I recently hit 2,000 Battles since The Merge, and I thought I’d take the milestone as an opportunity to compile my thoughts on the current state of Enlisted, how far it has come since I started playing back in April of 2021, and what I think the game needs to be what I still think it could.
Let me start by saying, for those of you who are relatively new to Enlisted (started playing after The Merge), that the game has come SO far. Enlisted is, objectively, a much much better game than it was when The Merge happened. Let alone when I started playing.
Matches would start with a Ju188 dropping it’s 8 (that’s right, it used to carry 8 250kg bombs) across the entire map and Thanos snapping BOTH teams out of existence thanks to friendly fire being ON for them.
Artillery would never STOP raining down, since they had no cooldown, and oh yeah. That red warning circle? Wasn’t always there either. You’d know the arty was called when you got hit by it.
You think the AI are dumb NOW? They used to stand and spin on sandbags if they needed to climb over one to get off the rally point, or run in circles on an upper floor instead of running down the stairs.
There was no BR system. If you just started playing, you’d be in the same battles with your Kar98k, MP40, and no AT yet at all, as the maxed out sweat-lords with drum mag PPShs and late war T-34s.
But we still loved the game. Even though it was, objectively, WAY less balanced than it is now. Why? It felt authentic. The “oh sh*t” moment of rounding a corner with your Kar98k right into the face of a T-34 felt like a real WW2 moment. And SOMEONE on your side probably had a Panzerfaust to deal with it, even if you didn’t. There was an asymmetrical balance to Enlisted in the Campaign era, and it’s what made Enlisted fun back then. At least until the matchmaking imbalance started to show.
Huge numbers of players would play only the faction they had maxed out, and that caused the matchmaking to become heavy on one side for some of the Campaigns. Tunisia was unplayable for one side or the other for MONTHS at a time, because the matchmaking was so heavily one sided. It needed to change. Enter: The Merge.
The Merge was a signal to everyone that the game would put priority, moving forward, on balance over realism. No longer would a Kar98k fight a PPSh-41, even if that’s what really happened. If you want to play with your high-tier equipment, you’ll have to fight against it as well. Fair and balanced. And it was! Things needed a bit of movement, as they were either under or overestimated with their initial BR but, overall, the game had more balance than it ever had before. New players didn’t have to suffer anymore. But once balance became the focus, it was put under a microscope. The feeling of authenticity left the game, and so players started to feel the gaps in balance more than accepting them as “well that’s just how it was”. So, a choice had to be made… How do we bring balance to factions that historically were not balanced? The Americans never used an automatic rifle, but the Germans have a huge advantage at high BR with their FG42! And if the Americans get one, the Japanese will need one too (before the Americans for some reason)! Right? Enter: The Prototypes
Enlisted could have taken a different path. Asymmetrical balance could have been achieved, through faction specific squad makeups, abilities, and weapon availability that could ALL make sense in the WW2 setting. Adding to the authentic feeling of the game, rather than taking away from it. But that’s not what happened. Instead, we got prototypes. Tokyo Arsenal, Type 4, Type Hei Auto, T20, Hyde 1944, AVT-40, MG 15 and 81, RD-44, Fedorov Avtomat, AS-44. Countless weapons that never saw a battlefield or, in some cases even an assembly line, flooded into the game. What remained of the authentic feeling we used to get from Enlisted was crushed into dust.
And that is the problem I see in the Enlisted that we have now. It is an objectively better game than it once was, because of the countless issues that have been fixed, improvements to core gameplay elements like AI, maps, etc. But Enlisted lost it’s identity along the way. We lost the feeling of deep immersion and authenticity we want from a WW2 game. It has been replaced with automatic rifles, submachine guns, tanks, and planes, most of which feel out of place in the setting, and the rain of high explosive options players resort to just to get a sense of gratification from the game that USED to deliver it through an AUTHENTIC, and IMMERSIVE, asymmetric balance.
I think Enlisted needs to recapture that identity, in a big way. A major overhaul, of a similar scale to The Merge, that sets the game back on the path of asymmetrical balance instead of this “everyone gets everything, even if they didn’t” balance we’ve been feeding for so long.
Start with gunplay. Get rid of the dispersion recoil everyone hates and adopt a Dev friendly camera-based recoil model (think Apex Legends) that rewards skill and punishes misuse (i.e. trying to use a PPSh at medium/long range).
Bridge the gap between the balanced BR and authentic Campaign systems. Two queue types: Arcade Battles and Realistic Battles (steal from yourselves at Gaijin). Arcade Battles use the current BR system and presence of aiding HUD elements such as pen indicator for tank gunners and AT guns, lead indicator for aircraft and AA guns, marks from outside your squad (the little red/orange triangle pings), and normal (current) re-arm mechanics for vehicles. Realistic Battles bans all weapons that did not make an appearance in-theater. No prototypes at all. No KTH/StG or IS-2 in Stalingrad. No Pershings in the Pacific. All weapons are tied to their theater(s) of use and will queue for that theater in Realistic Battles. Also do away with some of those aiding HUD elements. No pen or lead indicators, no marks from outside of your own squad. Tanks also have no ammo count on HUD, only an ammo load (AP/HE) indicator. Planes must land to re-arm/repair. Crosshair, teammates names/markers, and hints automatically turned off.
Finally, bring some much-needed uniqueness to the factions. I have a lot of ideas for this, but I’ll save them for their own topics.
That’s it. That’s the rant. I do still enjoy Enlisted, even if I think it’s taken a poor direction since The Merge. Here’s to 2000 more battles. Thanks to everyone for letting me farm you.