After racking up roughly ten hours with the Battlefield 1 open beta over the weekend, I can’t say that I was blown away. Sure, it’s good, but the game to finally kill off Call of Duty that so many people so desperately want it to be? Not quite, at least from what I’ve seen so far.
It feels at times like a reskin of an earlier Battlefield, but at others feels like something new entirely. It’s strange. DICE have mixed the aesthetics of Battlefront and some of its gameplay mechanics with the series’s own style. It works, but it might take some time to get used to it for those who have been sinking 100+ hours into Battlefield 4.
Battlefield 1 is due out soon, and although I’m not naive enough to suggest that a sea of change will come over the game before its launch on October 21st, there are some tweaks to the way it plays that would make the experience of WWI mayhem slightly less harrowing.
1. Focus on stability
Easy, straightforward pick to begin with: Battlefield 1’s open beta is rife with technical issues that have become staples for Battlefield’s pre-release versions. I’ve climbed a ledge only to temporarily cause a rift in space and time to be transported to another part of the map, disappeared inside a boulder, watched my teammates turn into B-roll footage from The Thing while entering vehicles, and, worst of all, spent long stretches of time unable to move.
These are all issues that should be able to be fixed before launch, at least you would hope so. Battlefield hasn’t had the best record for its launches, so here’s hoping DICE prioritise stability over anything else before Battlefield 1 comes out.
2. Pick-ups
It’s not immediately obvious, but there are pick-ups dotted around the Sinai Desert that can change the way you play completely. Most people might rush towards the flamethrower, but my personal favourite is the sniper rifle nestled away in the Desert Outpost – one shot can take out a jeep full of enemies.
Here’s the thing, though: you can’t drop the pick-up and have to stick with it until you die. That means that no matter how many poor, unsuspecting people I kill as they haphazardly struggle to drive over dunes, I still have a death sentence. Once the ammo is gone, you can only swap to your secondary weapon and, weirdly, put on your gas mask. Whether this is a bug or just a bad design choice isn’t something I know, but it really doesn’t work.
3. Give us something to do between matches
Maybe (almost definitely) I have been spoilt by Overwatch, but the downtime between matches in Battlefield 1 could be spent doing far more important things rather than just choosing which medal you want to track. Considering how many different loadouts you can choose, surely it would be a better opportunity to change things before a match instead of in the middle of one?
4. Calm the tanks down
All’s fair in war and all that, but tanks are certainly a little too overpowered within the beta. Without even really trying, I racked up about ten kills from within a light tank just by rolling up on a sector nearest the opposition’s main spawn point. Infantry are like ants against them, not helped by how little they have in their arsenal to counteract their mortar shells and machine guns.
It should be a relatively straightforward fix to ensure it’s a bit more balanced. Either more classes can come equipped with more suitable weaponry or the damage of tanks could be limited slightly. Whatever stops people from constantly bitching about dying to me.
5. Make support/medic roles more useful
How many times have you been given ammo or health during a match? Revived from death? It doesn’t seem to happen often and has happened to me maybe once or twice, so it should be made obvious to some people that different soldiers means different possibilities.
Listen, I just valiantly ran in front of a mortar shell to save your life obviously on purpose, so the least you could do is inject me with some of that magic heroin.
What do you think? Keen for the full version of Battlefield 1 or want to see some changes first? Let us know.
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