I’ve not been playing Dirty Bomb long, and I haven’t even progressed to the point where I own any mercs (aside from the starting 2), but I’ve been playing FPS games since Wolfenstein 3D (or Counterstrike if you only consider competitive 3D games), so I felt obliged to offer my opinion, on the off chance the development team are at all interested in how players percieve the experience of their game.
I just want to state my opinion on the game’s progression curve, and what it feels like to be a noob entering an environment where a significant portion of the player base have progressed beyond the starting equipment.
I’ve been playing for 9 days, not more than a few games each day (I hit lvl 6 today), frankly because the gameplay is just not that enticing for me. I love competitive FPS games as a genre, I quite like the engine, but the way the game is balanced right now just does not appeal to me.
The variety and diversity of Merc armaments and abilities is good, but the lack of choice at the start of the game is, in my opinion, obnoxious, and feels like a cynical attempt to take my money. Most other games would give you a reasonable choice of starting weapons/characters.
Here you get the two basic mercs, and whichever 2 are on free rotation. This eliminates the need for people to start new accounts if they picked something they didnt like, but at the same time it forces you to play with the weapons and in the roles that are available at the time. In my case, that’s Skyhammer, Arty, Aura and Fletcher.
Part of making a balanced game is giving every class and/or weapon a strength and a weakness, and I appreciate the fact. The thing is, with the four mercs I have access to, choice is limited to very few options, none of which fit my play style.
I’m generally happy to use a shotgun, but here the movement speed on some of the characters and the ability to double jump makes using melee or shotguns rather tricky; while the assault rifles suffer from very rapidly escalating accuracy bloom (reference to the way the crosshairs “bloom”, by getting larger), to the point where shooting someone with an M4 on full auto from a few meters away takes about 25 bullets to take them from full hp to bleeding out.
I’ve seen people use SMGs, and these seem to be a lot more forgiving in terms of accuracy bloom, it’s certainly the case for Fletcher’s secondaries, but I can’t actually get a Primary SMG since I don’t have enough currency for a merc who uses an SMG, and I’ve not managed to get the mp7 loadout cards for Aura/Fletcher.
Of the four primaries I have access to, Arty’s G3-like assault rifle seems to work best for me, it seems to deal x2 about the damage of the m4, and since it’s semi-auto accuracy bloom doesn’t come into play to such an extent. The thing is, if you are then going to stick to just 1 merc, the drawback on their ability is going to bite you in the arse. hard. There’s maps (especially metro) where the areas susceptable to his ability are so rarely occupied by the enemy force as to render the ability more of a hindrance than a use. What I wouldn’t have given (the answer is of course, real money) to sell the artillery and have a nice, normal frag grenade, like those that are in every other FPS game, ever.
What’s also off-putting are the game modes: objective and timer. Timer is by far and away the most frustrating thing about Dirty Bomb right now. You can tell which side is going to win in the first 5 minutes of almost every game. And both game modes essentially encourage camping by forcing one side to defend an objective!
Also of note is that fact that if one side is dominant (which happens almost every time in timer mode), the game degenerates into spawnkilling. How about inaccessible and safe spawn zones? Or a spawn shield which reflects damage rather than ignoring it, to put off this exploitative behaviour?
I appreciate you need money to run the servers and pay for the development cost, but forcing F2P players to spend a lot of time (I am still stuck with the same mercs after over a week) playing the starting/free rotation mercs before they have any real choice (most of the loadout cards i get have the same assault rifles as the base, or shotguns, all of which are more or less equivalent as far as I’m concerned) is not going to get you much popularity. Understandably, reducing the price of mercs would mean that players reach content saturation much sooner, so I suggest an exponential element to the pricing scheme for in-game currency purchases (retain the flat rate for real money) - the first few mercs are considerably discounted, but buying more with in-game cash will increase the cost, cumulatively.
This will give newer players more choice, and in the long term could increase the time to reach content saturation (not to mention that people who have invested a lot of time in the game are more likely to part with real money).
