Portal 2.0 - Tuning Mods
Recently, I picked up Company of Heroes 3 and a big reason for my support of the franchise over the years has been their inclusion of mod tools. What does a WW2 RTS game have to do with BF? Well, they have something called the Essence Editor that allows players to edit/create maps, create scenarios and create tuning mods. With Portal, we effectively have the ability to create scenarios with all the rules editing we can do. Map creation and editing would be amazing however given complexity of Frostbite maps I don't believe its realistic to get a hold of such potent tools. That leaves tuning, something we have some limited capability to do now with adjustments like weapon damage, soldier movement speed, solider health regen rate. However, these are all handled at a high level encompassing all soldiers and weapons. What if we had the ability to adjust the specs of individual weapons? You could not only change things like damage but also ROF, muzzle velocity, rounds per magazine, spread, damage drop off and more! For really advanced players you could things like tweak missiles and control their turn rates, acceleration, max speed, time to live, blast radius and more! Players could create their own balance mods or they can really expand upon their scenario mods by drilling into individual weapon/vehicle performance!
There is a mod, that shall not be named, for a past modern BF (Frostbite) entry that allowed for exactly that. I know making such mod tools isn't easy and I wouldn't expect much in the way of customer support but I truly believe that this is an area of opportunity for BF to surpass COD, and unlock the power of the community and gain a competitive advantage they've been desperately searching for. This will allow players the opportunity to dig deep and truly understand the weapon/vehicle mechanics of the game just like the Rule Editor helped players understand the basics of coding and syntax. Although Frostbite/BF are different beasts in different genres than COH3, there's a surprisingly significant amount of things they hold in common. A lot of the statistics for weapons for example have the same fundamental stats so the layouts in a modding program would be similar in many respects. You can see in the screenshot below of the COH3 Essence editor how a BF tuning mod tool could look and work.
A tuning mod would also effectively allow players to run their own CTE servers and quickly flesh out balance issues and even come up with novel outside of the box solutions.
The biggest challenge to realizing this dream I anticipate is the vehicle portion. It may not be obvious to the lay person, but vehicles are actually incredibly complex and the damage tables vs other vehicles alone are reported to be something of a labyrinth to sort through. But there's always the possibility of a breakthrough that could allow editing of these figures in an easy to read format.
I immensely appreciate what Portal has brought to table in terms of customization but I hope this will be the beginning of a growing tool set and I think tuning capability is the logical next step!
