth to the meta-game that keeps one interested or invested.
Movement
I think I'm just going to have to concede that games will no longer incorporate a strafe jumping scheme. It's one of those underlying depth to movement in games that hasn't been replicated in recent fps and it seems the current gen of gamers don't care for it. For the most part I'm ok with movement in DB. It doesn't seem to be too different than what's the norm. I personally don't care for for the strafing speed and some of the hitches in movement when reloading, getting hit etc. I personally prefer smoother movement but can understand some of the slow downs....I just don't really care for it during fights due to the sense that it makes the fights one dimensional. I don't have any real feedback far as movement goes outside of the want to have SOME depth to it, but that's a general thing with all recent FPS games.
Classes
Having played very little I can only have generalized comments on classes. I've only really played the medic so that's where most of my opinions will be focused around.
Atm the classes seem to lack that, for lack of a better term, core dependencies. What I mean is that there's not a WANT to be with other teammates/classes. Of course you can't make the classes so dependent on each other that you NEED to be together. Need and want are two different things and it's kind of hard to balance that out. Atm it just feels like if teammates are around me great...if not it's alright too. I don't ever feel low on ammo due to enemies dropping ammo (that's since changed with current patch). Health isn't much of an issue since you can regen health, and current revive mechanics feel somewhat weak. (that's being address with new patch as well)
As an idea for medics I feel that medics should provide an armor mechanic with their medpacks....say 5-10 armor that absorbs 50% dmg with a HOT that heals another 5-10 or whatever over time. Whether that HOT stops healing on any dmg taken or any un-armored dmg taken would be a balance issue to figure out. This would create somewhat of a perk to being around a medic. It could also create those gather and push strategies, having medics buff before making a hard push to an objective. Of course the armor mechanic could create a lot of balancing headaches. I can already see the self healing medics have a field day, but you could always just leave out the armor component on self heals...basically giving them a really weak hot.....or halving the armor they get and take out the HOT component on self heals. Another issue would be someone having really high armor...but you could make the max armor at something extremely low...maybe right at 10 or something.
Can't really comment on other classes due to minimal amount of play time, may update with opinions later.
Social
There's a really good discussion going on in the comp forums about a social system and I would agree. I would almost say that SD needs to concentrate on this aspect just as much as the game itself. It's one of those things that kept me playing competitively because there was a great community. As much as I love steam, its current chat/friend system is somewhat exclusive imo....It's great if you have friends but it isn't a strong system to create an environment to build a strong and lasting community. Almost all of my friends on steam are ones I made during my quake/cs/rtcw days and I contribute that mostly due to IRC. (of which hardly any of us use anymore sadly)
Like someone said in the discussion forum I believe it should be irc like. Maybe have a couple general channels like general/pug/scrim/clan recruit. And if SD wanted to monetize this somewhat they could charge people a small fee to create a clan channel. Of course if they went that route they better provide more than a channel with that fee. Something like invites to weekly/monthly/quarterly tournies (maybe with prizes of some sort) to people with clan channels, or even better have something in game like a clan matchmaking feature where clans can group up and have the game match clans up to play. Maybe include some form of clan ranking system and such.
SD needs to create a sense of persistence i think with the game....having a strong social aspect to the game helps creates that.
Above all else though this thing needs to run lean. No one likes bloatware.
Misc./Requests
Death ghost is interesting and I'd like to see the areas that you've been hit before death be in a different color or something to have a more visual highlight.
In the settings it'd be nice if you had the option to set refreshrate in there. Would also be nice to have a more granular scale for sensitivity along with more granular graphical settings if that's possible.
Not too keen on being able to see enemies hp either…it makes fights more predictable. If you have to have that in I’d maybe make it a feature of the heartbeat sensor…least that would make it more appealing
There’s alot I’d like to comment on such as map/gun/spread/recoil and the like but I don’t feel I have played enough to form a decent opinion on those mechanics yet.
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