Welcome to what will likely be my biggest post on these forums so far…
I am expecting a rather big backlash from both the community and the developers on this one. As you will likely know if you have seen me around on the forums, I do try and keep things positive and approach as much of my feedback as possible with detailed reasoning. However, that mainly just causes massive arguments within the community from people that disagree and agree. I feel for as much effort as I have personally put in, I have unfortunately failed in my attempts to spark interesting debates or even solve many of the problems I see going forward. Having tried to remain active both in the forums and in game my frustration levels have basically raised to boiling point and now I need to unload some of that negative energy. So please, put your hands together for the amazing wall of text!
Skill based shooter… A phrase that everyone likes to throw around the place, yet it seems that most people have a pretty skewed definition of what that actually means and what it should entail. By the definition most people seem to use, Splash Damage could have made a game where two players spawn in a simple cube with a Quake Live style Lightning Gun, strafe jumping and grenades… Would we finally be happy then? Please don’t get me wrong, I am all for natural skill being a rather big aspect of the game but when you attempt to make the whole game based on that very limited skill set you end up with what we have now. Still not skill based enough? lets crank that speed up 50% more and reduce that recoil! If the design doc had the following.“The premium tap left and right while tracking the enemies head simulator” you would get laughed at. Yet it seems from the current design and what the community are asking for, that is exactly what people want Dirty Bomb to be. The skill aspect alone just seems dumb to me… There are literally dozens of individual skills required for most first person shooters. Normally having just any one or two of these skills will give you a place to compete. Not here though… Your options are gimped to the point where if you cannot track like a beast, you may as well go home. Where is the timing, positioning, flick aim, prediction aim, and ability usage? These are not things you can simply “add” to the game. The only way way these skills will manifest themselves is when/if the overpowering tracking and left to right spam is nerfed. The problem is, the only viable ways to do this would be via slowing the overall game speed, increasing the time to kill or increasing/decreasing the recoil. Ironically, doing any of what I just mentioned will get most of the current player base up in arms. I have said this time and time again but here I go again… Fighting vs evenly matched opponents at lower levels is hard and frustrating. Fighting vs evenly matched opponents at higher skills maybe not as hard but it quickly turns frustrating and highly luck based. Now it would be easy to accuse my frustrations being born from my own lack of skill. Hopefully, some people here that I have played with can assure the rest that I am completely capable of L/R spam while tracking heads. My concern here is with accessibility, fun factor, frustration factor, spectator watch ability and long term viability. Watching people fight this way looks dumb and at higher skill levels you feel at the mercy of random deviation. It is not fun, its frustrating and frustration is a sure fire way to cause people to get angry and to move onto the next game. In an attempt to raise a skill ceiling you have reduced the games depth and it is one of your biggest obstacles to creating a rich experience to the end user. Before moving on its important to note that this is also made so much worse by the games general performance. Sure performance often does effect player ability however in Dirty Bomb the person with the highest/smoothest frame rate is at a massive advantage.
This is the part where I would tell you to not get me started on the maps but as that is not an option, so, here I go. I have tried and tried to remain positive and even produced a video showing why I think that Victoria shows signs of decent map design. However signs is where I have to draw the line. What makes this all the more baffling is the fact that many of the major flaws are beyond obvious to even untrained eyes. No consideration seems to have been taken when it comes to angles that overlook objectives and distances between spawns, objectives and chokes compared to respawn times. I can excuse the lack of wall jump spots, not having areas that work with certain Merc abilities and the crappy collision in sections. However, the limited routes, overlooked routes and lack of consideration to a Mercs optimal range is all on the map designers. While I respect that many aspects of the games design are rooted in old school sensibilities, moving forward this needs to be addressed. So far from the look of Dome and Battersea I am not seeing any improvement. Dome itself feels like it was designed for a game like Battlefield with the number of windows you need to be watching. Battersea on the other hand has a great concept that up until now has been very poorly executed. London has the opportunity to be a great setting for the maps and I cannot wait for next year if this game does well and we start seeing Tokyo, New York or South American based maps. After all its hard to imagine that if the game does well you would be limiting yourself to a single city… I would personally recommend starting work on the TDM, Execution and even Domination maps until more has been introduced/finalised when it comes to gameplay systems. You also have VIPS here that are more then capable of looking at 2D map designs and giving feedback before you even waste your time blocking them out. Just because something is mapped perfectly does not make it good/fun. Many of the best aspects of some of the most popular maps ever produced are down to their flaws that are sometimes deliberate and often not. Echo and play testing offer a very limited amount of feedback. Its perception, emotion and peoples imperfections that really effect how a map plays. I would even go as far to say I believe that if everyone was a robot that played perfectly every single time. The current map pool would likely be pretty good. Unfortunately we are but humans and the current map pool by no means has tolerance for our limitations.
