RE: To Battlefield 6 development staff - Suggestions

Good afternoon Battlefield 6 development staff I once again wanted to leave some ending suggestions that might be valuable for the development of your game. I will try and be brief where possible.

Spotting process

It is great to see that 3D spotting markers disappear when the spotted person goes behind cover but there are still potential issues of people binding the spot key onto a fire button in one way shape or form. To prevent spot spam and to enhance the difficulty curve of your game consider making spotting a button that you have to hold on the enemy relative to their distance from your soldiers model. So instead of pressing the spot button when an enemy is say 60 meters away you would hold the button while aiming at the individual for say 3 seconds. The time period would scale up or down based on the distance, if the threat is 1 meter away you could make it so that the time period is 500 ms and you could give it a slight cone of fire so that when you spot soldiers in the distance you can spot more than one within a close radius of the other with one spot execution. Most importantly there should be a cool down for this so a player cannot just spam the spot button for close targets and create a short range radar and you must not allow a person who is engaged in this spotting action to shoot simultaneously as this is supposed to be a dedicated function of a soldier like a mode of operation. The UI would naturally have to be altered to present the spotting progress to the user in some way based on what they are trying to spot.

Spot markers

Spot markers are no longer a triangle but are instead a diamond, while they can look more circular from a distance the problem is the marker acts as a kind of arrow pointing to the soldiers head providing an easier shooting experience so players end up shooting instinctively just below the spot marker to hit the target. As such they are not really looking at the soldier they are looking at the marker, to prevent this issue you could consider placing the spot marker relative of a spotted soldiers head by a small random number of units on the X and Y axis. This would mean that each spotted soldier would have a spot marker that is positioned differently; some to the left some to the right. You could also consider delaying the movement of the spot marker such that the position updates every 2 or 3 seconds rather then having it track the players motions.

Auto spotting replacement

While I appreciate that this is an aspect that was present in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 I don’t think that this is a very good feature as it has a potential to subtract from the goal of challenging players to develop themselves and work together. Instead of this why not consider a signature trait that is based around a more logical and skill based attribute of reconnaissance which is picking out key targets and relaying the data back to your team. A reconnaissance officer would most likely be trained to recognise various military assets from a distance so this could be represented in your game by said soldier class being able to interpret potential targets more accurately then others, so if they spot a soldier instead of just saying “there’s an enemy soldier in our AO” they can specify the class and mark the soldier as said class on the map for all to see or perhaps they can recognise mines, claymores and C4 and mark that on the map again for all to see (note I’m not asking for you to superimpose silhouettes or outlines on the 3D game world, subtle icons might be okay for the reconnaissance soldier who spots the threat but they actually have to perform the spot function it can’t be automatic; we should make people use their brains). You could marry this together with my earlier suggestion about spotting only this time by making the spotting process a little quicker and giving it a slightly lower cool down or increased cone of fire (spotting area) perhaps even a longer distance. You could call this signature trait “Thousand-yard stare” or “A.I – Advanced Intel” or perhaps “Eagle eye” though I think that last one was used in Battlefield 2042 so probably not.

You could also offer the reconnaissance class the ability to mark an area of attack for vehicles specifically air based ones. This marking ability should not be a simple point and click UI map feature but rather it should involve the player such that they must commit aim based actions to a skilled task. One way of doing this would be through the use of coloured smoke whereby the presence of which would indicate to a helicopter or jet that they should engage the area. So in this example the reconnaissance player would have to throw it and the vehicles would have to be watching for it. A better solution that would take the reconnaissance soldier out of sniping for longer would be to give the person a laser designator of some sort like the tactical binoculars seen in Battlefield 4, this way the player actually has to stop shooting and concentrate on their classes namesake. Or you could do a little of both in that you could provide the reconnaissance class with a special gadget that fires a beacon dart. When the dart is deployed it relays it's positional information to the HUD of the vehicle user in the form of a bounding box similar to the lock-on bounding box of Battlefield 3. There should be heavy declination of the launched beacon to limit the distance it can be used from as you don’t want snipers shooting it from base, it should also be slow in velocity so you can’t just hit scan a tank with it and only available in a quantity of 1 per reconnaissance soldier. The dart should not be self replenishing and non-recoverable so as to promote a respectful symbiotic team based environment meaning the player must aim carefully and use the support classes ammo box to be able to try again. You could maybe have the dart fired from some weird prototype percussion pistol to try and invoke the players imagination about the military technology in the world of your game. To counter it you could make the dart destructible so that if enemy players find it they can void the threat but I would go one step further and offer engineer soldiers the ability to reverse engineer it and triangulate the position of the reconnaissance soldier who launched it such that their position is shown on the minimap of the reconnaissance soldiers on said engineers team as a means to promote the pros and cons of a potentially powerful military asset while also encouraging team cohesion.

