Battlefield V

Season 5 is in and SWEET MERCIFUL ZOMBIE JESUS. The M1 Garand is absurd, low recoil, solid damage, decent ROF. The Type 100 SMG is even better, having virtually no recoil at the cost of slightly lower damage (just like anyone gives a shit at 720 RPM). And then there's the Type 99 sniper rifle, which is a seriously beefed up Enfield.

Also, US uniforms are alright, but the Japanese ones suck. At least the default ones, the Season Pass and Season Booster have some decent ones.

So the latest update has been getting some flak, mostly for yet another TTK change. Could've sworn they did this before and rescinded after getting a ton of complaints, what made them go back?

^ Easy. Poor player attraction (few new players) and even poorer player retention (few continuing players).

To describe Battlefield V one year after launch would be in a word: Trainwreck.

Poor on content (seriously, Battlefield 1 had twice as many maps by this point), launched with a poorly handled controversy of their own making, enough Game Breaking Bugs and bugs in general to rival the launch version of Battlefield 4, a very poorly balanced weapon sandbox and class system, a very frustrating gameplay loop, dumbed down weapons, Hardcore-wannabe weapon damage and thus frustrating deaths even at long ranges, poor player/object visibility, and numerous performance problems under the hood to say the least all makes for a very forgettable and undesirable game.

Given there's rumors going round that Bad Company 3, the proposed title for next year has been canned and thus there won't be a Battlefield title til minimum Fiscal Year 2022 (late 2021 at earliest), it makes perfect sense they'd maybe want to try out a "second launch" and overhaul the game to attract new buyers and hobble themselves along long enough until they can finally abandon and disown the trainwreck once and for all for the new title.

With the TTK changes, I suspect they realized they cannot overhaul the constantly complained about "hardcore lite" stupidity of the launch product and its frustrating deaths with slight changes and tweaks. That and the only people left currently playing would be the Hardcore type who like twitch shooters, something in incredibly short supply if the game wants to make enough money through sales/microtransactions to last upwards of 2+ years.

Furthermore, they had to break up the entrenched "meta" of Suomi/Thompson users for Medic, snipers, MMG campers and Action Man^TM assault class and his good-at-everything everything being roughly 2/3rds of all infantry. They wouldn't have achieved this through tweaks and slight changes, much more drastic measures were needed.

TTK changes in 5.2 were fucked, to say the least. Most blatant example was the Breda assault rifle: it has four-round burst, and needed five hits to drop anyone even up close. Nonsense!

5.2.2 sorted things out, and most importantly, Season 5 rocked the meta as far as Medics go, giving them ridiculously unbalanced Type 100 and continuing the new carbine weapon class with the Enfield Jungle Carbine, placing it between the noiseless, low-damage Delisle and the absolutely overpowered Tromboncino.

As for the MMG camping, I can't say I suffered much from it, although one weekly before Season 5 (the one that introduced the Underground map) made me resort to MG 42 and M1922. Turns out it's funnier than I expected.

The BAR is cool, but requires a bit of getting used to, with the gas regulator or whatever it has allowing you slower burst fire at longer distances (like the Bren) or going full whoopass mode up close.

Sounds like Battlefield 3 with the AN-94 and M16A4. Two and three round burst assault rifles respectively but needing no less than four shots to kill! Meaning no less than two bursts were required for a kill. On paper anyways, it usually took 5 or 6 bullets (2-3 bursts) because the maximum damage range barely extended beyond knife range even with Heavy Barrel and even if you did hit max damage, it did exactly 25 so a hit to the hands or feet which was insanely easy to have happen meant a 5 shot kill.

It wasn't nonsense then. Time to kill and time to die were a lot slower in BF 3 despite the on paper theorycrafting compared to BFV's pre-5.2. It was what I liked about BF 3 compared to COD and Halo games. Damage was slower in BF 3 compared to COD games and the maps weren't sports arenas unlike Halo. And it didn't have laser beam COD gunplay of BFV so it stretched the time to die out a lot longer as well.

