Klaue_
03-12-2012, 09:29 PM
Hello Folks,
this post is dedicated to give feedback to the developers.
Its not a bug-report in essence but a overall review about gameplay in the current playable state of the beta build 234744.2(March 12th 2012).
Little introduction to myself, i'm playing pc-games for more than over 15 years now, included very dedicated five years of Ghost Recon 1 and two years of Rainbox Six: Raven Shield. Played a load of other tactic- and so-called-tactic-shooters, to name the ones i've not played would maybe the shorter way, but i keep that.
So its not overrated to say i know a little bit what iam talking about.
I don't go into depth of every single weapon, skill, armor or attachment, just because my time is limitted in some way, but i'll try to adress the most important things i got in my mind at the moment. Also i will not do augmentation on or to real combat, behaviour or any realism, even if i could. Its still a game and it will be juged as such. Another point i will not adress is the way some things are to fullfill the role of earning money, there must be such things. I just hope its not gonna go pay-to-win anyways.
Also i'll apologize in advance for my bad language skills, english it not my nativ language.
General - Discussion
I realy dont want to exclude people of this discussion depending they are not "good" enough but to make sure there is a solid base of knowledge about the game, how it works and fells in long term. That is not achieved by playing 10 matches by the way ... I know its a beast of post but there is no point in arguing on a single line, read it completly or leave it.
So please don't reply to this post if you do not have made up your mind by facts and a lot of experience. Thansk in advance, feel free to push this thread
Expect comments about - non game related - stuff i'am just annoyed of, dont wanna start any bashing or flaming so don't be upset.
So here we go, lets get to my points of view.
Menu - Leaderboard, Matchmaking and Equipment
Matchmaking - Overall i feel comfortable with the current system, but there are some issues.
In my opinion players that 90% of their games in "place 1" and got a overall KDR of >3.5 after 12h gameplay shouldnt be mixed up with players their skill konverge to zero. Even its beta where not so many players are around and its all public, its not the way it should be because player with "high skill" get realy frustrated by brainless camping teammates. I prefer to wait two or three minutes more instead of mixed up with player that are in fact not existant in a match. Also ther should be a balancing mechanics to give a 2/3/3, 3/2/3 or 3/3/2 setup for the classes per team. Pick player that play a specific role frequently and give them a match where they are needed.
Match-Up-Phase - way to long, even its to made to find players and give them more time for joining and loading. Reducing them to the half of about 90 seconds should be way enough, not to mention most of the time the half of the team is useless anyway, so it wouldnt matter that much if you start a game with 5 instead of commonly 7 players.
Leaderboard - I dont realy paying attention to the comparrision to other players becaus the position is cacuulated on .. hm points made in a match? And points made in a match are calculated by kills, captured points, assists, offensive and defensive kills and so on. I understand why a leaderboard is nice to have and the majority of the players of course "need" it. But i dont see any gameplay related purpose in this. I HOPE the matchmaking dont uses the position one any ladder to match up players ... anyway its hardly bugged at the time, in fact you get a different place and score if you open up a specific ladder multiple times in a row.
Equipment available - at the moment a good collection, some updates are completly useless (muzzlebreaks), even stats are not displayed properly, or i do not understand how a reduction in damages from ~32 to ~24 is done when the new weapon has 2 less damage then the old one. Looking forward to see other gadgets like HP/Energy-Regerneration-Booster, Ability-Blocker, temporarly sprint and stuff like that. Also displaying progressbars and percentage for weaponskills would be nice. (not only in the match-result screen)
What i realy would like to see in the future - the possibility to decide for maps/gamem-modes i want to play. I know this is problematic because of the daily missions where i can pick a specific map for example, so the time to achieve the reward would be drastically reduced.