C4 throwing

I understand that Battlefield is going to be based around things that can happen in real life and it may well be the case that when soldiers are in the heat of battle they are probably not going to be slow and gentle with applying C4. They probably would throw it but this is one of those examples where one has to question the impact of allowing this in a video game because as is evident through social media, players will always take the path of least resistance; if you provide players with a win button then they will press it. It doesn’t matter if there is broken geometry, glitchy or speedy animations, over powered/bugged weapons or even cheat exploits and screen overlay access players will seek out the metaphorical blind spots and programming oversights in your game, use it and then justify it. In context of C4 throwing I ask you to please revisit what Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 did in their implementation. To elaborate, in those games the developers did not allow you to yeet C4 because they knew that people would use that as a more powerful grenade. Rather they made the distance that it can be thrown shorter and the animation slower so as to make the asset situational. Yes you should be using it on tanks, walls and soldiers but not every chance you get, your ability to successfully deploy it is based around angles, cover and support because it is a very powerful asset.

Vehicle first person view

Please add an option setting that forces you into the first person camera when you enter a vehicle. This is a first person shooter after all so it makes sense to maintain this immersive quality.

Hip fire reticle

The hip fire reticle has a dot in the centre of it which makes it that much easier to shoot targets especially with sniper rifles and DMRs, this removes the focus of approximating your aim between the space of the crosshairs and subtracts from the bonus aspect of using laser sights to see whether your gun is pointing on the target as now the player will just be using the attachment to dazzle their opponent and get a lower cone of fire, the user won't be looking at the laser and where it’s pointing. I don’t know if its an oversight but please do take note of Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for a more appropriate crosshair implementation especially with regard to the RPG or SMAW. Those games didn’t put a dot or a plus symbol between the crosshair because it makes the shooting experience too easy. Of course someone can just use a hardware based overlay and do the same thing but you shouldn’t put it in your software, it cheapens the game and sends the wrong message.

Mag dumping

In my previous post I expressed that the game is challenging and with regard to weapon control this is somewhat true, I really do think that the recoil and horizontal muzzle drift is very involving and I like it however, as is demonstrated by players uploading gameplay clips of themselves on social media these attributes matter little when you can just hold left click for the majority of your engagements. The aforementioned attributes are less effective the longer you hold the trigger and despite the cone of fire increasing while doing this it is still small enough that you can hit your shots. While wasting ammo might be considered a disadvantage to such a game style it isn’t really in this game because ammo crates are merged with health crates and are plentiful on the battlefield and even if that weren’t the case players who do this may not value trying to play the game to cooperate with others and so don’t expect to survive more than 2 or 3 kills. When such an individual does die either by their own hand or by someone else's they don’t face any penalties and so go right back into the fray to repeat it all again. It needs to be noted here that in some cases these players are streamers or TikTok users pumping out daily click bait in an attempt to make revenue from reaction videos or trick shot videos and so they are not interested in PTFO because that requires time, effort and cooperation; it’s harder. The issue is even more pronounced when someone unlocks extended magazines for their assault rifle as now they can hose down targets for longer with no concern paid toward good firing discipline, positioning or the squads needs.