I'm not convinced the TTK changes were bad.

Edited by MajorTom on Dec 27th 2019 at 4:59:20 AM

The problem is, before 5.2, you could drop a guy with a single Breda burst up close. Which shows how ill-thought the change was.

On the other hand, they didn't do jack shit to the Garand. It's still a very quick triple-tap weapon, compared with every other semi-auto rifle for the Assault class.

Not necessarily. If anything it shows how ill-thought pre-5.2 was. Burst fire weapons in Battlefield games have NEVER killed in one burst to the body at any range. Never!

Some of them killed in one burst if you chained headshots at close range, but never to the body. (The AN-94 is pretty reliable for that playstyle in BF 3.)

Ahahahaha, so the new SMG is in.

It deals even less damage than the Type 100.

But it has a staggering 1028 RPM rate of fire, upgradeable to 1200 at level 3.

If you don't need 1200 RPM, the alternative is a 50 round magazine, up from the default 30.

One magazine allows you to perform a double kill in close quarters.

Suomi? What Suomi?

The jig is up, the news is out, they finally killed it...

BFV is over people. A failed end to a failed game.

I suppose it's appropriate since they killed the South Africa servers (and reactivated them temporarily) about two weeks ago. No successful game deletes game regions after all.

Was just coming here to post that. So much for the long-term "games as a service" concept.

REALLY hoping this doesn't happen to Battlefront 2, but knowing EA, it's probably going to appear on the chopping block soon.

I'm pretty sure the only reason they'll keep it for Battlefront II is the ominous, foreboding juggernaut that is the House of Mouse.

It appears DICE failed to grasp that concept. It was foreshadowed very early on, with their refusal to include MTX until Season 3 or 4, and pretty much telegraphed with the absolutely atrocious Season 6 Pass and weeklies.

Makes me wonder who even approved the entire development schedule for that game. Turns out there are still loads of Dummied Out skins, weapons and gadgets that apparently didn't work out, so why the fuck did nobody signed off on them over the last year and a half? Not to mention, the absolute fiasco involving the AT spear back in season 5.

I lost all faith in DICE and EA.

Man, talk about taking too many steps back from BF 1.

At least Modern Warfare 2019 is still going strong.

The more I look at what happened, the more I realize they had no idea how to make the game successful. They made the Firestorm mode just to abandon it with no real development, and that after Blackout received updates season after season, despite being popular only on consoles. Their excuses for cutting modes just to have them return for a week once a season were insulting. Not to mention, seasons gave them a great way to plan ahead with major content updates and still they pissed it away. I mean, c'mon: you know you have everything stacked in three-month blocks of content, the sensible idea would be to theme the blocks (which they figured out, and not quite so, in Season 5), starting with smaller things that didn't make the cut on release while working on bigger things like the Pacific update scheduled for later seasons.

The only thing I expected out of BFV was its short stories. And only The Last Tiger impressed me albeit short and with the problematic historical errata when it comes to the Tiger and the other smaller details (two shotting Sherman Firefly tanks as opposed to one-shotting it as the narrator even said).

We'll probably never be able to get a good modern WWII game ever, with only Post Scriptum being the one that matters. Also, thankfully I pirated this game as opposed to buying it.

Edited by HamanaHamanaHamana on Apr 27th 2020 at 10:04:22 AM

Given that they just killed battlefront as well, which by all accounts was doing pretty good now, and the devs that have left and are now free to talk on twitter are going on about how they had so much more planed, and the pacific update was supose to be the one that got the fires lit for them to work with....

...

I get the feeling there is money issues at the company proper, maybe not even just dice but EA, have they even had a product land sucessfully in the last few years, because I sure dont remember one....

Edited by Imca on Apr 29th 2020 at 4:15:39 AM

Wait, what you mean Battlefront 2 is coming to an end? The game's doing great and recovered, they're supposed to even have a whole season coming up next?

{Looks at news}

Awww fuck.

What the hell is going on at EA and DICE? Has COVID 19 made things that desperate that they have to shutter BOTH of their games?!

