DICE Team
@edgecrusherO0 wrote:
@doubleome Because DICE wants to promote co-op play without actually having systems in the game to promote co-op play, hoping folks will just do it organically.
Rao CAN be insanely strong with a coordinated group in terms of eliminating vehicles, and even solo can be effective at "area denial" for vehicles if he can find a remotely safe place to hack from. But to your point...playing "area denial" on Rao is like watching paint dry. It's boring and lame, even if you're running the M5/Stinger to try to combo vehicles, or C5 to try to blow up ground vehicles you can get close to (hoping that the passengers all stop thinking and nobody exits the hacked vehicle to simply shoot you).
This is a problem for many of the specialists. Some like Mackay, Falk, Sundance, or even Dozer have "generally useful" kits that work in a wide range of situations. Others like Rao, and as the devs pointed out Irish, have far more "niche" roles for their toolkits - driven in part by challenge completion (seriously, needing to destroy grenades to progress Irish feels like trash compared to how "easy" other characters progression tracks are like healing people as Falck).
Honestly I think the whole vehicle design at its core, both ground and especially air, is fundamentally flawed and that we're never going to get a "good feeling" game that has any semblance of balance between that design and how specialists operate.
If people aren't picking a specialists, it's not because they don't know how to use the specialist in all instances as the devs implied on their 1.2 video. It's because many of those specialists are too niche, and in a game where the majority of the design is focused on supporting solo-play these characters that are inherently co-op oriented and whose kits don't lend to solo play will see less playtime in general.
DICE has always struggled with balance, and I'm still mystified why they thought that taking the already tricky balance they struggled to maintain and adding an Everest-size mountain of complexity with specialists was a good idea. Sure the concept is nice and all, but it should have been clear very early that the direction was not going to lend itself to an overall positive experience, and would instead just eat up a massive amount of additional development time towards frequently tweaking, balancing, updating, and changing specialist kits that aren't performing in-line with expectations.
Not everyone will like everything and never a good aim to try to get everyone to like something, and not every ability needs to be complex puzzel. It's very easy to over engineer something that can be simpel.
Rao do has its spot and does promote teamplay but can do a lot alone. I personally like Rao and does add a nice balance vs anything vehicle especially anything that is flying.
/Atic
@edgecrusherO0 wrote:
@EA_AticI mean that's cool that you like Rao and all, I'm not saying he's "bad" or anything as he's very good at what he's designed to do (to a point).
It's just that what he's designed to do is largely fairly niche compare d to many other specialists. It's that his kit lacks anything remotely dynamic for interesting plays compared to other specialists. Think about how Sundance works with a variety of different gadgets or guns (finding hard to reach sniper posts to spot from, aggressive back dooring with spawn beacons, going after enemy armor with C5 etc.), or how Falck can be an effective medic with her kit paired with a wide range of gadgets or weapons (babysitting snipers, frontline aggression, etc.). Even Irish affords a more dynamic and interesting kit that has a wide variety of potential uses and pairs with a range of different weapons/gadgets nicely, and the devs on the 1.2 video were similarly talking about his low play-rate.
Rao's kit is simply...well...boring. It's not about being a complex puzzle, it's about his kit standing out amongst the rest of the kids as an extremely static, simple binary that doesn't really have any major "play/counterplay" to it. Maybe I'm just lacking imagination here and you can help me out, but a huge reason why (IMO) his play rate is so low is BECAUSE of his kit being so binary and niche compared to everyone else. If there are no vehicles around, his active is functionally useless and he's just spotting enemies that shoot him. Even another more anti-vehicle focused specialist like Liz brings more in non-vehicle situations since her rocket can still be somewhat effectively used against infantry (especially pesky snipers that aren't moving around a lot).
They talked about Rao's low pickrate on the 1.2 video and seemed a bit confused as to why, and honestly I'm confused why the devs are confused. It's not that he's super complex or folks don't understand how to use him, he's an incredibly straightforward specialist without any meaningful depth to his kit (and he's a handsome devil). It's that playing him is, largely, BORING as a result of how binary/boring his kit is, and how playing him in any situation where there aren't active vehicles feels like you're wasting your time and should just redeploy as a specialist with far more marginal utility.
I'd argue the biggest reason he's played at all is largely due to aircraft being consistently too strong and unbalanced, and him being one of the only remotely effective counters against them.
Now I hear someone somewhere saying "SEE! PROBLEM AND SOLUTION! IT'S ALL WORKING!" except that's a bad problem and worse solution. He's a bad fix to the problems with aircraft design/balance, and is not even really a great fix as he can often serve as a deterrent but can't effectively set-up kills on aircraft given how many maps afford them extensive LoS cover should they find themselves hacked and even with flares down as well.
specialists are gadgets. think of them as tools. yea, sometimes you can get a screw out with a #2 philips, but other times a #4...that isn't useful for a lot of other things...is better
@edgecrusherO0 wrote:
@PsubondBut the problem with that comparison is that not all tools are equal, and you have a number of highly specialized tools that CAN be very useful, but often times aren't, in the same toolbox as a lot of tools that are generally ALWAYS useful in every circumstance.
DICE just set themselves up for failure with the system and are making their jobs of needing to try to balance this absolute mess way, way, way harder than they have to. Especially given that the current DICE very much isn't the same DICE we used to trust.
right, but you don't just throw away the specialized tool. you don't like him fine. that's not a reason to REMOVE him from the game