This is not isolated to just shooting it is related to movement as well. Players are impeded somewhat with movement in Battlefield 6 but not by enough to prevent them from dancing left and right rapidly during engagements (I mentioned something like this in my last post about A and D dancing within close range fire fights and how I was able to get the better of many players by just moving left and right randomly and shooting). The problem with this is that it makes the game into something similar to a movement shooter, rather then the focus being based around: spatial awareness, situational awareness, gun parameters, firing potential and so on it’s just random movement to fake out your opponents aim and outlast their ammo count all while using a high RPM low recoil meta and what’s worse all of this is macro friendly. This all goes full circle with the other player doing the same thing as a means to try and dance between the opponents bullets and outlast their ammo count. Yes, we can all agree that movement shooters exist but not every game is a movement shooter and it doesn’t make it low skill or a noob game when it’s not, that is a very myopic point of view that I have heard people express and it does not align with reality. To be clearer I am not saying no strafing, no jumping and only running and walking I am saying the movement implementation should be based around locomotion that is inline with the established aesthetic or motif e.g. I need to get from here to there or I need to strafe while shooting to provide covering fire for my team as we advance across this road. If power moves like sliding are to remain then it should be more like skidding with the ability limited based on surface, angle, running speed, vector (to prevent taking several running steps to the left and sliding to the right) and possibly health. Dependent on the surface it should also create dust and debris (or water splashes if the surface is very wet) to obscure your vision with the camera shaking or rotating accordingly to provide a disadvantage to an advantage and make it more situational as well as atmospheric.

A final and very serious note that adds to the aforementioned issue is that because the cone of fire is so small (or perhaps its the rate of increase), the recoil so manageable and the gameplay is based around basic strafing and holding left click the TTK will be very quick making it easier to hide behind a low angled FOV aimbot with hyperbolic aim transposition. It doesn’t matter if a cheater has a hand cam or a face cam it will look natural because the guns are too accurate, the skill curve is too flat and as expressed the hacks are designed to blend in with your gameplay so you won’t be able to visually confirm your suspicions and a user can toggle them or adjust them to give different results; this isn’t the early 2000s, rage hacking is not the focus and with the rise of social media and the lack of consequences the temptation is there for people to masquerade as something they’re not and again this is because of the way the game is designed in terms of gun physics and soldier physics.

Just to express my point more bluntly if you give people an opportunity to get something with easy or broken game mechanics they will exploit it; this is low hanging fruit for potential cheaters and you won't catch them. Look at this from another perspective: view the videos that people are uploading and ask yourself if the gameplay your seeing is not cheating and this is what a large fraction of people are doing then what does cheating look like? How do you visually confirm cheating? Why did Battlefield 3 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 not have these game features? What will happen when you release different guns or attachments to your game? Will they be distinct? Have you really increased the learning curve with these kind of shot and movement mechanics of have you flattened it?

So what is the solution? In previous games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 if you held the trigger you were more likely to miss your shots so you had to take into account the weapon you were using, the distance of the enemy, nearby cover, visual obscurity and in Battlefield 3 whether or not you were suppressed and couple that together with firing pattern and frequency. In essence this translated to sometimes holding down the trigger when someone was right in front of you like 6 or 7 meters and in other cases altering your firing frequency relative to the distance of the enemy threat or suppressive state. I am making it sound more complex than it actually was, it was really quite organic or intuitive because the game gave you the necessary audio and visuals as feedback to know what you were doing right and what you were doing wrong and I can see that you’ve done some of that with the camera z-axis rotations and with recoil and horizontal muzzle drift but increasing that alone to be more aggressive will not work here because it is very easy for a player to negate this with either: a little practice, a mouse sensitivity adjustment, FOV adjustment, hacks or macros, and as said in my previous post gaming adapters and mice don’t usually use memory resident software so you won’t catch it with an anti-cheat solution and you may not be able to ban the hardware because the ID of the hardware can be spoofed. The best solution is to program more intimate physics into the guns limitations such as increasing the initial cone of fire or the rate at which the cone of fire grows as you shoot. Can someone still hack this? Yes, but by doing what I have expressed the TTK will be long enough that you can set your watch to it which means that if a player is using something that he shouldn’t it will be much clearer to analyse both in terms of raw data and video footage and you’d have a game that invites a particular discipline that encourages exploration in attack and defensive scenarios e.g. engagement distances, weapon application, firing patterns, choke points and cover. I would also hypothesize that this will give the game clients and servers a chance to catch up with the bullet data that players are sending and receiving as the players would have to actually break their line of fire to land their shots this would prevent the sensation of dying too quickly or the feeling that your client lapsed out of sync (the feeling that you died a few seconds ago but you just didn’t get the death packet, like your watching a recording that has been timeshifted by 500ms) improving clarity and the overall experience of the battlefield for the players.

