Well, i’ve played over 750 hours of this game and i felt like sharing my opinions of the game and what i would like to see from it in the future. I know it’s quite lengthy but i had some time on my hands and thought why not.
General gameplay
First things first, the gameplay is pretty good. Tight shooting mechanics, i like the fact that most mercs don’t go down at a single shot fired at them but you can take a fair amount of damage before kicking the bucket. The game really awards accuracy and being able to get consistent headshots makes all the difference. All in all i would say that there’s a pretty high skill requirement to be really good at the game but fortunately there’s enough of a player base for now to be able to enjoy it even if you’re not close to that.
F2P model
The financial model of the game is really fair considering that this is a free to play title. You can’t buy power in game with money. There are no BS weapon add-ons, damage improvements and whatnot that you can only get with money or ridiculous grinding time. Real money price of 7,49€ and 4,49€ is alright however i would like to see 50k credits mercs dropped to 40k or at least 45k. It takes slightly too long for a new player to get that much for a single merc. It’s not a big issue since you get 2 top tier mercs for free and with the usual 3 mercs rotation you have a good selection but noobs see people playing Nader and feel like you need to pay to get „good“ mercs but they don’t realise yet that often Aura or Skyhammer are more useful. The loadout system is also pretty fair since it’s quite easy to get a bronze card and the augments by themselves are not that powerful so it’s better to even use a lead card with a weapon you like and are comfortable using than a bronze with something else just because it has 3 augments. There are optimal cards for some mercs where the augments really hit spot on (SM41 Nader for exmaple) but my experience taught me that you won’t really feel the difference if you have something else when playing. Some people complain about the bad RNG to get anything better than bronze without shelling out the moneys but that’s purely cosmetic and the devs have to earn money somehow. To sum up pretty fair for a f2p game which is very rare these days.
Mercs (mostly complaining about things that kill Proxy)
I like playing Proxy and she’s my favorite which is unfortunate because she dies when a bit stronger wind blows in her direction. Fletcher’s stickies needs a nerf, Fletchers don’t even use their weapons. Either make them have 2 stickies or increase the cooldown. Bushwacker’s turret is the worst, words can not express how much i hate it. It has more hp than proxy ffs, better aim than most players and on Bushwacker rotation you can forget about playing low health mercs. Remove the katana from the game, it’s a freaking shooting game. Crouching phantoms camping and waiting to stab proxies, aura’s and etc. piss off both the attackers and defenders. Nobody likes a camping phantom. One body shot kill shotguns shouldn’t be a thing, make them 79dmg on a body shot like the Fel-ix.
Make a better tutorial
To be honest i haven’t played through it recently but from behavior of new players it sucks. Tips while loading are good but they need to play through it in the tutorial. Learn that only one person can repair/defuse at a time and do it if you’re the engineer. If you see teammate repairing message take a step back and cover dummy. I’ve seen so many losses when two engineers are defusing the same c4 to be cleared by one grenade and team has no fast defusers after. Cover and take their place if they get killed. Generators can be blown by explosives, if you’re a Nader playing Bridge don’t efin waste 5 nades dicking around instead of shooting them at the generator. If you’re a medic don’t run in combat first. Aura’s are fast so a lot of noobs run into action first leaving their team without revives/heals. If you’re not the only Skyhammer in the team co-ordinate air strikes. On first repair people throw 3 airstrikes and then what. It gets half way waiting for the cool down.
Balance
The biggest issue that this game has is balance, being pub or competitive matches. I’ve heard somewhere (probably on this forum) that the plan is to remove the join button and disable team switching in pubs, and introduce the party system similar to ranked. Removing join button is imo very stupid. Firstly sometimes i want to play in a match with my friend and we don’t have another 4 guys to make a 6 player team and spend 10 minutes looking for a match. Secondly are you removing server browser as well? If not this makes no sense, people will simply enter the same server from the browser. Leave the join button, make the game skill shuffle before the match and disable switching. Punising leavers in pub matches is also a bit silly. Sometimes people play pub because they’re not sure if they have the time for a full match and in other times you’re getting stomped so hard you have to leave and find another match. Are you really gonna punish someone for that? I think pre-shuffle with no switching is okay and don’t allow odd number of players. If 2 teams are playing 5v5 on a bigger server and one player joins make him wait until another guy joins so it’s 6v6. You can then balance even easier by choosing which player fits in each team and not just adding players as they come to fill the empty spots. (quick join would have to prioritize filling matches that already started over opening new ones)
Ranked
As for ranked i would make a few changes. Make solo/due que 6v6 and leave the 5v5 for full teams. The reason is that in 5v5 individual skill comes out the most and in 5v5 it’s really hard to compensate for one team having a crazy carry. I think this would greatly improve solo/due experience. The second change would be make silver rank progression faster than other tanks. Most people are sorted into silver ranks after 10 matches and as far as I know the matchmaking will put you against people +/- 2 or 3 ranks from you. Going up or down on the rank is a bit too slow and you end up getting rekt by people who should be higher up but it takes too many matches. Add +30% rank change speed to entire silver rank group and +15% for first 2 bronze levels and last 2 golds. This way good players would get faster to their range and still have to play quite a bit to get to high ranks and worse players would sink faster and be able to play with other players on their level. Seems like a decent idea to me.
Future
GTFO of beta as soon as you can. It’s almost a year since the game was put in open beta and you should really look to get the full release as soon as possible. Folks don’t like eternal early access/open betas. And you’ve already released a lot of content. People that come when the games gets full release are going to be like what a shiny loadout! Where did you get it? It was the containment war last year. What about this one? Rogue en Vogue… I mean the pre-season of ranked is over. We have season 1 of ranked and we’re still in beta. Are you gonna start full release with season 2, maybe 3 or who knows? This probably isn’t a issue for a lot of people but i say iron out all the bugs and release the game. Then work on the extra content if the form of new mercs and maps, eventually new game mode. Just don’t over do it on the game mods in the future not to divide the player base.
All in all i think Dirty Bomb is a good game with potentially great future and i hope it becomes an establish shooter. I don’t see why it shouldn’t if the devs don’t get greedy and introduce some form of p2w which is a common occurrence in this types of games. If i had to give it a grade on a numerical scale i would give it a large number out of a larger number. Whoever read this whole thing gets a cookie.