Time to voice my grievances with the game, so pardon the wall of text or read the TL:DR. I enjoy it, but I think it has some design/balance problems. This is coming from a non-"pro" but reasonably experienced bf player.
These are my problems with the air vehicle and map balance.
Mobile AA can deny 70% of the airspace of a map, and on certain maps like Lancang dam there is amost no cover at all from the enemy AA. The nerf to active radar was a step in the right direction, but I don't like how doubling the cooldowns on countermeasures makes scout heli with 2 repairs the only really useful air vehicle.
The attack chopper is underwhelming because it's fragile with no air repairs, and it can't compete against other air threats as heatseekers do much less damage and have a long replenish cd. it has become exclusively an air anti-ground vehicle unit, as jets, scout choppers, and transport choppers make it their bitch with their sustain and more reliable damage when crewed.
The fact that stingers do more damage than heatseekers means a scout helicopter with a stinger is the only reliable air to air option. Don't get me wrong, I love teaming up in a scout chopper and destroying pretty much everything my squad comes across and racking up countless repair points, but I don't like that crewed scouts are so op compared to the poor humbled attack chopper. Transport choppers can hit scout choppers hard if they get the first passenger stinger hit and lots of minigun focus but most people just use it to get onto a rooftop and then bail.
I casually enjoyed BF2 and the Bad Company games, and my favorite part of the BF series is large scale vehicle-inclusive conquest because this is the gameplay style most flattering and characteristic of the franchise in my opinion. I appreciate that DICE are experimenting with naval and urban combat in the launch maps, but I wish there were more maps akin to the Armored Kill expansion in BF3, so I hope a future expansion fills that void.
Another issue I have with bf4's maps stems from the modular design in terms of gameplay. Since DICE accommodate conquest, rush, squad deathmatch, domination, and other game modes into their maps, it feels like this hurts the overall quality of the maps. They have to make the central close/medium range part for domination/deathmath/whatever that often times blocks itself off from the rest of the map. Then they either just make a straight line up and back for rush or scatter points to make multiple hot zones of activity.
I'm not really an expert map designer, all I'm saying is they didn't really put out any new classics in the launch maps this time around. You know usually a shooter will have a few greats (lockout and zanzibar from halo 2, Carentan and Toujane? from CoD2, Gridlock from Gears, Wake Island from previous bfs) and then a bunch of decent maps and maybe a few flops. But there isn't really a shining star of the BF4 launch maps, and while I like what i see from the first two expansions, I think I'm going to wait to see what the third and maybe fourth expansion looks like and wait for a 10 or 20 dollar discount before going for premium.
I like the occasional meat grinder of operation locker/metro style only in small bits, as the repetition and mindless spamming of known weak points gets dull after a while. Rush can be fun but success seems to depend on learning the best single spots to mortar/cover/snipe and repeatedly using/abusing that tactic, whereas conquest has much more freeform adaptation. Also rush matches seem to end way too fast in bf4 in what little i played.
TL:DR Air/anti-air combat needs balancing; the launch maps are unique with naval and urban combat but the game needs more/better large scale vehicle-based conquest maps; and non-conquest game modes seem kinda repetitive.
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