Dirty Bomb is a very good time, but I don’t think it does enough to keep new players around long enough to find that out. A list of things I noticed:
- Sawbonez would make a better intro medic than Aura.
Coming from other shooters, the frenetic speed of Dirty Bomb can be jarring. I felt at home with Skyhammer right away, but Aura felt unplayable. It takes a while to learn how to exploit her mobility (flanks) and the positioning of her health station… and until you get handle on that a shotgun class with 80 HP can be very punishing. Sawbonez’s straightforward and hardier kit would make for a softer introduction.
- The mission system doesn’t work well for newer players, and doesn’t work well overall.
Earn XP with phantom in my squad? Play a competitive match? Mercenary specific missions should only apply to Mercs you have access to. I’ve had the Phantom mission for about a week now, feels bad. My other missions are for competitive.
There’s a lot wrong with this system: first, if I can’t or don’t want to complete a mission I can’t do anything to get rid of it. That sucks. Missions could be a great way to keep newer players logging in. As is they do the opposite: I don’t want to play competitive, and so my competitive missions aren’t going anywhere. Feels bad.
Fortunately there is space to improve the system: get 30 headshot kills. Revive 20 players. Win 3 matches. Earn 10 double kills. Kill 10 players with grenades (if you have access to fragger or nadder), etc. Hearthstone does this well, and it’s a huge part of why players keep logging in each day. Dirty Bomb can’t afford to miss the low hanging fruit here.
- 50k mercs are demoralizingly expensive.
It takes between 30-40 hours to farm 50k. After a solid game you earn 150, less than 1/300th the cost. Players need to feel like playing progresses them within the game. The 50k mercs are ruinous to the sense of progression. Mercs should be 30k across the board. You guys have designed great mercs, the cool factor is there. But its hard to sustain the excitement when buying that cool merc takes literally a month of playing an hour every day. Whatever financial considerations there may be, a month long reward loop is a problem for player retention.
- The loadout system isn’t much fun.
The rumour about this game is that it’s pay to win. I was pleased to find that untrue. Loadouts have very little impact. So little that I doubt they are doing their job. Most of the perks are so subtle that you don’t really notice them. Good for the fairness of the game, but bad for the sense of reward within it. Once you get the gist of the system opening cases isn’t much fun. More importantly: you can play for 5 hours without getting any cool stuff. The pineapple perk doesn’t count.
It’s not all bad: some of the perks work really well. Reload while sprinting, jump off walls 3x, increased melee damage are all noticeable in game, despite being nonfactors in most gunfights. The problem is there isn’t enough design space to fill all three slots with cool yet fair augments. Most of the augments barely matter, and so most loadout drops barely matter. The game can be as fun as anything, but when the reward for playing your first 5 hours is an extra ammo clip or machine gun time many players will become disengaged.
The trick is to make more loadouts, especially lead and iron loadouts, meaningful without powercreeping the loadout system as a whole. One way to do this might be to have every loadout give one of the cooler or impactful perks: 20% reload time, 3x jump, reload while sprint, buff to role, etc. No one is going to use lead for long. Lead loadouts act as an incremental reward that keeps players playing. It’s important that lead loadouts feel as impactful as possible: they are the first reward new players achieve.