Gameplay - Spawnpoints, Cover-System, Camera and Movement, Abilitys, VoIP, Weapons and Deviation
Spawnpoints - Spawnpoints are well placed so far, enough cover and space i think. Anyone who complains about spawn-killing is wrong, most of the time you even can't see the spawnpoint, direct fire not possible so there is no spawnkilling, thats fine to me. On some maps the movement of the spawnpoint, after capturing a flag or loosing it, is a little bit too far i think, especially on moscow metro. I know its depending on the design of the map but it moves around 10-20 meters too far back for the loosing team, if D gets unlocked and about 30 meters too short if you unlock B at the same side, in realtion to the map-size its should be fixed. Check other maps as well, there are more issues with that where the movement time to the center of the cappoint is not even or compareable to other maps, related to the overall individual map-size. Hard to explain and for sure to read and understand, but its this way. :D
Cover-System - A nice gimmick, works sometimes, the bonuses provided are often not realy noticeable, iam not a friend of it. First Problem: Poping out of cover and aiming around the corner takes too long imho. So i often stay in cover the old ways, aiming through my scope. Of course with the disadvantage that i cant look around the corner, but for that i use to quickly un-aim my weapon, way faster than the cover system imho. So the common approach is to use the cover system to look around corners an to engaging enemys leaving the coverystem and bring it down the old way. Another thing, if your not looking down your sight and try to shoot around the corner "from the hip", it takes way too long before the weapon starts firing. It has its uses, but bring disatvantages. Maybe its should be this way, you also get the sacrifice of weapon focus when using cover, not as doing it the old way, dont know, still not a big fan. Second Problem: You often stick out too much, espacially the weapon and equipment on your back. In fact the most kills i do in rushing enemy positions is by killing enemys that stick out to much because they used the cover system. In cover and prone stance, often your knee sticks out, also a disadvantage. Check this please i depth. Second Problem belongs much to placement of objects in the map. You also get glued to object sometimes, as well as the systems cant decide to let you look over cover and pops you up and down frequently, but these bugs are rare.
Camera/Line of Sight and Movement - The camera works fine most of the time, the switching between the left and right side of the shoulder-view is nicly done. One little scratch on that, if you switch the shoulder on turning your soldier on the horizontal axis quickly, it becomes too smooth and slow for my taste. The camera then needs 1/4 up to 2/4 seconds longer to follow the players line of sight and that reduces the time to react on threads drastically. Now we get to some very seriouse points: Using the cover-key on sprinting - the distance you can slide by holding the cover-key on sprinting is way too high, you can cover about 7 or so meters of distance this way. Its nice you can shoot while oon the sliding and even go prone by looking behind you at the end of the slide, but its to much distance imho. Go instant prone on running - there sould be a timeout for shooting or a much more deviation on that.(i prefer the last one) I saw alot of players doing "dolphine-doge" i call it. Spamming the prone and upright stance and getting a nice "slide around"-effect, in fact very hard to hit with a way to high accuracy on the weapon. The speed for getting up and down is nice, but the accuracy and sliding effect are overdone. There is an very hard issue with the line of sight when you are laying on stairs, you can shoot people the need to expose yourself to the enemy, this is because the angle of the camera allows to see AND shoot over obstacles. Actually bulles should follow the line of fire that leaves your barrel and not the "center" of the screen. Please take a very serious look at that. Also i would like to be able to interrupt actions like climbing. Contectual jumping is bugged sometimes, if you approach a obstacle by sprinting, the avatar goes into slide-mode somehow.
Abilitys - not soo much on that. Specialist Aegis stays up too long after activation. Detection by Snipers stays up too long after activation. Blitz bugged sometimes, hitbox-detection problem maybe. EMP should disrupt activated abilitys of enemy players, in its current form its one of the weakest abilitys to use it in squad-combats, in my opinion. Another real Problem with Blitz, bullets went through teammates but not through the Blitz-shields on the back of your mates. Realy annoying if you try to supress enemy through "meat-shields". Stealth on snipers is also bugged, sometimes you cant see the blurry effect while the sniper is on the move. Nevertheless I understand why there are abilitys and why they are the way they are, but i dont give much attention to abilitys, a nice gimmick though, the brain everyone should use is a much better weapon to hit your enemys hard and unexpected. Team-Abilitys are .. yeah, they are .. :D Dont get me wrong, average player could realy improve their way of combating and the abilitys are mostly nice this way, but on the two ends of the "skill level" abilitys are not so important imho.
