I’ve been playing Dirty Bomb for a little over a week now and i’m on my way to level 8, so I guess i’m still pretty new to this by some measure. I like how this game kinda reminds me of Enemy Territory ( and it makes sense that it does, Splash Damage worked on both ) and so far i’m really enjoying this. But since this is a beta, there’s still some polishing to do here and there. One of those things is the game client itself. Sometimes it feels a little slow and clunky and could use a couple of UI improvements, but I won’t go into much detail on that.
Secondly, and my main focus with this post, is gameplay. There are a number of issues that I, personaly, feel that should receive some attention.
One of the things I find most annoying is jumping. Not the double-jump or trickjump bits, but those people that jump around in every fight but still manage to hit most of their shots. Especially annoying with shotguns. Shouldn’t jumping impose a harsh penalty on aim ? It’s even easier to land headshots while aiming at another person from top-down ( larger head hitbox in proportion to the body, because of the perspective ), and it makes you that much harder to hit. People shouldn’t feel that there’s no point whatsoever in jumping, but it becomes annoying when a fast character just runs at you and jumps around with a shotgun hitting your face.
That brings me to the 2nd thing: character speed. I like the differences in speed. Heavy guys like rhino or fragger are slower while others are faster, but to me there is too much of a difference, and at a point it becomes a balance issue. Since this game’s aim is based on tracking, it is much harder to track a fast moving character than a slow one. The health differences between the two don’t quite make up for the speed differences. Also, i’ve seen plenty of auras run past proxy’s mines and by the time it explodes, aura is far enough away to not take fatal damage.
On to more specific things:
Bushwacker’s turret feels a little on the overpowered side. A 1on1 with it is a certain loss, and a well placed turret can take down more than a couple of guys before anyone can take it down.
Spawn protection. This existed back in ET and I feel it should exist here. Often people get spawn camped and it’s really hard to recover from such a situation. Even worse when a Bushwacker places a turret behind your spawn point. This would also apply to revives - you often get shot down before you can even more around. A 2-3 second spawn protection and even a 1 sec revive protection would go a long way.
Defuse vs Help up - I think this has been discussed somewhere around the forum but I feel it needs some more attention too. Defuses should take priority over “Help up”, always, since they use the same key. This wouldn’t even pose a problem for medics because they revive instantly and use a different key for that.
Grinding. - Right now the game feel a bit grindy to get the desired mercs. A more or less casual player will have to play for a long time to get his desired mercs. This doesn’t really help new players either where the games don’t have an engineer.
And that’s about it for now. I’m open to discussion on any of these topics, and they only express my opinion. Tell me if you agree or disagree and why : )