generalD98
8 hours agoNewcomer
Battlefield 6 Open Beta Feedback
Had a great weekend playing the beta, and kudos for how much fun the current state of the game is. Sorry for the long post, but I really want this to be good and can't keep all of this in my head any longer.
TL;DR: Some bugs, some UI choices feel like a step backwards, some balance changes may be needed, or the balance may just sort itself out at launch once all equipment is available. looking forward to the full release, good job so far devs.
Ok, Here we go:
Bugs:
- Screen would occasionally turn a wheel of a lot of sharp shapes, then go back to normal on it's own, it didn't appear with much noticeable pattern. Possibly related to aiming down sights. I've had it happen on all maps in all game modes. But it seemed to occur most frequently on Liberation Peak.
- The fences north of Liberation Peak Conq B point would be invisible sometimes, blocking walking or sprinting, but could still be vaulted.
- There's a pane of glass southeast in the alley behind point E on Siege of Cairo Conq that is constantly blinding, maybe break the lightbulb in that spotlight.
- When you are downed on top of rubble at extreme angles, your character gets stuck into a constantly falling animation.
- There is a bush north of Liberation Peak Conq point E next to one of the rubble walls that cannot be shot through (This one may be wrong, a friend encountered this one).
- When sliding or diving into some terrain features or rubble, you could occasionally get launched 5-10ft into the air.
- When trying to respawn, spacebar would fail to register sometimes, only mouse would work.
- I changed the binding to mount on surfaces, the in-game tip reflected the changed keybind, but only the original binding would work.
- Netcode feels a little wonky, the number of times I've died where I felt like I was fully behind cover is a number far above zero.
Maybe bugs (I don't know if these features are intentional):
- When you are downed on stairs, you slide all the way down that set of stairs.
- RPGs and grenade launchers take sideways momentum into account when firing; i.e. if you're strafing right when you fire the RPG, the projectile will also go to the right when it's fired, proportional to how fast you were moving sideways. This makes sense in physics, but it feels odd to see a rocket miss your mark by 5-10ft to the right at long ranges, it feels a little over-tuned.
- When respawning, it is possible to respawn in front of bullets and projectiles already fired, causing you to die before the screen even loads. This can happen even when not spawning on beacons.
Personal Opinions:
- I don't mind players being able to climb on top of buildings you wouldn't expect, but counter play is needed. If you're able to get onto the freeway overpass on Seige of Cairo, get a dominating advantage, and setup respawn beacons up there; there needs to be a counter to that play. The mortar from BF4 comes to mind, though maybe the other gadgets on launch will give us some other options.
- On a similar note, I'm surprised of the lack of verticality on Seige of Cairo, there's so many buildings but you can reasonably expect players to get onto the roof of like two of them? You get access to the second story of a smattering of buildings, but almost all other building only act as ground level cover or an obstacle and it feels like an odd decision.
- Liberation Peak constantly turning into a sniper-fest was not fun. Looking up at C or F to see the crowd of paparazzi trying to snap your picture gave me this sinking feeling every single time. Hopping into an IFV or tank and slapping snipers in the face with cannon rounds is only fun for so long.
- The in-battle ribbons are disappointing. You earn such cool medals for leveling weapons that give your screen a stamp of a job well done, but the accolades you get are just these boring white silhouettes? I hope these get an art pass before launch.
- The shotgun may need a balance pass, if I missed my first shot on an enemy, most weapons didn't have a time-to-kill faster than the pump-action reload of the shotgun. Maybe there are more faster options when the game releases fully; but all I know it that I felt filthy using that shotgun.
- Why is the compass turned off by default? I'm not a sundial, I'm not going to use shadows to figure out what direction I'm looking at any given time.
- UI has some weird choices, why isn't the squad leader marked? Why are teammates outside of your squad marked by a blue dot instead of their class? But support gets marked in some cases? My health is on the opposite side of the screen from my ammo? Not deal breakers, but just confusing. You had this figured out ten years ago.
