Battlefield 6 - Constructive Feedback (Good framework, Needs love)

After playing both weekends I have to say I think it's a great start for Battlefield, but it's not the best showcase. I heard the internet talk about winning COD players over and that's fine if it's, but with the limited scale maps, we're missing a lot of the original Battlefield play. Overall I like the framework. This is a good baseline to improve the game. I think October is probably to early to do the amount of changes it needs to be a great game. Here are most of my concerns and some suggestions.

Quick Positives

There are positives interspersed through out, but to show that it's not all negatives:

• Graphics are amazing. Everything so detailed and pretty. Empire specifically has a crazy amount of detail. It really feels like your in a modern day city. The amount of finely detailed visual clutter is great
• Destruction looks great. Between the dust, explosions, particle effects and the simple fun of altering your environment. It's downright fun. Add more!
• Dragging your Teammates to revive. So good. Healing in the open is asking for a bullet.
• Gun play feels real good. This could make or break a shooter. 
• Audio is really well done. Explosion, gunfire, and voice lines all make it sounds realistic. 
  • It sounds like I'd imagine a real battlefield would sound like 
  • The voice line feedback for objective calls outs or assistance is on point.
• Weapons for everyone! I talk about this more below. But I can be support and use my shiny ARs. Yay!
• It's good to have a group shooter again.

Speed (as many others have mentioned)

• The game is fast, plain and simple. Whether it be sprint speed, respawn times, respawn areas, maps, or other variables, the game's pace is too fast. It's a hold the 'W' and shift key kind of thing. You're never not at a full sprint. If you're not moving your dead and even then, you will get flanked behind, spawned on or kamikaze support resurrecting the guys you killed who can immediately gun you down. This takes away from other mechanics like mounting your gun on a wall or window. 

Few ways to counteract this:

1. Slow sprint/run speeds a tiny bit. Your character is in full kit, but they sprint like no weight. 
2. Bigger Maps
3. Move some respawns a bit further from objectives (relying on recon spawn beacons more)

Time to Kill(TTK)/Time to Die(TTD)

• This area needs work. It’s too many bullets to kill a target and other times you're instantly killed. There’s a lack of consistency or at least consistency in audio/visual input.
  • Example. You can get 5 shots against you but it sounds as one and you just drop instantly. I personally fall towards realism which favors tactics. Less bullets to kill. This will slow gameplay down. 
• A better damage per body part system. Obviously there are headshots. The TTK was all over the place to tell if there were other damage amounts and I didn’t tinker in the gun-range so excuse my ignorance. Hitting the arm and legs would do less damage than the neck or head. Soldiers have armor plates but still the most vital so should do more than arms/legs with consecutive shots.
• I was getting more damage changes from damage drop-off ranges than anything. 

HUD

Too much clutter on screen. There’s a lot of neon icons and information. A lot of it takes away from the great graphics.

• The objective icons should have some opacity adjustments to make them get in the way less.
• The Match objectives and ticket counter should take up less space. Move it or reduce it. 
• Compass should be on by default
• The Compass should have better visibility and the cardinal directions should be colored differently. Everything's blue…
• A party member’s ping. Make it visible and noticeable. Tiny green line is not noticeable amongst the explosions and the field of orange murder diamonds
• Less point counters on display. You have high realistic graphics, heavily overlaid with bright text and numbers for everything you do. Move it to the corner.

Defibs

• The defib spam is bad. You can wipe a room of enemies and you can have one enemy revive teammates immediately who are then able to instantly start shooting you. You can just keep speed clicking the defibs to revive a ton of people. There's no reason to charge it up

Few ways to fix this:

1. Slight charge up/delay between defibs
2. Introduce an animation for the person getting revived so they can't gun immediately. Just a minor delay to avoid instant gunning. 

Map Size For game modes

•  Current beta map sizes are too small to support much vehicle action or recon kits. All fights boil down to automatic fire rates or a mountain of sniper campers off objectives.
  • An obvious fix is to space things out a little bit more. This ties in with respawns too. Move those out a bit so recon kits are useful.

1. Liberation peak really needs a rework to allow flanks and less open ground. In conquest Liberation Peak needs a third path for flanking instead of just the two paths (one to C) and D to E. 
2. Empire - Good job this one is overall fine. The only suggestion is to allow you to navigate through all buildings with openings. Some are closed off.
3. Iberian - This one is chaos. Spawns need to be looked at. More vehicle movement

Spotting

• Auto-spotting needs to change to manual spotting. Let players identify enemies and call them out. The game is always a sea of orange markers. Half the time spent is shooting where there is orange vs enemies.
•  Smoke should immediately unmark/un-spot you. Getting blasted through smoke if frustrating.
•  No auto-spotting enemies while downed…

Squad Size / Friends recognition

• Squad size of 4 is fine, however allows multiple parties to join games together or link. Or make it a raid style group of 8 and then either randomize let the party members choose which people to group with.
• Secondly, if players are your friends and not in your squad, make them have separate colors icons. Like Yellow. Easily identifiable and makes it easier to work together with larger groups.
  • Example of the frustration: We had a night of playing with 6 and 7 players. 4 of us were the main group and a couple friends joined later. They joined on our party midway into a match. The match ended and they didn't go into the next game with us, but a separate match. Even if the extra members grouped together, it still requires some setup on the second group to join us. 

Explosion damage

• The radius for damage is too low with explosions. Primarily Grenade Launchers and RPGs. I know the RPGs are anti-tank and not HE, but explosions should do more damage. Only kills seem to be direct hits. Same goes for Grenade launchers. The damage doesn't have to be high, but at least make it usable as follow up shots or to flush people out.

Pistols

• A bit under powered. It takes too many shots to kill someone.

Classes and open weapons

• I personally like having a variety of weapons. I do get some peoples concerns about having RPGs and a Sniper. I suggest restricting sniper to just recon while allowing all classes to have DMRs. Other classes  having access to ARs, carbines, & SMGs is fine. I hated nothing more than being forced to use a certain playstyle (weapon) when choosing a class. LMGs limited to medic and SMGs to engineers are dumb as you can only be so effective in certain situations. Which forcibly pushes users to other classes for the weapons styles they like.
• Reduce RPG count by 1 for Engineer

Tanks

• 3rd person view has to go for the tank driver. There should be no reason a tank driver should have a wider field of view than a person. Force players to only use the tank hud/display. If you think it's too big of a weakness, a tank shouldn't be without its infantry support.
• Tanks need a buff. They're weak on damage and armor. Since maps are small and respawns so close and quick, people can swap to Engineer in a heart beat. You then have 20 rockets tagging your tank.
  • Example: I've had three engineers repairing and still got out damaged by RPGs. 

Game Mode

• Add a vehicle mode. Tank vs tank would be sweet, but you're locked into the tank. Even with Helicopters and Jets fighting in the sky while trying to take out tanks. It would make for some awesome matches. Armor is limited in normal matches for tank nerds and current beta maps are too small for epic armor to armor fights.