Weapons - about Handling and Deviation - For the speed of the game the deviation, recoil and overall behaviour of weapons is good already. I have some worries about shotguns and semi-auto marksman rifles. Espacially the semi-snipers with CQB-scopes can be a devastating tool used properly(today known as imbalanced). Of cours the rate of fire is limited, but thats not a big issue if you handle your movement the right way, not a big deal. Sure there should be an effort to player that do so, but shotguns and semi-snipers could maybe be realy overpowered at the current state. Bad thing, i got no usefull solution to that but to reduce the damge that you cant one-shot-kill someone expect of headshots and critical hits, not even to adress further problems with special ammo. Ah ... Special ammo .. uhm, you can carry more than 300 rounds on an assault class, bug-fix needed, you know that. Also i think its too powerfull. If you aiming towards that players with high rank are able to kill every opponent with one or two hits, make it from the start this way or you get in trouble with SMGs (because of the less recoil) and LMGs(because of the ammount of ammo carried in one box). Or make them realy ****ing expensive. The stability of weapons in prone stance is a little bit off i think, more stability with the sacrifice of longer time needed to focus. Makes LMGs and marksman rifles more meaningful in defensive purpose. Deviation on Run'n'Gun is good so far, only the recoil on crouch is a little bit odd, should be higher while crouch and on the move, same for crawling around and shooting your gun onehanded. Please more recoil on both. As in the part Movement already said. A timeoff while going from upright to prone or much more recoil/inaccuracy should be added, also a timeoff or much more recoil/inaccuracy while rolling sideways in prone is needed. At the moments these two are very imbalanced.
The "Reddot" is way to big on most of the sights, i know its a reason of balance but it feels just wrong, as well as the shape, actually nowadays a real red dot became very rare, there illuminated dot sights out there are more bar-based. Also the faint of the sight-glas is too high i think, very distracting sometimes. I would like to have an option to place the sight on the weapon in different distances to the eye. :P
Grenades - line of flight not correctly shown, maybe on purpose, some player complainng about that, for me its fine this way, you unever know where it goes boom. :D But and real issue on that, grenades with impact trigger should not bounce off wall and keep flying 50-100cm, would be nice though. :)
Network Performance
I have to admit i'm a little bit impressed by the perfomance, realy stable and quick, nice hit-detection no big problems problems with delay so far. But there is something i missed ... hm what is it ... ah my latency to the server! In numeric numerbs, please. :D
Voice over IP
An option to silence selected people in a match, please, i'm seriouse, its annoying to hear ignorant peoples music,TV or talking on teamspeak about someones boring birthday party and wondering that someone made a request ... on a mysterious way ... Ingame-VoIP O_O(woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo O____O):
"Please activate your Push-to-Talk." ... Thanks. ...
Video- and Audio-Options
No full screen anti alaysing, very bad for detecting enemy on middle and higher distance. You know what ia talking about, the whole discussion about optical "illusion" effects and the capability of our brains to missinterpreting pixeled-object to something not existent. Recognition is very limited, in fact, the way to spot enemys is to look for any moving red lights ... not the way it should be i think. Btw i've not tryed to force any FSAA by the driver but it should be a option in the game anyway.
Audio problems with some guns having too much bass(M96) and others are too quiet in comparison to other guns(M249 Para). Also the sound of firing supressed weapons by yourself is odd, you hear it correctly when others(mates and opponents) firing supressive weapons, but not by your point of acting.
Tutorial
Please, oh please help to exterminate the disease of minimap-ignorance. An basic introduction for player to basic gameplay tools like markers and minimap would be nice and usefull to everyone playing public. Tell the player this thing called map is very useful to play in team, getting information about teammates and objective positions. Many players just dont give a ****/dont know how to use the map and stay one or two capurepoints behind, not aware that there is some seriouse push ongoing 100meters ahead. I know this problem for 15 years now, nobody solved it proplery, i think you realy have to explain a map to people. I'm not saying they are dump but .... **** that they are, dump as **** god damit explain the ****ing map!
Overall
I'm not worried to call this a true tactic-shooter, not like hyped stuff from other big publishers or UbiSoft. (calling no names to avoid bashing and flaming)
Nice balance so far, known issues pointed out above. Even in this state of beta the game is much better then 90% of any "tactic"-games out there i think. Well polished so far, some balance issues for "professional" gaming there, but keep on your good work and you will get a diamond hopefully.
And thats it so far, important suff pointed out. For those who made it ... to this point of text, without skipping anything, thanks.
Feel free to add stuff, dont flame, dont blame, play the game, stay calm and nice, relax and use your brain. :)
Boidrix
/edit: my grammar sucks hard ...
this post is dedicated to give feedback to the developers.
