It will be a bit of a personal grumble so feel free to leave now.
You can go to the end of the post to the suggestion part. There are 2 TL;DRs, 2nd one (about suggestion) is more important one.
I feel kind of dissapointed by the teaser of “Operations”.
The game was meant to be casual, meanwhile it seems thet devs are going to implement competitive mode soon. It won’t be a huge problem if it’s optional, but if it’s mixed with normal games, it will change the Enlisted by 180*. It’s basically turning this game into something that it was never meant to be.
Come on! Competative game with bots? Who the hell thought it’s a good idea? This game is simply not suted for such modes, maybe Lone Fighters but not Squads mode!
Also the game has quite a few exploits and scummy tactics. As long as this gamemode is separated from the “main gameplay” it’s fine. Hell, separate lobbies for Operations might help to remove some scummy tactisc from the main lobbies.
But if lobbies won’t be separated, it will probably cause many casual players to leave. I hate “X type of players will leave the game if Y happens” argunemt but I can’t see it any other way, even though I try.
But what about prewious updates / changes?
The game was (and I hope still is and will be) about playing with AI squads. Yet Lone Fighters mode got introduced. I get that some people wanted it, yet unlike those who play squads they had and still have a choise. Bots are UNIQUE to this game.
Why do I write this you might ask. Because I think that Oerations will cause increase of the LF players, whitch on itself isn’t a bad thing, more players is always good. But I’m affraid that it will also cause the shift of the focus on the LF development at expense of Squad mode development. It’s a pessimistic vison but that’s how I see it.
The game was meant to be mix of sim and arcade. (Firstly I must say that devs seem to actually know about this and try do something.) What’s the problem you might ask. Well, while vehicles are nice mix of realism and arcade, infantry combat is total arcade. The only “realistic” feature that infantry combat has is penalty for MG whtile shooting in move. Excluding it we have bunny hops, drop shotting, instant grenade throws, almost instant position change.
The game was meant to be historicall (as long as it doesn’t cause imbalance). Then we got Jumbo, M2 and FG42 got added. After that it went down the hill, it’s a lot of shame as there is no non-sim FPS that is historicall.
So it could be another unique feature but it got blurred out to finally disappear.
Of course I might be very wrong and the game will be super good and everyone will live happily ever after.
Why do I write this? Well, as I’ve once written “It’s uneasy to watch the game you dreamed about, die a bit with each update.” The Enlisted seemd to be the FPS I always wanted. Mix of arcade and sim, historical, casual and most importantly: with AI squads. But with the development the game changed, for bad in some aspects in my opinion.
Now it’s just… now it just is. From being super hyped about the game untill the OBT started, I went to next to being neural.
TL;DR
Me complain about Enlisted now and write about good old times. Or me complaining about what the game was meant to be / how it was advertised vs how it looks like now.
Also me shows disapointlent that the game becomes more and more generic from something that could be unique.
Proposed solution
(I don’t like to grumble without proposing a solution, so here it is.)
The obvious answer to my problems are custom lobbies. I will be able to somewhat tweak the game to better suit my needs and devs said that I’ll still be given xp for playing in custom lobbies. But as we can see, devs said many different things and not all of them lasted in the course of time.
I’m not that egocentric do “demand” removal of features or something like this, especially when devs clearly won’t do that.
So my proposal is to split the game into two main modes: arcade and sim (it might sound familiar to WT players). You can see it here in better detail:
TL;DR:
arcade - arcade gameplay, screw history etc.
sim - more reslistic gameplay (but not sim, it’s only in the name), more historical etc.
It doesn’t cover casual vs competative “problem” but for now it will do the job. If Operations are done well, it shouldn’t be a problem and could exist in both modes. In the worst case scenarto I will be unhappy about how it turned out, but who cares 