As expressed earlier this suggestion would also require some kind of analysis on the way strafing works as it feels as though it is designed with a narrow cone of fire in mind so that you can pre-fire around corners or waggle your gun in full auto and in general just cut people in half. I do not know enough about it to say whether the general speed is too fast or if the transition speed from one direction to the other is too fast but the overall effect I am getting is that I have a higher advantage against my opponents because I am spamming left or right strafe randomly and holding left click in Battlefield 6 than in Battlefield 3 or Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (you can’t actually do it in those games and if you try you’ll lose the fight) and I don’t think I should be able to because I don’t think this is supposed to be a Quake like game or some generic shooter.

If I may just add one more thing here I mentioned it in previous posts but I’ll say it again I really think your game could do with some kind of suppression to enhance the combat and to provide a kind of implicit litmus test for cheaters as it would act as another barrier of logic to discern real natural ability from artificially augmented ability since a persons potential to engage at the same rate and efficiency would be impeded based on changing visuals and assuming you change the gun parameters ever so slightly during the effect there would be a physical based limitation to combat that could not be bypassed. As mentioned previously you could have an initial amount of suppression but for those that want more atmosphere you can give users the option to turn it up as they see fit just like the camera shake option.

Player HUD

This isn’t an issue so much but modern gaming especially has really patronised gamers to the point where everything has to have skulls and useless information over your screen (and Battlefield 3 has a similar problem with its ECG graph and progression bar stuck around the ammo count) so can you please re-evaluate the purpose of having a picture of your gun next to your ammo count? I as the player am already aware of the gun that I chose both because I selected it myself and because it is in my soldier models hands. I do not need a 2 dimensional picture to remind me of this nor do I need it to help me remember its configuration, it is completely superfluous and only succeeds in taking up necessary space and like the skulls motif looks puerile and pretentious. This isn’t a mobile game for children just do what Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 4 did and use numbers to represent quantities. Anything that is on a timer ignore it, it doesn’t need to be rendered with icons and gauges because players are not so stupid that they can’t approximate the time elapsed over time remaining relative to an item used; in essence if you press the button to use it and nothing happens it means it’s not ready and if you’ve played the game enough times you’ll gain a rough understanding of how long you have to wait before it is ready just like reloading or obtaining ammo from a crate; players can understand this. If it is that important to have the icon with the animated gauge then just replace the primary weapon count display with the aforementioned when a player switches to that item slot or if it would be too much work to animate a switch from an item-being-held posture to a no-item posture to an item suddenly being available just implement an inventory toggle bind that will show or hide the gauge on the screen when the user presses the bound button.

