Closed Alpha Test & Deth..
Re: At Last! DICE to make the new SWBF!!!
I saw the footage and all my fears were initially squashed. The game's art assets are absolutely spot on(having personally spent what feels like a decade studying SW weapons, vehicles, locations, and characters). They have set the bar high in that respect and it is awesome. The sound is phenomenal, the effects are super authentic, and it is pure Star Wars in its presentation.
However. More details have come out which really kill it for me. One such detail is that, on the walker assault gamemode anyway, the only way to fly a fighter craft is to locate a floating glowy icon somewhere on the map and when walked over, your character crouches down and calls for air support. You are then teleported into an already airborne fighter. This bothers me for a few reasons:
1. This means there is no teamwork in terms of repairing aircraft. There was mention you could get repair powerups which will probably be like flying through a glowy spinning icon somewhere in the sky to repair your craft.
2. The feel of physically jumping into a fighter and carefully taking off(or landing for that matter) is huge for immersion and cool-factor.
3. It simply is not realisitic. We want to live out scenes directly from the movie like seeing the Snowspeeders taking off from Echo Base, gunners in the back, ready for action. How this feature affects any possible future space boarding maps I don't know but it would be odd for them to allow take off and landing for one game mode and not for the other(though I could see a case like FS has where you spawn directly in a ship and cant leave it until you die).
Another thing that bothers me is there doesn't seem to be any player to player healing mechanic. No bacta cannisters and no revive(not sure on the revive part). So we have no healing and no repairs. We also know the guns do not have ammo per se and are based on heat. This leads one to believe there will be no ammo drops either. They also decided not to add a spotting feature and it seems any and all players/vehicles always show up on the minimap so there will be little room for stealthy attacks.
There has also been word that heavy weapons such as torpedo launchers will only be powerups found in the map. This is why they went with withering fire as nobody would be able to damage the armored walkers if they didn't happen to find a rocket spawn.
Deciding not to implement squads and instead going with the buddy system further kills any teamwork in my opinion. I fear it will always feel like a bit of a free for all. Teamwork is what I love about this style of game and with no player to player support mechanics in the game I'm quite dissapointed. I wouldnt be surprised if vehicles only have one player slot when they can clearly support multiple players from a lore and gameplay perspective. Right now with all we know about the game it appears like it will be very limited. One of the things I've grown to love about BF4 is the wide variety of gadgets and weaponry available. A friend of the devs told us they were having a hard time trying to come up with an unlock system as they are kind of stuck with the lore. My bet is there wont be a progressive unlock system in the game beyond small perks you get in a match.
I'm gonna try really hard to enjoy the game but I fear it may just not be for me in the end. I'd say we can mod it into what we want but DICE dropped modding due to all of the licensed technologies that Frostbite uses(or so they say).
) I hated the COD perk system I stopped playing in part because of that, one person got lucky or had played the game for 100 hours more than the rest of the players on, they could turn it so that the other team couldn't do anything positive for a short time. Which doesn't feel right in a battle.