Hi, there. Been playing the game non-stop for 40+ days now, clocking around 200 hours, and have to admit the game lost its appeal due to the reasons I’m going to list below, which I hope may get resolved at some point in the future. Warning: Long read.
Critical issues
1. Matchmaking and live games
This issue kills the game the most for me. After ~700 games played, I’d like to have somewhat of a consistent and predictable experience across games. But now that the hype wave is over and active playerbase has shrunk noticeably, most games boil down to “Map loading. Few people realizing it ain’t the map they want to play and leaving. Game being filled with bots instead of them. Having 2-3 people on each side actually play the game, with the rest 7+ being random new players who haven’t quit yet or just bots, doing practically nothing whole game”. It’s sad and boring at the same time.
Most importantly, my suggestion here would be to let people join live games at any point in place of the leavers. Have it in the find game menu as a checkbox, like “Join live games [ ]”. And reward those who fill in instead of the leavers with noticeable extra XP multiplier, which increases the later someone joins the game. And please STOP filling games with bots, it completely kills the vibe and competitiveness of matches.
Additionally, there should be at least Quick and Campaign Mode game types for both SQUADS and LONE FIGHTER modes. And later on, maybe also add Ranked games of some sort.
Quick games can mix any type of players, new ones and veterans. While Campaign Mode can become unlocked after reaching Campaign Level 5 or so and should limit the difference in Campaign progress across players on both sides to say +/- 5 levels. This will make sure veterans can have an option to play more interesting and competitive games with players of around their own level, at least progress wise. Ranked would be an interesting option too, at least for the extra edge and stat wise.
2. Performance
No FPS game is fun to play when it can’t render at solid FPS. Playing anything below 120-140 fps is pain. And sadly, over the last month or so, the performance of the game has dipped noticeably for whatever weird reasons. I understand that companies need to push content to make profit, but please work on the optimization among the priorities as well. People won’t invest in your game if they don’t have the actual frames to play it at an enjoyable rate. Month ago, my rig was handling the game fine on low settings. Now, the input delay and fps drops have increased and are ruining the game for me.
3. Progression, XP and orders
First of all, new squads are INSANELY slow at leveling before they get some XP upgrades. This needs to be tuned somehow. Maybe make all squads start with an XP node unlocked that gives them a reasonable boost from the start. Otherwise, it’s pure pain to level them. And having more than one new squad on the roster is VERY detrimental to overall XP gains from games, which is quite sad.
Also, please consider people who may not perform very well during games and don’t have Premium squads and bonus. I can see how the current orders system can be discouraging for some players, especially new ones.
In this regard, I strongly believe that there should be a way to get orders in various ways. Keep the existing system with the XP based order rewards. It works fine on Premium accounts and for F2P people who perform well. But also bring back the old system of getting orders from challenges, so that people have other ways to get orders. Personally, I liked the challenges. Now, they are practically useless rudiment in the game that is little more than just a multiplied link to the Premium offer cluttering the game’s main UI.
Also, there has to be another way to get special orders - Squad Upgrade Chance, Academy, etc - other than just Battle Pass. Maybe add a very small random chance to get them from any SQUAD game, and like double or triple it for LONE FIGHTER mode. That way, there will be more reason to play and farm LONE FIGHTER mode later in the game. As it stands now, it’s mostly a dead mode filled with bots.
Gameplay issues
1. Artillery / Radio Squads
It is VERY annoying when there is TOO MUCH of artillery being thrown around. The solution here, IMO, would be to rework the Radio Squad. Remove the extra artillery calls from the squad, but give them recon options instead.
For instance, the special ability of the Radio Squad could be to temporary highlight the enemies on the map in a specific area. Instead of extra artillery, they could launch flares or something, that would highlight enemies in their radius to every squad on the team for a short while.
2. Planes with Bombs / Rockets
These should be high risk high reward, IMO, but not overpowered brainless spam as it is now.
First of all, regardless of IRL accuracy and whatnot, bombs and rockets SHOULD NEVER kill people inside buildings and under roofs. The only counterplay to them right now is hiding inside buildings. But no, some bombs and rockets splash through any kind of roofs and even multiple floors. It’s just dumb and hugely upsetting, gameplay wise, due to no counterplay.
Spamming planes should have a risk factor. So far, the option to have fighter planes that will fight enemy planes isn’t working for the most part. Mostly because f2p players will often have their tank squad instead of a plane. And so far, lobbies are filled with mostly f2p players who can’t do nothing about bombers but to complain on forums.
To address this issue, the feature of Engineer Squad to build Anti-Air and Anti-Tank guns can be made possible to any Engineer on any squad, provided they buy in Logistics a specific set of tools, say Engineer Tools, and have them in the backpack slot. This set of tools should be available quite early in the campaign, along with the addition of engineers, but can cost like 4-5 orders. Then, any squad with an engineer can have an option to try and counter the enemy planes, giving them an actual risk factor.
Quality of Life changes
1. AI soldiers
As it stands, the AI is super bland at the moment. Would be nice to make them behave somewhat less stupid and more random.
As far as commanding the troops go, it should be possible to tell them to use a specific stance while executing the given commands. The stances can be Aggressive (will start shooting anything they see while still trying to execute the move commands), Defencive (will not shoot unless shot at), Passive (will not shoot at all and if shot at, will try to hide or go prone while holding position or executing a move command).
Also, would be nice to have a noticeable difference in performance between AI troops of different rank. One star can be quite lame and inaccurate, panic more when shot at. Five star troops should be quite adept and frag out proficiently with targets in sight, having little to no panic when shot at.
2. Bots
Until the bots that take place of actual players are phased out of the game completely, please make them distinguishable in the game screen. It’s understandable why they are there so far, to speed up queues and take place of leavers. But please, stop pretending that they aren’t there and either stop giving them player-like names or color them differently, or something.
As suggested above, there are ways to get rid of them at some point once and for all. And I doubt many people want to play versus AI in what is supposed to be primarily a PvP game. And the least you can do in this regard as developers is at least be transparent about it.
Afterword
The game is promising and could be fun and all, but while it has so many critical, in my opinion, issues, it’s really hard to enjoy it. But since it’s an Open Beta and the devs seem to somewhat listen to the feedback, I hope it will only get better as the time goes and hopefully will have them resolved at some point.