Assault class

I am not a fan of the current design of the assault class because I am not seeing any kind of cooperative play from them. All I am seeing is them run off into danger, get incapacitated and ask for a revive or tap out, redeploy and repeat. It is almost as though they are not playing the same game. It doesn’t matter if you give them less ammunition or no health packs because their play style doesn’t usually allow them to survive more than 2 or 3 kills and they can just redeploy on a radio beacon or squad member with full health and ammo which for the most part is exactly how it works out in other fast paced arena shooters. I don’t know exactly what you could do to make it better but the first answer I get off of the top of my head is to make them the medic class. It might not be realistic but then neither is allowing someone to act as an engineer by picking up an engineers gun. My point is that sometimes games have to be realistic but other times you have to compromise on that attribute to represent the ethos of your game more accurately. What is the ethos of Battlefield? Is it a run and gun arena shooter similar to unreal tournament but with vehicles or is it a cooperative shooter emulating an abstraction of events and values that occur in and around the idea of military combat? Ask yourselves this: in Battlefield 6 are assault players cooperating with their teammates to the same qualitative effect as in Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2? Now ask yourself: why is this? Can you describe it? Is it repeatable? What should change to make it better?

Vehicle theft

Battlefield has always had issues with teammates stealing vehicles that are being repaired or hijacking ground transport vehicles that are engaged in suppressing targets for reasons of a joyride/suicide run. Sometimes its probably due to ignorance rather then malice as some people do not understand how to play Battlefield but overall this is very similar to what I mentioned earlier whereby that if you provide players the ability to do the wrong thing with no real consequences then they will do it. One way to prevent this is to provide a car key token such that the driver of the vehicle is considered the owner of it while the player possesses said token. If the driver gets out of the vehicle and wonders say 10 meters away from it for 15 odd seconds the car key token automatically goes back in the vehicle so that the next person can access it unless there is a player using the heavy machine gun in which case it goes to that player. To mitigate this add a commo rose option “Can I have the keys?” which should post to the player’s UI who has it. The player has a limited time to answer through the commo rose menu “Affirmative” or “Negative”, if no answer is given then the car key token goes to whom ever requested it. You could also have it such that the player requesting the keys can direct his commo rose request to the vehicle itself for cases where you can’t tell who owns the vehicle. You could also offer a button bind that allows the owner to leave the key token in the vehicle when they’ve abandoned the vehicle so that players don’t have to wait.

Helicopter seat switching

I haven’t been able to confirm this as I couldn’t get access to the helicopter in your game but this has happened in multiple Battlefield games so I’m assuming it’s present in Battlefield 6. In previous Battlefield games players would sometimes try to operate the attack helicopters by themselves, that is they would pilot the helicopter as high as possible and then switch from the pilot seat to the co-pilot seat and engage any targets beneath them in gentle free fall. If this is in your current game then I highly recommend that you make it such that a pilot cannot switch seats unless they land the helicopter first as a single player is not supposed to be using such a powerful team based asset by themselves as it defeats the whole point of a cooperative game.

Vehicle deployment access

Over the last few Battlefield games accessing the vehicles in base has been designed around clicking on an icon within the deployment menu. The issue with this is that a person can create a macro to click on the desired vehicle which unfairly locks other people out of accessing it. I suggest that you do what Battlefield 3 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 did, you make it a scramble such that players will spawn somewhere in the base and that they have to go to the desired vehicle to access it. You can spawn non-engineer players further away from the vehicles and you can do the same for users who have recently used a vehicle or didn’t use it correctly. It is far more appropriate to do it this way as it will force players to interact with one another via the presence of their soldier models and as such force them to recognise that they must cooperate and share. What’s more if a person chooses to be a problem it is far easier to report them because you will see their name tag. Again, this relates heavily to what I mentioned about allowing people to exploit something; a menu function for vehicle access isn’t bad on paper and looks nice in presentation but the potential for abuse is far larger then the alternative.

Camouflage XP multipliers

The camouflage in Battlefield 6 looks far more appropriate then Battlefield 2042 but to encourage people to choose the correct camouflage for the environment you could offer an XP multiplier based on the camouflage selection and the map. So this could look like setting some meta data or an enumeration in the skin that the player has equipped and query that meta data based on what colour based meta data is present for the area the player is occupying on the map when they perform an XP awarding operation. If it matches then you are awarded the multiplier for example 1.1 which means any task the player performs that grants XP will be 10% greater. You can also do it the other way such that if a player has equipped snow camouflage but it is in a desert map then you could give them say 0.9 multiplier so in that case the XP awarded for a task performed would be 10% less. This way you are using positive and negative reinforcement to encourage players to choose sensibly as the choice of camouflage is a part of military combat which this game is about. You could even take it one step further and extend the XP multiplier based on all squad members being inline with the squad leaders camouflage choices and the occupied territory.

