The Core Feedback blog for Battlefield 2042 outlines five main topics “around the current problems that we face with gameplay on maps” as well as their cause and the dev team’s proposed changes. The five main topics are traversal, intensity, line of sight, paths, and cover. Starting with traversal, the devs acknowledge that they’ve heard player frustrations about how long it takes to travel — including that players have been using terms like ‘Walking Simulator’ — and that this travel time is a result of the large maps needed for 128 players. “We understand that this isn’t a satisfying experience and agree that there’s too much overall travel time,” the post reads. To lessen the travel time, EA is looking at moving the base spawn and closes flags on certain maps. “We’ve already identified a number of obvious candidates that fall outside of our new expected behaviours, but we want to hear from you on this topic as well. Which maps presently provide a poor opening experience because of the location of the Base Spawn? Which maps are making it harder to get back into the fight in an all cap scenario?”Another issue is the intensity of combat, which again the devs say is due to the 128 player modes making things a little hectic. “In terms of improvements, we are presently reviewing if it makes sense to keep Breakthrough as 128 players vs 64, or if we feel that a reduction of the total number of vehicles that can spawn ensures that their presence isn’t as overwhelming, and gives infantry players a more important role,” the devs say, adding that they feel 64 player Breakthrough provides the “best experience.” Line of sight is described as an issue because of how much it encourages “direct long-distance combat” over large spaces. The plan is to “ensure there are more opportunities to hide yourself from enemy line of sight while traversing from objective to objective, with a goal of ours being to reduce the focus on long-range combat, and the necessity of carrying weapons which perform best in these ranges.” The team highlights Kaleidoscope in particular as causing issues, “and are already making passes internally on improving certain areas of the map, including re-designing our Breakthrough experience to move combat into areas of the map where better cover already exists.”Then there’s paths, or rather the lack of clear paths towards objectives — EA is looking at introducing “clearer and more defined paths.” Lastly, the lack of cover is listed as causing issues, which is again caused by the wide open spaces on some maps. The dev team is looking at “reviewing the need for additional cover” in places where cover is lacking. “In line with what has been discussed in some of our other focus areas, our intent is to reduce the likelihood of being fired at from a 360 degree angle, and to take away that Hail Mary feeling of running onto no man’s land between objectives.” The devs provide images of prototype layouts, which you can check out below: EA emphasises that all this will need “substantial development time,” and add that the feedback will impact the map design process, with future maps expected to be smaller than release maps. You can check the whole blog post for more.
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