- Air vehicles feel too fragile, you're a flying coffin the instant 2 stinger missiles exist on the same map as you. The self-repair ability helps, but not enough. It's just acting like a re-skinned second set of flares. Maybe increase stinger lock-on time, but also increase its range? Possibly let flares linger for longer? Though in all fairness, maybe this gets fixed when vehicles get access to upgrades at launch.
- Why does it take so many button presses to get into the attachments menu? I already have my gun selected, I shouldn't need to re-select it before modifying it's attachments. Just let me go straight to the attachments interface. Also the icons below the sliders are too vague, I can press a key to turn them into text, give me a way to default to that view.
- Engineers may be repairing ground vehicles too fast, a single engineer sitting on a tanks' engine deck can keep IFVs and Tanks alive through literal landslides. If repair speed isn't changed I'm hoping there's some good gadget options at launch to help deal with pocket engineers. The proximity mine hitting vehicles from the top down could also fill this role given some slight tweaks.
- I understand your attempts to combat cheating with your BIOS requirements, but with all due respect; how my personal computer is configured is none of your business. I appreciate a non-kernel level anti-cheat, but there's got to be a better solution than making hundreds of thousands of people suddenly need to learn how to edit their BIOS in order to play a video game. It's ridiculous.
- No longer being able to send vehicles into orbit is a little disappointing. I understand that if it can be abused, someone will figure out a way to abuse it. But there's ways to mitigate it, make the physics threshold to launch something 8 pieces of C4, force multiple players to have to work together for a launch. Give vehicle fall damage where they will explode upon hitting the ground too hard, so you cannot launch a tank behind enemy lines, but the occupants could still parachute out. This would also give an alternative to flanking by sneaking or wasting a helicopter. There's ways to leave the fun, but make things a little more fair.
Don't Make These Mistakes At Launch:
- I'm seeing a lot of complaints about the fast time-to-kill, don't listen to them. It feels great.
- That main menu layout screams to me: "Welcome to Season ### of the battle pass!" please don't do a battle pass; I'm begging you. It makes no sense to add content to a game, just to remove it in 4 months and swap in newly made content that's also going to vanish in 4 months. At the very least, If you can't stop your avaricious urges from doing a battle pass, make the rewards permanently accessible like in Halo Infinite.
- I can't believe I have to say this, but no ranked mode. We have plenty of competitive shooters that players have already invested decades of money and time into. Purely due to sunk cost fallacy we aren't diving headfirst into another one until another 3 competitive shooters literally vanish from the face of the earth.
- Just because you give us a map building tool, doesn't mean you can skimp on how many maps you make or their quality. Don't force your own player base to fill in the cracks of your own game, that will just brew resentment.
- Every weapon and gadget should have a reason a player would want to use it. When playing any weapon type, I don't want to have to pick the one best gun from each category. Each should have situations where it will dominate that niche. That's what makes games with lots of weapon options fun. It gets into OP territory once that weapon dominates too wide of role, or a situation that is too commonly encountered. Keep the weapon and gadget strengths focused, and balance tends to become easier.
Compliments:
- Great job so far to everyone currently working on this. It looks and plays great, I'm rooting for the developers, and current impressions are promising!
- Destruction is so much fun I've missed being able to simply remove camping positions from around the map.
- I used to think BF4 was perfect, but some of the modern quality of life improvements have changed my tune on that. I didn't know I needed a more tactile attachments menu like this one or a more modernized movement system.
- You managed to make ground vehicles less dominating in conquest without making them feel useless. A single good engineer player can knock out a tank in reasonable time and the tank player has enough mobility options to get out of that position. Wonderful job there.
- The maps look gorgeous, the scenery, set pieces, lighting, terrain. All of it looks so good, and feels optimized. I'm not raising the temperature of my room by 10 degrees every time a house collapses.
- Good job with the battlefield labs process, testing things early and often in development, it's made such a noticeable difference compared to previous development cycles and it shows.
Sorry for the long post. You're a Rockstar if you read all of my ramblings.