On note of this I really think it would be good to add score decrements to discourage bad behaviour and to have that impact your rank so you can lose weapons and unlocks for being a nuisance. It needs to be made clear that the player has done something wrong so list it at the end of the round for the player to review. Old games used to do this all the time; ever played Desert Strike or Jungle Strike on the Sega Mega Drive (or SNES or Gameboy) then you’ll know what I am talking about. Telling someone that they did wrong through in game penalties is not going to stop them from liking your game, quite the opposite they will respect it more and try to do better by practising harder and they will encourage others to do the same leading to a healthy less toxic community so please do add score decrements. I know that it’s easier said then done as your game will need to be able to contextually analyse player action over effect but I am sure you can do something.

Hit markers through smoke

It has been the case with older Battlefield titles that when smoke is deployed a player can just spam bullets through it and fish for hit markers and the same seems to be true in this game (unless it was a bug). Much like how 3D spotting doesn’t work through smoke I would recommend that hit markers shouldn’t show unless the enemy is exposed.

Commo rose commands and auto translate text chat

The way that the commo rose works is useful and I can clearly see that it’s not quite finished yet but perhaps you can consider putting in additional commands representative of preparing for a breech such as an “On me!” command and a count down or breech count down command. This would mean that you might use the “On me!” command at an entrance or around a wall, a marker would then be posted to the squad based on the position of the soldier who made the command and then said soldier could initiate a breech count down command which would post to the squad members a simple timer allowing for synchronisation of player efforts. You could also consider a “Get over there” command which is similar to placing a marker at where your aiming but with stronger contextual meaning or you could do some kind of commo rose concatenation where by you can structure a command combined with numbers to represent the numeric index of the players in your squad so for example the squad leader could select 2 (meaning squad member 2) from the commo rose and then select “Get over there”. You’d need to change the user interface for this and probably make it such that each command is enumerated with a number such that you can dial the commands in with your number pad. Perhaps arrange the commands as a horizontal logic tree and remove the invalid commands as the user progresses through the selection. With this you could describe something additional, perhaps something with adverbs e.g. “Get over there” “Slowly” or “Quietly” or perhaps a further instruction like: “And” “Wait for my signal”. When the user has finished structuring the command it gets sent to the squad member in one complete phrase.

I don’t know if your game is doing this already but have you considered adding auto translate in text chat? That way a person who is not a natural English speaker can still talk to others. With the commo rose it shouldn’t be needed but since this is a social based game it might be a great way to square the circle and aid communication.

Close

Just as 2+2 is 4 so is 3+1, 1+1+1+1 and 5-1 different operations and values can create the same result and as such I believe that there are many ways to create or approximate a Battlefield game and it may be the case that you have succeeded in doing this with Battlefield 6 after all Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is different from Battlefield 3 but I like them both, why? The answer is that they are both challenging titles that encourage you to master your senses as well as the assets in the game together with other players in a symbiotic type fashion. Are they perfect? No, but the demands on my focus and the combined efforts of others who are also similarly impeded is what makes it so attractive and re-playable. To note in particular shooting in those games is intuitive but it requires player observance as you are penalised for spraying and praying and those difficulties are physics based limitations that you cannot bypass or supersede; you can’t just hold left click for all the engagements and run around the map wiggling and sliding all the way. No, rather it encourages you to pool your limited ability and resources with your squad members and your team and cooperate through a combined effort.

At present Battlefield 6 while challenging is not providing me with any reason to focus on how I am shooting unless I choose to fire in short controlled bursts and I don’t really need to do that because I can just turn up my mouse sensitivity and pull down on my mouse. And just to add I am not an aim god or fps guru with super KDR so I’d imagine that anyone with more time logged in to a movement shooter will be even more effective in this. Naturally of course you want everyone to come and play your game and that is fine but if a person can just implement the same techniques that they’ve learnt from a completely different FPS sub genre then doesn’t that at least beg some kind of question as to why you’re making a game to support that and not a game to innovate on what existed in your previous games?