Anyway, what are maps without gamemodes? well… just maps I suppose. I personally find it crazy that half of a gamemode is considered a gamemode at all. Now I cannot say I have much experience with ET or ETQW so please feel free to correct me if what I say next is incorrect. It is my belief that in previous Splash Damage games the maps were designed for the Objective style and then converted to work with the Stopwatch style. In Dirty Bomb however, this seems to have been flipped around. Just because something works one way around does not mean it does the other way around and I believe you likely have the stats to back that up. The fundamental difference I see here is that Objective maps in the past were designed to be completed 50% of the time. Stopwatch maps on the other hand are designed to be completed the vast majority of the time. This small difference completely throws off the balance. The systems you have implemented to differentiate the modes also seem to do the opposite of what you expected. The more random spawns increase the likely hood of the Attackers getting a clear run at an objective. The longer spawns increase the likely hood of the Defenders not having enough time to even attempt to re-take an objective. The overtime mechanic literally gives the Attackers more of an opportunity to finish and we have already established a second attacker advantage in stopwatch due to changes in play when the time limit comes close to ending, yet in objective mode you allow the time limit to start coming to an end constantly pushing the attackers forward and giving the defenders false confidence. From watching back some of the old matches that Potty did the casting for last year, I honestly think that Objective mode should be played on maps like the original London Bridge and the full length Train Yard. The longer the map the less impact the psychological kick up the ass has. The mode would also feel less repetitive, be easier to balance and able to embrace larger player numbers. I honestly do appreciate that you are working with limited resources but without nailing this now, you are basically wasting more of them resources on a fundamentally broken aspect of the game then it would take to fix/improve/remove it. Execution and TDM are both modes that I have yet to get my hands on. Since joining the game I have heard lots of good things about the TDM maps and Execution mode in general. My biggest fear with Execution is that its just going to die in public play unless you add some form of objective for each round. I have already made a couple big posts about my ideas of Execution so please feel free to dig them up and have a read. What I think you should be looking at more the being completely original is at least having something the majority of players can understand. Throw in a new game mode or throw in a playlist game mode that has multiple maps that span different game modes so you can eventually start seeing what the public want to be playing. I totally get that developing game modes is one of the most complex aspects of development but the truth is right now you lack a good pub friendly gamemode for reasons I will rant about later on in this post. Most people will agree as fun as TDM could be, the Merc based system really does throw a spanner in the works when it comes to predictability and the potential spam that would likely happen.
They say stress is a killer. Dirty Bomb is a very stressful game to play. Whilst some people would say that constant action is a good thing. I would say its only a good thing over short periods of time or when the stakes are low. Dirty Bomb however is anything but them two aspects. Its kind of a catch 22 really… The gameplay is fast and that means that lots of deaths are bound to happen. This means respawn times have to be quite short and the gamemodes mean that your playing for a fair amount of time. This is one of the causes of major frustration the players feel. The respawns are longer than on other games of similar speed and the result is that even a 1:1 kill death ratio still feels pretty horrible. This is impacted even more by long periods of time spent running from spawn back to the action. There is a distinct lack of pacing and escalation. You are either doing nothing or doing everything at any given time. You need to be fully alert at all times to make sure your ready for that switch as once it ramps up, its normally only for a few seconds before you or your enemy is dead. Whilst these are just some examples of how it effects the player directly, indirectly the effect on the game from a spectators PoV and as a video producer or streamers PoV is equally as dull. Crazy to think that something so fast and action orientated can be so boring at the same time. Like anything in life we soon become accustomed to our situation. The match needs more properly defined phases, better transitions between fights and deeper contrast between the emotional states. Hate to say it really… Again, I honestly feel this comes down to the games speed, time to kill and lack of depth. Hopefully in future you will be able to find a gamemode that works well with these traits if you choose to not lower the games speed.
-=TO BE CONTINUED=-
Let the hate commence >.<
