This update has brought many welcomed and unwelcomed changes to the game systems. Many on the forum just whined about how old players don’t give a shit about the newbies or vice versa, but these waves of anger are not unfounded. Don’t get me wrong Enlisted is a WWII shooter game that has great potential, but those potentials remain on the paper if the dev team doesn’t fix them in their way of project management.
I. Poor project management and lack of QA testers
The dev team of this game seems to be understaffed and some of the team members are unqualified for game development to speak at least. I understand that developing AI behaviors and tuning pathfinding features are difficult and time-consuming tasks. However, the horrendous AI pathfinding behaviors and poor map designs showed that game designers and software engineers are unqualified for their job. The BA buffs are somewhat needed for new players, but the current AI will just snipe you 50 meters away like an aimbot.
Since the PMs know that your entire team is understaffed, the Enlisted dev team insisted on developing campaign maps for every 5 campaigns rather than cut them short, which inevitably led to poorly designed maps such as all maps on Berlin seelow heights. It will only get worse when a 6th campaign is released like the pacific ones, as I highly doubt that the current dev team is capable of simultaneously developing multiple maps for all 6 campaigns in the future.
This understaffed problem could explain other problems as well. Animations for SFs such as G41 and Johnson 1941 remain unfixed until now, Lewis Gun animation in Moscow is just unpolished and lazy, and DP mg family doesn’t have a proper animation to this day. Weapon animations of M2 Carbine, M1 Thompson are still awful after several patches.
Many bugs of this game could be easily found by playing 1 or 2 rounds, but for each patch released those problems remained unfixed for days, weeks or months. I seriously doubt that there’s no QA testers in your current dev team because those bugs are just too obvious to be ignored. Gaijin and Darkflow are companies in European Union and are regulated under GDPR. I suggest Darkflow should reconsider changing the behavior of premium squads or it might has legal consequences.
No proper balance has been made among different factions and the attacking side suffers in the recent 2 patches. Stalingrad event is unbalanced and it is a poor decision to hold a placement match in a clearly unbalanced and unpolished map.
The understaffed team created all those problems above, and I don’t see the future of this game with unqualified software developers and the PM of this game is clearly doing a very poor job.
II. Lack of the direction
Enlisted labeled itself as a ‘battlefield-ish’ hardcore WWII shooter, as it is definitely more hardcore than battlefields and CODs while not as hardcore as other games Hell Let Loose or Post Scriptum. Currently Enlisted implemented all their game modes around capturing the control points in conquest, invasion, and demolition. In the recent patches, the dev wanted to make this game more hardcore and added features like BA buffs and nerfing the attacking side nerfs. Those features plus the AI aimbot behaviors would just make the player’s life miserable because it encourages players to snipe in the back rather than play the objective by CAPTURING THE POINT.
Again, I don’t know if the dev team wants to make this game a battlefield-ish game or a hardcore WWII shooter like HLL but the current mechanism is a rough, unpolished mix between battlefield and HLL features and it just seems messy and not enjoyable.
III. Draconian rules in the official enlisted forum
Needless to say that the forum manager did not allow free speech and managed it with draconian rules. Remember this is not DPRK and players have the right to speak for themselves.
Again, I’m not a pro player but I’m confident to say that my arguments are supported by my in-game experiences, as I maxed all 10 factions except Tunisia Axis. Unlike war thunder, there are many other WWII shooters and Enlisted could easily lost their playerbase if those issues are not addressed.