Its not a bug-report in essence but a overall review about gameplay in the current playable state of the beta build 234744.2(March 12th 2012).
Little introduction to myself, i'm playing pc-games for more than over 15 years now, included very dedicated five years of Ghost Recon 1 and two years of Rainbox Six: Raven Shield. Played a load of other tactic- and so-called-tactic-shooters, to name the ones i've not played would maybe the shorter way, but i keep that.
So its not overrated to say i know a little bit what iam talking about.
I don't go into depth of every single weapon, skill, armor or attachment, just because my time is limitted in some way, but i'll try to adress the most important things i got in my mind at the moment. Also i will not do augmentation on or to real combat, behaviour or any realism, even if i could. Its still a game and it will be juged as such. Another point i will not adress is the way some things are to fullfill the role of earning money, there must be such things. I just hope its not gonna go pay-to-win anyways.
Also i'll apologize in advance for my bad language skills, english it not my nativ language.
General - Discussion
I realy dont want to exclude people of this discussion depending they are not "good" enough but to make sure there is a solid base of knowledge about the game, how it works and fells in long term. That is not achieved by playing 10 matches by the way ... I know its a beast of post but there is no point in arguing on a single line, read it completly or leave it.
So please don't reply to this post if you do not have made up your mind by facts and a lot of experience. Thansk in advance, feel free to push this thread
Expect comments about - non game related - stuff i'am just annoyed of, dont wanna start any bashing or flaming so don't be upset.
So here we go, lets get to my points of view.
Menu - Leaderboard, Matchmaking and Equipment
Matchmaking - Overall i feel comfortable with the current system, but there are some issues.
In my opinion players that 90% of their games in "place 1" and got a overall KDR of >3.5 after 12h gameplay shouldnt be mixed up with players their skill konverge to zero. Even its beta where not so many players are around and its all public, its not the way it should be because player with "high skill" get realy frustrated by brainless camping teammates. I prefer to wait two or three minutes more instead of mixed up with player that are in fact not existant in a match. Also ther should be a balancing mechanics to give a 2/3/3, 3/2/3 or 3/3/2 setup for the classes per team. Pick player that play a specific role frequently and give them a match where they are needed.
Match-Up-Phase - way to long, even its to made to find players and give them more time for joining and loading. Reducing them to the half of about 90 seconds should be way enough, not to mention most of the time the half of the team is useless anyway, so it wouldnt matter that much if you start a game with 5 instead of commonly 7 players.
Leaderboard - I dont realy paying attention to the comparrision to other players becaus the position is cacuulated on .. hm points made in a match? And points made in a match are calculated by kills, captured points, assists, offensive and defensive kills and so on. I understand why a leaderboard is nice to have and the majority of the players of course "need" it. But i dont see any gameplay related purpose in this. I HOPE the matchmaking dont uses the position one any ladder to match up players ... anyway its hardly bugged at the time, in fact you get a different place and score if you open up a specific ladder multiple times in a row.
Equipment available - at the moment a good collection, some updates are completly useless (muzzlebreaks), even stats are not displayed properly, or i do not understand how a reduction in damages from ~32 to ~24 is done when the new weapon has 2 less damage then the old one. Looking forward to see other gadgets like HP/Energy-Regerneration-Booster, Ability-Blocker, temporarly sprint and stuff like that. Also displaying progressbars and percentage for weaponskills would be nice. (not only in the match-result screen)
What i realy would like to see in the future - the possibility to decide for maps/gamem-modes i want to play. I know this is problematic because of the daily missions where i can pick a specific map for example, so the time to achieve the reward would be drastically reduced.
