It's been a couple weeks now and the new the content drop is soon today. Since we're on furlough this week, I've been able to put more time into the game and I spent more time in PvP modes over the weekend.
I want to preface all this with my main point: Battle for Neighborville is great. GW2 has been my favorite MP shooter since 2016, so much so that I uninstalled Overwatch and haven't played TF2 in years, and only Paladins has any interest for me in MP PvP shooters beyond the series. Now BfN makes a lot of changes but I find it even better than GW2 already, and it's not even fully done yet!
Again, so I don't sound like a sycophant, it is not perfect. Some of the issues are minor, like that bird nest medal many of us still need, some are more serious like the problems many are having with lag and getting the game to run at all and the aiming/control issues, but this seems to be a really common problem these days, a lot of people are having serious issues with Borderlands 3 for instance. This doesn't make the problems ok or acceptable, but they aren't unique to this game by a long shot, and GW2 still has issues to this day, if not as serious as these.
Some of the stuff I will bring up here I would have thought would have been addressed in alpha, and as we skipped beta to Founder's (and honestly despite what's been posted, it certainly feels like a paid beta), they need to capture as much data as they can and make many changes prior to launch and then after just like any other game like this. If you've played other MP shooters, especially games like Overwatch, you've seen how many changes these games go through, some of them are so massive (like Mercy in Overwatch) that it makes you wonder what on Earth they were thinking.
Balance: Balance needs work and like many I was disappointed that we didn't get a fix for it earlier, but when you think about it, waiting makes sense in many ways:
-Some of the old characters have been significantly altered, so people need to get used to them.
-New characters all have their own learning curves that we need to ascertain before big changes.
-Making knee * changes based only on the most vocal players' complaints can really skew balance. It's much better to collect more data before making balance changes.
-Adding more modes first let's them test various situations and also to test maps and not just the characters.
Again, we need some changes, especially to the Foot Soldier and Kernel Corn main weapon, but some of the stuff that I was really unhappy with I've been able to adjust to better, and I'm sure others have as well. Some people are obviously unhappy with the greater focus on team play and the way it's changed old characters. In GW1 and 2, unless playing with friends so you can coordinate well, it was fun and chaotic but felt like a bunch of individuals over an actual team.
Optimization and controls: Initially the game chugged for me on PC but that's gone now and all I've done is switch to DX12 and turn to Ultra. I did get some chugging the other night but I think that was a connection problem rather than the game itself. Two of my friends, feeling how boring classic WoW can be, jumped in last night and ran fine. But we know many are having issues and the control sensitivity is very odd. I notice it if I try to rotate my view too far when zoomed in and it really slows down rotation speed. These changes to boost performance and usability for all users may be the one thing more important than balance! The sooner more people can play it, and play it with as few issues as possible the better.
Maps: The maps are all great, much like GW1 and 2, but need some balance tweaks and when we get new maps we need more variety in locales. That first point in Peachy District is a nightmare, the drill is crazy hard to take down, even if the plants focus it, the batteries are very hard to defend for zombies with the lighthouse, etc. Unlike a large number of people, at least guessing by the comments, I loved the contrast of the dark zombie maps to the lighter plant -centric ones in GW2, so would love some darker maps added. As we only have 4 TT maps, we need more of those once more critical issues are dealt with.
Free Roam Areas: I've always been a huge fan of the Backyard Battleground. As someone whose played MMOs since around 01 or so, it felt more than any MMO's world ever did. I was really excited to see the free roam areas and they've been so good, so very fun to play that I really want to see more of them over any other content. They also need some adjustments, I'd like to see more interesting and varied enemy spawns and hope the remaining areas and any new ones mix things up a bit, but excellent job on Town Center and Weirding Woods, even if I still need that bird nest medal in the Woods!
Giddy Park: The main hub is great and having the hidden puzzles and mini-quests makes exploring fun. I also like that you can go public or private with and without bots. I would like to see ways to keep people from spawn camping the landing area in the park itself and far more diverse AI characters there as the basic ones only feels like a wasted opportunity. We have the skirmishes in the free roam areas, and they're fun, but having those massive battles we had in the backyard in GW2, with 4+ bosses per side, lots of other AI, and then players would be amazing. Even better is the fact that we could only have 4 players in the backyard, imagine it with a full hub world!
