Many people in the enlisted realm are calling for more balance in the game, and we are 100 percent correct. To make the game as possible three things need to be in balance with one another. The three categories that must be balanced out are fairness, activeness [how much time you spend in combat versus non-combat], and realism. If one category is too heavy, especially realism, the game becomes unbalanced and not as fun as it could be. Unless you want an unrealistic, unfair, and slow game. Conceptually this is a way of looking at each individual topic within the game to determine where it fits within the bigger picture of enlisted. Some topics will affect all three areas at the same time, some will be two and not one, and some topics should be only one. To keep things shorter than longer, in this post I won’t go over all the topics, only the major ones that I think need addressing.
Fairness
In every war game I’ve played, the devs always engage in nerfing and buffing weapons to make the game fair. When they do this, they technically make the game fair, but they destroy the fun of having realistic weapons at the same time. In reality this approach is super unnecessary because you don’t have to change the weapons to make the game fair at all. The only thing you truly need to change is the terrain and how its arranged with its varying angles and engagement distances. In practice, this can be achieved in a couple of different ways. The first way is making the terrain for every combat phase roughly symmetric on both sides of the objective. The second and better way to arrange it would be to give both teams terrain that favors their ways of combat separately with each combat phase alternating who it favors. For example, let’s say the two armies are Germany and the USSR. Germany is going to prefer open fields with lots of distance so heavy armor and better trajectories and be used to a greater effect. Now in context, if Germany is on the attack they would start the match with an objective that favors them in that type of terrain. If Germany takes the objective, then the next objectives terrain favors the Soviets. The terrain could be a town or a heavily wooded area with many opportunities for flanking maneuvers on the Germans. This way would be preferred because it allows both sides to fairly participate in their preferred combat environment while also giving everybody a chance to do long distance and close quarters combat in the same match. The main point I’m making here is that fairness is mostly in the design of terrain. This why the maps shouldn’t be modeled after real life locations because there will always be unfairness in the map if that’s the case. There has to be intentional fairness with the map design.
I also want to address a few areas where fairness should be considered also. All have to do with the different game modes. The first issue has to do with conquest, assault, and destruction. Securing multiple objectives on one map only makes sense if the whole team is all coordinating together as a unit in timing, while attacking one objective at a time. In the context of playing enlisted as a video game, this concept of coordination in timing doesn’t exist because most people aren’t linked up and communicating in coordination. In each multiple objective scenario, you get games where a half or a third of the team is trying to take each objective separately, usually unsupported because everybody is given the option to focus on different objectives simultaneously. When the map works like this, it’s nothing short of an unstructured chaotic mess. The idea of doing it this way makes no sense because in practice, each player has to focus on one objective at a time anyways. Why not give each player the context with the highest probability for support and team coherency by having them all focus on one objective in the first place? Solution, no more multiple objectives game modes. The second issue addresses a problem with the remaining game modes of confrontation and invasion. In these two modes, both the attacking and defending side are unified towards one single objective, and that’s a good thing as I stated above. However, if you don’t manage the timing behind how the objective changes, this creates an opportunity for the advancing side to do something called “quick taking”. Quick taking happens when one squad gets to the objective before the retreating/defending team does. In a lot of cases this squad can actually take the objective alone before the defending team even gets into position to defend. I would say out of all the problems in enlisted this has to be number one, it causes immense frustration. However, the solution is simple, do a positional reset after every objective. It doesn’t have to be complex, just have ai take over all players for 30 seconds to rearrange the players and then resume the match. This solution solves the problem of chain taking while giving people a small break to regroup like a boxing match. This would make the game much a lot fairer.
Activeness
With activeness, enlisted actually does a pretty good job with some needed improvement. The best feature that improves activeness currently is the squad AI concept. This gives every player multiple chances at realistic life, rather than giving every person one life at a time with a big health bar. This idea should never be taken out of the game, only improved. All I can say with the improvement of the AI themselves is make them better at knowing where their positioning is relative to the player and where the player is looking. All the time I get them running in front of me the worst possible time.