Gameplay - Spawnpoints, Cover-System, Camera and Movement, Abilitys, VoIP, Weapons and Deviation
Spawnpoints - Spawnpoints are well placed so far, enough cover and space i think. Anyone who complains about spawn-killing is wrong, most of the time you even can't see the spawnpoint, direct fire not possible so there is no spawnkilling, thats fine to me. On some maps the movement of the spawnpoint, after capturing a flag or loosing it, is a little bit too far i think, especially on moscow metro. I know its depending on the design of the map but it moves around 10-20 meters too far back for the loosing team, if D gets unlocked and about 30 meters too short if you unlock B at the same side, in realtion to the map-size its should be fixed. Check other maps as well, there are more issues with that where the movement time to the center of the cappoint is not even or compareable to other maps, related to the overall individual map-size. Hard to explain and for sure to read and understand, but its this way. :D
Cover-System - A nice gimmick, works sometimes, the bonuses provided are often not realy noticeable, iam not a friend of it. First Problem: Poping out of cover and aiming around the corner takes too long imho. So i often stay in cover the old ways, aiming through my scope. Of course with the disadvantage that i cant look around the corner, but for that i use to quickly un-aim my weapon, way faster than the cover system imho. So the common approach is to use the cover system to look around corners an to engaging enemys leaving the coverystem and bring it down the old way. Another thing, if your not looking down your sight and try to shoot around the corner "from the hip", it takes way too long before the weapon starts firing. It has its uses, but bring disatvantages. Maybe its should be this way, you also get the sacrifice of weapon focus when using cover, not as doing it the old way, dont know, still not a big fan. Second Problem: You often stick out too much, espacially the weapon and equipment on your back. In fact the most kills i do in rushing enemy positions is by killing enemys that stick out to much because they used the cover system. In cover and prone stance, often your knee sticks out, also a disadvantage. Check this please i depth. Second Problem belongs much to placement of objects in the map. You also get glued to object sometimes, as well as the systems cant decide to let you look over cover and pops you up and down frequently, but these bugs are rare.
Camera/Line of Sight and Movement - The camera works fine most of the time, the switching between the left and right side of the shoulder-view is nicly done. One little scratch on that, if you switch the shoulder on turning your soldier on the horizontal axis quickly, it becomes too smooth and slow for my taste. The camera then needs 1/4 up to 2/4 seconds longer to follow the players line of sight and that reduces the time to react on threads drastically. Now we get to some very seriouse points: Using the cover-key on sprinting - the distance you can slide by holding the cover-key on sprinting is way too high, you can cover about 7 or so meters of distance this way. Its nice you can shoot while oon the sliding and even go prone by looking behind you at the end of the slide, but its to much distance imho. Go instant prone on running - there sould be a timeout for shooting or a much more deviation on that.(i prefer the last one) I saw alot of players doing "dolphine-doge" i call it. Spamming the prone and upright stance and getting a nice "slide around"-effect, in fact very hard to hit with a way to high accuracy on the weapon. The speed for getting up and down is nice, but the accuracy and sliding effect are overdone. There is an very hard issue with the line of sight when you are laying on stairs, you can shoot people the need to expose yourself to the enemy, this is because the angle of the camera allows to see AND shoot over obstacles. Actually bulles should follow the line of fire that leaves your barrel and not the "center" of the screen. Please take a very serious look at that. Also i would like to be able to interrupt actions like climbing. Contectual jumping is bugged sometimes, if you approach a obstacle by sprinting, the avatar goes into slide-mode somehow.
Abilitys - not soo much on that. Specialist Aegis stays up too long after activation. Detection by Snipers stays up too long after activation. Blitz bugged sometimes, hitbox-detection problem maybe. EMP should disrupt activated abilitys of enemy players, in its current form its one of the weakest abilitys to use it in squad-combats, in my opinion. Another real Problem with Blitz, bullets went through teammates but not through the Blitz-shields on the back of your mates. Realy annoying if you try to supress enemy through "meat-shields". Stealth on snipers is also bugged, sometimes you cant see the blurry effect while the sniper is on the move. Nevertheless I understand why there are abilitys and why they are the way they are, but i dont give much attention to abilitys, a nice gimmick though, the brain everyone should use is a much better weapon to hit your enemys hard and unexpected. Team-Abilitys are .. yeah, they are .. :D Dont get me wrong, average player could realy improve their way of combating and the abilitys are mostly nice this way, but on the two ends of the "skill level" abilitys are not so important imho.