In the shooter department, they haven't had a "successful" meaning controversy-free, means/exceeds expectations and is received well game since Battlefield 1.

Since then they've had a fair few stinkers and controversies that have bit them in the ass. Be it Gamblefront II, Anthem, "Everybody's Battlefield", and a couple others if I remember correctly. (Even their Meal Ticket franchise the FIFA series has had issues and controversies pop up.)

I get the feeling we're watching the real-time collapse of both DICE and the Battlefield franchise. And EA is going to be changing things up because it's burning them too often. They'll probably be a bit more cautious about things for a while.

Edited by MajorTom on Apr 29th 2020 at 8:19:32 AM

If we look at the long term however, we're also seeing a problem of quality. In the last 10 years DICE has only had two launches that went according to plan or close enough: Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 1 incidentally those are the two best-selling Battlefield games of all time. Battlefield 4 had its infamous disaster of a launch which is still held against it even today. Battlefront 2015 was slammed and shamed for its barebones presentation and content. Battlefront II aka Gamblefront II got caught up in quite possibly the biggest gaming controversy this side of "Hot Coffee" and attracted the ire of not only gamers but Disney and politicans alike. That game didn't reach expectations at launch as a result and it's taken two years for them to try and Win Back the Crowd over time. Battlefield V, self-explanatory, big controversy, even bigger shitstorm with the way developers and marketers handled it, complete flop of a game both in terms of copies sold and MTX in terms of Triple-A game. A buggy, broken, unbalanced (in every sense), short on content and even shorter on promises game that for every one thing they appeared to do right, they screw up on five things elsewhere.

With that kind of long-term record, I wouldn't expect DICE to be either swimming in money or around much longer.

So they punted out all the cut content fit to publish and now it shows how much they were fucking with us.

Check the skins for Welgun, Chauchat and Sjogren.

Full Year One sets for every one of them. Unlockable with Company Cash.

Just... how long were they sitting on those guns?!

Not to mention, suddenly there's an option to add charms to your guns, like in every goddamn shooter released recently (and Blacklight Retribution). Suddenly. Now. When there's nothing but ashes from the garbage fire.

I'm not bashing them for implementing everything popular. I'm bashing them for not having a plan to implement it earlier, I'm bashing them for an absolute lack of vision and being stupidly unable to follow up on their ideas.

It's starting to sound like DICE had no idea on how to approach monetizing content without using the old Season Pass model, along with the usual technical issues. That, and the Battlefield games are probably becoming too expensive to develop and maintain while keeping a steady stream of updates.

I say this because of how similar the situation is with Bungie and Destiny 2. They just made the surprising decision to remove several planetary destinations and various content, due to how bloated and difficult the game has become to maintain. Certainly would explain why BF 4 shared so much re-used assets from BF 3, and why the same has become apparent with BFV re-using BF 1 assets: it's a developer's time saver.

In the case of the Chauchat, at least since launch. It was in the single player War Stories so it was fully animated and functional.

Which means the massive Reddit meme of (u/)GIVE_CHAUCHAT is very well deserved.

More like, they had no bloody idea about how to even implement a Season Pass mechanic in the first place. It was the second-worst Season Pass mechanic I've seen, because you can't top Ubisoft's fuckup in Breakpoint that ended with Ubi handing out everything that was in the two passes and kicking the concept under the cupboard where nobody's gonna look for it.

DICE not only decided on MTX way too late after talking about how there will be no MTX, but also had no idea what to do with a Season Pass while having a Tides of War mechanic that did the exact same thing, handed out limited-edition candy.

Another fuckup was the aborted 5v5 mode that made no sense to implement in the first place. That was a mode for literally no one, with the smallest teams to date being 8v8 and no concrete idea for a 5v5 gamemode that wasn't implemented on a larger scale already. How much time did they waste on that one?

And they pissed away their take on Battle Royale that was not only enjoyable, but obviously inspired both Warzone (tiered weapons with pre-set mods, killstreaks) and the recent updates for PUBG (destructible environment, vehicle calldowns).