Why make a game like this? It’s like Capcom making another Street Fighter game but putting blood and gore in it complete with hyper violent finishing moves, sure Capcom could do that and some people would both like and defend it but why build a hyper violent sequel to a game IP that is known for having non-bloody violence? How is that innovative? It isn’t, it’s just copying from someone else in an attempt to appeal to people who probably would never play a Street Fighter game in the first place. Those players who don’t want to play Street Fighter are not bad and they are not noobs they just want a different game, likewise the players who play Street Fighter don’t want Mortal Kombat and they don’t hate the game they just don’t want any of the game mechanics in Street Fighter. That being said the idea that one publishers game must top all the others in the same genre is one of the most stupidest ideas. Such a focus only succeeds in stifling innovation, ruining game identity and eventually it will destroy the IP. To put it more bluntly Battlefield does not need to prove that it’s better then Call of Duty or vice-versa and making COD killers is not helping your game. That is not the purpose of video games, players are not measuring a better game based on the number of features that they can count in one game over the other. You cannot just give player type 1 feature A and player type 2 feature B and conclude that because you have included the desired features of both demographics that the game will play fine and both parties will play the game together with no issues. This is not so as the existence of one feature is antithetical to the other so you’ll end up alienating one group of players and in some other cases failing to appeal to the other; it is an optimised for everything good for nothing approach and it rots good games from the inside out. Because some of the players from one of the player types might buy your game and just live with the flaws and complain here and there but someone up top in corporate space who listens to wallets over voices will incorrectly deduce that the sales being comparably good means the ideas copied from another game is fine and so the heuristic becomes rinse and repeat with the next game rather then stop and listen. As such the next game adds more of the features from another IP that no one asks for and the cycle continues with the games getting progressively worse with each iteration. In essence I am trying to say there is more than enough room out there for more than 1 FPS game and they are allowed to be different from one another history shows this. Sonic the hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers, Contra and Gunstar Heroes and Turrican and MegaMan, Final Fight and Streets of Rage and Double Dragon, Tetris and Columns, Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung Fu and Pit Fighter and Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and King of Fighters and Guilty Gear and Virtua Fighter and Tekken, Quake and Halo and Counter Strike and of course Battlefield and Call of Duty; the most popular games today started out with small groups of people programming different answers to the same game genre based questions. Yes, some of their results are similar and I’m sure they weren’t programming in complete isolation with no knowledge of other games in existence but what we had back then is an output of developer creativity not copying and pasting or the watering down of established game mechanics to attract certain customers. It’s questioning the existence of feature X and how it adds to the overall game experience and established concept and then asking why. It’s innovation not imitation.

I am probably in the minority here and my views and suggestions are most likely going to be considered as silly or outdated and that’s fine everyone has an opinion but I say these things because I too care about your game and I want to buy it, learn it and play with other like minded people. I want to make it clear here I am not saying your game is bad or the developers don’t know what they are doing. No, not at all. Making video games is not easy and I think your staff have done a monumental and powerful work and it is great, but the infantry combat style spoils it and the class design is not helping it. I am not asking for it to be as vague or as inaccurate as Battlefield 4 where you can barely hip fire your assault rifle on target and you can’t tell when you're suppressed most of the time but your game needs to give players a reason to take their finger off of the trigger in the majority of cases. You have to remove the proverbial win button and encourage players to play with one another not just next to one another and the best way to do that is via limitations. Limitations in how the guns work, limitations in what classes do, limitations in map geometry, limitations in terms of who gets what, limitations in physics.

I believe you have some of that already but I think it needs to go a little further, I do hope you will take it further.

Thank you for letting me play your Battlefield 6 Beta video game I had some fun and thank you for reading my comments.