Weapons - about Handling and Deviation - For the speed of the game the deviation, recoil and overall behaviour of weapons is good already. I have some worries about shotguns and semi-auto marksman rifles. Espacially the semi-snipers with CQB-scopes can be a devastating tool used properly(today known as imbalanced). Of cours the rate of fire is limited, but thats not a big issue if you handle your movement the right way, not a big deal. Sure there should be an effort to player that do so, but shotguns and semi-snipers could maybe be realy overpowered at the current state. Bad thing, i got no usefull solution to that but to reduce the damge that you cant one-shot-kill someone expect of headshots and critical hits, not even to adress further problems with special ammo. Ah ... Special ammo .. uhm, you can carry more than 300 rounds on an assault class, bug-fix needed, you know that. Also i think its too powerfull. If you aiming towards that players with high rank are able to kill every opponent with one or two hits, make it from the start this way or you get in trouble with SMGs (because of the less recoil) and LMGs(because of the ammount of ammo carried in one box). Or make them realy ****ing expensive. The stability of weapons in prone stance is a little bit off i think, more stability with the sacrifice of longer time needed to focus. Makes LMGs and marksman rifles more meaningful in defensive purpose. Deviation on Run'n'Gun is good so far, only the recoil on crouch is a little bit odd, should be higher while crouch and on the move, same for crawling around and shooting your gun onehanded. Please more recoil on both. As in the part Movement already said. A timeoff while going from upright to prone or much more recoil/inaccuracy should be added, also a timeoff or much more recoil/inaccuracy while rolling sideways in prone is needed. At the moments these two are very imbalanced.
The "Reddot" is way to big on most of the sights, i know its a reason of balance but it feels just wrong, as well as the shape, actually nowadays a real red dot became very rare, there illuminated dot sights out there are more bar-based. Also the faint of the sight-glas is too high i think, very distracting sometimes. I would like to have an option to place the sight on the weapon in different distances to the eye. :P
Grenades - line of flight not correctly shown, maybe on purpose, some player complainng about that, for me its fine this way, you unever know where it goes boom. :D But and real issue on that, grenades with impact trigger should not bounce off wall and keep flying 50-100cm, would be nice though. :)
Network Performance
I have to admit i'm a little bit impressed by the perfomance, realy stable and quick, nice hit-detection no big problems problems with delay so far. But there is something i missed ... hm what is it ... ah my latency to the server! In numeric numerbs, please. :D
Voice over IP
An option to silence selected people in a match, please, i'm seriouse, its annoying to hear ignorant peoples music,TV or talking on teamspeak about someones boring birthday party and wondering that someone made a request ... on a mysterious way ... Ingame-VoIP O_O(woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo O____O):
"Please activate your Push-to-Talk." ... Thanks. ...
Video- and Audio-Options
No full screen anti alaysing, very bad for detecting enemy on middle and higher distance. You know what ia talking about, the whole discussion about optical "illusion" effects and the capability of our brains to missinterpreting pixeled-object to something not existent. Recognition is very limited, in fact, the way to spot enemys is to look for any moving red lights ... not the way it should be i think. Btw i've not tryed to force any FSAA by the driver but it should be a option in the game anyway.
Audio problems with some guns having too much bass(M96) and others are too quiet in comparison to other guns(M249 Para). Also the sound of firing supressed weapons by yourself is odd, you hear it correctly when others(mates and opponents) firing supressive weapons, but not by your point of acting.
Tutorial
Please, oh please help to exterminate the disease of minimap-ignorance. An basic introduction for player to basic gameplay tools like markers and minimap would be nice and usefull to everyone playing public. Tell the player this thing called map is very useful to play in team, getting information about teammates and objective positions. Many players just dont give a ****/dont know how to use the map and stay one or two capurepoints behind, not aware that there is some seriouse push ongoing 100meters ahead. I know this problem for 15 years now, nobody solved it proplery, i think you realy have to explain a map to people. I'm not saying they are dump but .... **** that they are, dump as **** god damit explain the ****ing map!
Overall
I'm not worried to call this a true tactic-shooter, not like hyped stuff from other big publishers or UbiSoft. (calling no names to avoid bashing and flaming)
Nice balance so far, known issues pointed out above. Even in this state of beta the game is much better then 90% of any "tactic"-games out there i think. Well polished so far, some balance issues for "professional" gaming there, but keep on your good work and you will get a diamond hopefully.
And thats it so far, important suff pointed out. For those who made it ... to this point of text, without skipping anything, thanks.
Feel free to add stuff, dont flame, dont blame, play the game, stay calm and nice, relax and use your brain. :)
Boidrix
/edit: my grammar sucks hard ...