That’s right Battlefield fans! Vacation is over for DICE and they are coming back into the office and what is the first noticable mentions to get started with? Rebalance! Same type of word as “adjustments”. Basically nerfing the game like they did with Battlefield 3.
Don’t get me wrong, Battlefield 4 needs some fine tuning, it is true and I do have a jaded memory of all the changes back and forth in Battlefield 3. During the beta I left feedback on how weak vehicles were and how splash damage wasn’t really good and how the attack chopper really wasn’t that threatening to vehicles. I still feel those things need to be looked at a bit more and adjusted. There are a few issues with this though.
The first issue, and most obvious, are the hit detection, lag spike, one hit kill bugs that still plague the game. When you have these strange variables in any game where servers and hit detection are out of sync, how can you be sure anything is over powered or under powered if it is one shot killing something by accident? I just don’t see how you get a good idea of how something is so weak or powerful when it can kill in a magical one shot instance one minute and not at all the next.
Another issue is the magic of how to decide what gets “balanced”. Going by Reddit and the Battlelog forums, just about everything is overpowered and needs to be weakened. You have people saying how they play all this or that and so are experts in what they are talking about on what is “OP”. Then you look at these peoples stats and you find out they want to rape you with the tank and are making posts about how lock on weapons need to be nerfed. I’m sorry, but to me that’s biased thinking. In this example, which is a true example by the way, they are mad they are not owning everything in the game and want to with their specific niche. I’m sure there are some legitimate “adjustments” that can be done to some lock on weapons, but perhaps we can look at a bigger overall picture?
That leads into a problem that I have that it seems nothing gets “buffed”. Its almost always about the overpowered and not the underpowered. In the end a device or weapon gets RUINED (BF3 Famas) while others simply stay the same. What is the point of having all these gadgets and customization if there is only one or two to use to begin with?
The Staff Shell with the tanks is another big issue. Everyone saying to nerf it because of the reload times between it and the tanks primary canon. I am in the vocal minority that says leave it alone and instead adjust reload timing and increase time of Active Protection. Of course that gets shouted down as not possible and wont fix anything. I’m sorry, how does weakening a gadget fix something to begin with? If two gadgets together are affecting something that much then its usually a game mechanic that is the issue. That could also correct some of the lock on weapon complaints.
Prime example was the BF3 AUG and underslung MASS. There is a mistake in the coding when the two were put together it caused a hit multiplier that wasn’t supposed to happen, making the MASS a one shot kill no matter what. Did they nerf the MASS more? No, they fixed the bug. Battlefield 4 is still full of bugs and damage stats that do not make sense in-game.
Another example on this is the Active Radar missiles. You fire them in the general direction of air targets and they lock on to the nearest target and hit them. They do 21 damage and the demand is to nerf them. Let me repeat that; they do 21 damage… Yeah. Nerf what? They are nerfed. You fire two and IF they both hit they will do 42 damage.
What also happens is that air vehicles (actually all vehicles, but stay with me) have a critical hit system that causes loss of control and it causes this cool spinning animation. Also, depending where any missiles or gunfire hits, the vehicle could flip and go into an unrecoverable roll causing a crash.
Now with all that information what is the real problem? Right, its the critical hit and roll mechanics are causing crashes. The Active Radar is an “easy mode” missile system. It’s supposed to be as its “modern” and “advanced”. It doesn’t do a lot of damage and, with the “skill” everyone talks about, a pilot can beat the weapon. The thing is that you can lower the hit damage to 5 and there will still be rolls and crashes. They will still be OP because there is nothing you can do to recover from those rolls or collisions. They already have a long reload time. So adjust the uncontrolled rolling and raise critical damage hits to a certain percent, like 76% instead of the lower setting it is now, which I am not sure on, but as a scout heli pilot, is low. As a destroyer of helis AND a flyer, I know what works and what the issue is. I am killed more by trees or landings than by rockets.
So those are some examples of game mechanic issues. An example of a nerf are the V40s. So everyone says that there are too many v40 grenades. You get 3. It causes a lot of spam. People say “Nerf it to 2!” So what is going to be tried? DICE is thinking about lowering the splash damage and noise. So in the end, you have to throw more of them to get a kill. Yeah, that’s right. To reduce spam, it somehow makes sense to lower the splash damage. I think the real hope is that people will figure the v40 grenade wont be worth using and go to the RGO Impact, where you get 2 grenades instead, thus less spam. So the next OP thing will be the RGO Impact grenades. To me, that is moving the problem, not really correcting it.
Again, I am a bit pessimistic and a little jaded in my thoughts with “adjusting” stats because of previous Battlefield titles. Some things get good adjustments and I am just pointing out some bad things and what I think are better ideas. I just hate when good things get bad adjustments. I’m hoping we don’t see useless gadgets as we already have a number of them now in BF4. Hopefully we will see more buffs and mechanic changes than actual damage “adjustments”.
Expect more updated information on this as the “adjustments” take place. It should be fun 😉
Crunch Time 