With the idea of activeness in mind, a couple of things hurt it in the game unnecessarily. The first one is the idea of having to build a spawn point. Most people in the game don’t build spawn points, and if you’re the only person building them on your team and everyone else isn’t, the game becomes much harder to win becomes one team spends more time in combat at the objective compared to the other team. This concept of building the spawn point not only makes the game slower and inactive, but it also makes the game unfair and frustrating because one side is more active and getting to the objective way faster. The solution to this problem is really simple, just pre-make the spawn points and put 100 of them on each side of the objective with the closest ones being 125m from the objective. The reason you need one hundred spawn points is also simple. If the enemy decides to wait in the spawn point or around it within a certain distance, the game excludes that spawn point from being used entirely and you have 99 more to choose from. Each spawn point should also be shielded from direct fire and vision via actual cover for a short distance so we at least have a chance to break out of the spawn point if the enemy is firing through a doorway or any other geometry that has a partial look in on the objective. There should also be many ways to get out of the spawn point, this makes it hard for the enemy to trap you in through one choke point. This idea outright eliminates the need to build spawn points so people can focus on the objective and not wasting time.
The second thing that hurts activeness in the game is making soldiers slower unnecessarily and giving them 20 feet of sprint stamina while making them stop and drink water. If the player is carrying something heavy like a flame thrower or an mg, I can understand why you might decrease the sprinting speed by a little bit but not by a lot like it is right now. Now if your being shot at your adrenaline should go up and give you quicker movement no matter what and I don’t think that happens in the game. There should also be a much quicker way to move out of someone’s line of fire. With this idea, I don’t think it should be as ridiculous as Star Wars battle front where the player literally does a complete cartwheel to the left or right, but I do think there should be something like it. Maybe if you press circle while moving a certain direction the player ducks and side steps quickly to that direction. I’ve had plenty of engagements in the game where I noticed the person in time, but I couldn’t move out of the way because the movement speed is slow. This is why improving activeness at the soldier ability level is important, it increases survivability which increases how much time you spend in combat. The last thing needed to make the game more active is to improve the animation speed and crispness of movements. The reload animations are comically slow. With the soldiers physical abilities, I would even go so far as to say every soldier should be as elite as physically possible during ww2. This is one of those areas where I think realism shouldn’t be strong. There shouldn’t be some soldiers with lower physical ability, everyone should be elite soldiers for maximum fun.
Realism
The last of the three concepts to balance out is realism. Alot of people like realism but in reality, realism is a very potent ingredient that needs to be thought of properly and used only in the right contexts. With realism there are two types, absolute realism and relative realism. Absolute realism is perfectly aligned with how the real-world works; relative realism takes into account the person behind the screen and their training level and military understanding. With absolute realism, I think the only relevant category would be physics. This would include how the body dies, ballistics, how buildings break apart, things like that. With relative realism, it has to be viewed from two perspectives, from the actual trained veteran’s perspective and from an untrained civilian’s perspective. At the interface level, think of realism as an adjustable dial. A trained veteran doesn’t need the bullet counting fraction on the bottom right corner of the screen because he’s already trained to know how many bullets he has left and its natural to him. As an untrained civilian myself, I’m not trained to do that, and I need the fraction for reference because I forget. Another concept that I think is worth mentioning is aim assist. Alot of people don’t like aim assist because they think it makes the game unrealistic and unfair. However, it actually can make the game more realistic because it gives players that don’t aim as well a more realistic ability set like an actual trained soldier would in real life. This is how relative realism is supposed to be thought of.
These are just a few of my with Enlisted. However, I want to throw in a bonus idea that would make the game way crazier. It’s the idea of having fewer but bigger maps. Instead of each map being real location, you do different climates like jungle, alpine, farms and cities, desert etc. You also have a front line and human generals directing the combat flow in certain sectors without micromanaging the players. The invasion would take place over months with people on social media debating over where the next offensive should go, there would be tons of online community engagement that way. The generals could even notify players when major offensives are taking place. Who wouldn’t like this?
