My thoughts on how to make BF6 better
1. We need BIG maps with better map design.
Firstly, the elephant in the room – map design is awful. Maps are small, chaotic and my willingness to play gets worn out way too fast.
Just give us big sandbox maps with tons of vehicles, pronounced points of interest and a cool atmosphere. Enough with the big empty construction sites. Enough with the cargo boxes. Enough with the flat fields with zero cover. Enough with the 100% urban warfare maps.
It just feels like map design has deteriorated greatly since BF1. A few months back, during the beta, I wrote on reddit that EA/DICE need to fire all their map designers, and everyone was very dramatic and jumped against me. Well, I guess I was right, based on the full BF6 version. All in all, we have one very cool large map (Mirak), one great mid-size urban map (Cairo) and two okay-ish mid-sized maps (Manhattan and Iberian). Everything else is just plainly bad or mid at best.
We need naval warfare. We need better and bigger maps for air combat. We need more diversity in the maps' environments - every BF6 maps is either located on some city streets, or in a depressing gray/brown dump with an adjacent big construction site. Where is the seaside, where are the jungles, where are the green fields of old maps, where are the snow maps...
2. We need NEW maps.
And I can’t stress enough on NEW. Remastering/reworking maps from old BF titles is just lazy work. We’re paying for a new game and we want NEW content. So get on with it and just get your money’s worth – give us NEW maps. And in all honesty, from what I’ve seen in the Firestorm remaster, they are not even doing a good job in the remastering, lol.
3. Fixing the lightning in the game.
I’m not sure what’s the technical terms which should be used for this, but when sitting inside a building when looking outside you just cannot see anything due to the overly exposed lightning. This is something that should be quite easy to fix.
4. Explosives are useless – we need a big increase in splash damage.
It makes no sense for RPG rockets exploding near people to not kill them. I believe that DICE knowingly made this decision due to the issue 1 above (the ridiculously small maps), but come on. RPGs are useless. C4 is useless. GLs are useless. Mortars are useless. Just make the right thing and increase their AOE damage and damage overall.
5. Anti-air is useless
The title here says it all. AA make little to even no damage to aircrafts. Just increase their damage and make them relevant.
6. We need more vehicles and aircrafts.
The game just feels way too infantry-focused.
I know that there is a bug where helis are not spawning at all at Sobek and Manhattan (which seems to be addressed already by devs, but I cannot confirm from my experience yet).
But overall I think that the spawn time for vehicles should be a bit faster, and more vehicles should be added.
Also, where are the Little Birds? There are maps which are perfect for them, but yet we do not even have such vehicles in the game. And where are the APCs? It would be great to have something like the Brawler from 2042 in-game as a mobile spawning point for teammates and it would really make things more interesting.
7. The main menu is terrible – it needs to be reworked entirely.
The title here says it all. No one likes the Netflix-style menu. It is very confusing and hard to navigate. Just go back to the simple menus. Even some of the fans in reddit have suggested some really cool and simple menus that would work 100 times better than the current one.
8. It is impossible to play with friend groups consisting of more than 4 people.
Parties are limited to 4 people. The only way for bigger friend groups to play together is for 4 of you to join as a party and the rest to join through in-game friends list >> right click on someone in the party >> join game. But you have to do it after every single game in matchmaking. It's obviously not well thought of (at all). We either need rented servers back, or we need to increase the party size significantly. I have so much friends with whom I’ve played since BF1942, and who are still playing now, but I just simply cannot play with them due to these stupid limitations.
9. The playlists are trash.
Just ditch the current playlists and make a separate playlist for each game mode.
If I want to play Rush, just let me play rush and don’t force me to play Breaktrough. If I want to play Squad Deathmatch, just let me do so. Enough with forcing me to play modes that I don’t want to. These mixed mode playlists switching up the game mode after each round are so annoying. Especially for people trying to do missions/achievements, it is hell.
And it makes it even worse that not all game modes are available in the Portal’s server browser. Just end this suffering and either give us a proper server browser with rented servers, or make the matchmaking playlists limited to each separate mode, and stop mixing the modes.
10. All in all, I think we just heed rented servers back (with reference to issues 8 and 9 above).
I just feel that having community rented servers was a great way to form communities around the game and keep people engaged with it. Me and my buddies always had our own little server and we really formed our little Battlefield society around it. We remained friends and kept playing together for years. And now it just seems and feels like DICE are intentionally making it harder for us to stay and play together.
11. Stop forcing us to play with female characters.
All those “characters” forced on us by default, and having to play trough achievements and missions just to unlock another character, this was a bad idea. Just let them be randomly generated male/female characters, or let us have our own customized ones. I was so annoyed that all the NATO supports are female, or that I had to grind hard to unlock a male support for the PAX faction. I am a dude, just let me play as a dude, simple as that. I feel misrepresented and discriminated, lol.
12. Some of the maps need to be reworked.
Firstly, the spawn locations for each objective, especially on smaller maps, need some versatility. I am sick of being spawn killed on Empire State just because the map is so small and I spawn on top of enemy squads.
Secondly, I think that all spawn bases can be reduced by 2/3 of their current size and the maps will play just as good, or even better than now. It makes no sense to have the spawn bases so huge - they are just dead areas of the maps where no one goes...
Thirdly, due to the maps being so small and devoid of vehicles, I think that some tweaks can be done to make them slightly bigger and more flexible for players.
Here are two examples:
- Empire state map is literally next to the river. Why not add some RHIB boats? Why not push the boundaries of the map a block or two inside of the city? The maps is visually gorgeous, it is really a shame that it is just a small cluster**bleep** with buggy spawnpoints.
- Liberation Peak can also be tweaked. The area above objectives A and B is just useless now and very few people use it to flank (but it is empty 90% of the time). Going from A to C is a suicide. Why not add a couple of tunnels under the mountain connecting A and C (and why not even make it connect objective F... since F is almost impossible to reach now from NATO side...)? This would also make a great addition and a new angle of the map, making it way more versatile...
And those are only two suggestions. The options are limitless. Just consider reworking the maps to make them play better...
I guess that is all I have to say for now. Don’t get me wrong – the game feels amazing, but really the release feels a bit rushed. There are very few and very small maps. Vehicles are missing from the game. There are also some technical/UI issues, which I already mentioned above. And of course there are the minor things that could be done better. I really hope that EA/DICE gets the feedback and start doing things to please the real Battlefield fans, and not the CoD fanboys, who will be gone from the game in a few weeks nevertheless.