Mister Reward-a-tron 9000: At first this was one of the things that had me worried for the monetization. 30k for a single thing screamed that they would be selling coin packs and I'm happy that they are not going that route. I've found that I don't mind the 30k per thing as much as I thought, but it would be nice to at least be able to get capsules for each specific side, allowing us to purchase things for plants or zombies at our preference. I did enjoy the sticker packs, as a kid we'd get Star Wars cards in packs with gum (and I use the term gum loosely here), and seeing which cards we had was a lot of fun, a thing Magic:The Gathering capitalized on and it worked in GW1 and 2 as well. Now that we have no more consumables, we really don't need the packs anymore and seeing that we aren't getting silver/gold/gemmed/diamond/shiny versions of everything is actually good. I'm still neutral on the price at 30k, so would be fine if they reduced it.
Timer over consumables: I've seen some negativity about this but it's nice to not have constant swarms of porta-potty zombies every point as even though they're far rarer than regular browncoats, we still had a ton of them. A team could spawn a bunch at once if they coordinate but then they can't do that again for awhile. In Ops and other missions you get an auto-spawn timer so no longer are we sitting there with thousands of self-revives.
Variants vs. new characters: Barring balance this one is the most contentious thing I've seen. Variants made packs exciting, gave us new weapons and effects, and looked pretty cool as well. But they made balance a living nightmare (both GW1 and 2 have balance issues to this day, and yes I know that BfN needs balancing), some of them were just too much like other classes, some were just bad, and some were far too good. If we get more completely new characters instead of variants, that's actually better. It's important to note that it's much more work to make a completely new character with a new model, rigging, animations, and textures, than just tweaking an existing character slightly and adding a new texture. Think of all the brand new characters we can get! The new ones are all great, some are just so well made that it makes me look to new ones with great interest.
Improved Booth: I'm so glad to see you implemented things many of us asked for in GW2l making it easier to select customizations and the ability to save loadouts. I would love to be able to name loadouts, and give us more than just 3 though. It was such a pain to find a particular costume piece in GW2, this new system is so much better.
UI/Menu Improvements: One issue we have with the upgrade system is was posted earlier; we don't have enough actual data on what they do (How much faster do I move after vanquishing? How much faster do I fire with criticals?), and it would be nice to see what upgrades we currently have equipped by using the main menu (Tab on PC), instead of having to respawn to check. Also, making our current rank more obvious on the UI when playing would be helpful.
Miscellaneous:
-I appreciate that the frozen effects from the Yetis no longer completely shuts you down. It still stinks to get hit by that frost AoE, but at least you can actually do something! This was always annoying in GW2 against the Yeti King and the horde of Arctic Troopers and Frozen Citrons.
-When talking to us I wish the NPCs animated like they did in GW2. I know this is really minor, but would be nice.
-The Soldier's rocket jump and Deadbeard's anchor are really clunky to use. They need to be smoother and more intuitive to use.
-Teams need to be as balanced as possible. You should never be able to switch to the larger team. When people leave and it ends up 7-3 or something, the new people that jump in should remain on the smaller team even if the other team is technically not full. Adding bots to fill in gaps that are replaced as people join would really help. The AI is never a perfect substitute for actual players, but at least it mitigates things to a point.
-I love seeing objective masters now but we need even more of an incentive to play objectives and stop farming vanquishes.
-Spawn camping needs to be impossible or at least difficult and unrewarding.
I know this is extremely long but I'm a verbose writer anyway and despite some issues this game has massive potential and I want to see it live up to that potential. Both GW games are criminally underrated, BfN has a great chance to succeed to an extreme degree, above and beyond other MP shooters coming out (and I've seen the new CoD, more of the same colorless, boring shooting that is so generic it was tedious to watch gameplay even with humorous comments). With the added PvE content and if they use a solid business model and fix the issues it has, both serious and minor, it's going to be fantastic.
TL:DR: BfN is great and could be even greater once its issues are fixed.
