Battlefield 1

The Game Room
1

I did a Battlefield One preview thread but now that the game is coming out today I decided to make a release thread. My opinion on the setting (WW1) and what that might mean are in that thread.

I’m probably getting this soon, but I’m also in the market for a new video card so I was going to dig around to see if I could figure this out if this might end up being part of the holiday bundle for a card. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way to know for sure, so I may end up buying the game now and then getting a code for the game in a few weeks which would be annoying.

The game has been out in early release through the EA access program for a few days, so there’s plenty of footage and early reviews. Reviews on metacritic are a very positive 89 so far.

The open beta was solid. While there are way too many automatic weapons people are running around with that ruin the WW1 setting, they at least gave them all different strengths and weaknesses so that there’s a reason to use different sorts and not everyone is running around with a magical assault rifle like in every modern military shooter. They did a good job of not dumbing down the setting so much that it’s just a reskinned modern shooter.

People from the SDMB steam group played a ton of BF3 together, BF4 not so much because it was broken on release although we eventually played a decent bit of it once it was fixed, and I’m hoping BF1 will be something we play together a lot again. If you’re interested you could contact/add me on steam (same name). Once I get the game I’ll probably set up a platoon if that’s still how they do it in game for groups.

2

I got this with the eaely release and had a blast playing the last couple days. And then today the PS4 network is down.

3

Grabbed it today. Game is really great so far. Extremely immersive, beautiful, hectic, eclectic, and interesting. There’s a wide variety of maps. Not just burnt out western front trenches, but Italian mountains, Arabian deserts, French towns. I haven’t even played them all yet but I think the Italian coastal map will be my favorite.

The new operations mode is really good. It’s sort of halfway between rush and conquest. It’s like rush in that you have one segment of the map you’re fighting over which focuses the fighting and provides a moving front line, but it’s like conquest where you don’t just blow up each point once and it’s done - the defenders can retake the points and the attackers have to hold all of them at once to win. And operations span several related maps - if the attackers push the defenders off of one, they start attacking on the next one. It’s a really good twist on the battlefield formula and I think it’s probably better than straight up conquest.

4

I got it with the early access and, as a just converted COD player, I have to say I am completely blown away. In the first five days, I played 45 hours (yay, time off for surgery!). The game is so damn good looking, the battles so immersive…wow. It’s got some issues, but the good so far outweighs the bad. I feel like the next generation of shooters has finally arrived instead of just another year of more of the same.

If anyone else feels like teaming up, I’m duality72 on Xbox.

5

I’m currently going through the single-player campaign, which is really, really good. I plan on jumping into multiplayer this weekend.

They only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t support joystick input. I’ve got an old Microsoft Sidewinder that I originally got for the first Battlefield, and now it’s just gathering dust. I haven’t done any of the flying mission yet for this reason.

6

I found it a little odd that the first campaign was set in tanks at the end of the war rather than chronologically.

7

The Honest Game Trailer for Battlefield One.

8

I’ve been playing a ton on the Xbox. I and the guys I normally play with are all loving it.

Though most of the maps are good, I particularly love Monte Grappa, the one in the Alps.

I didn’t think I’d like the behemoth mechanism, but I’ve warmed up to it considerably. A Zeppelin or armored train isn’t usually enough to swing the outcome of a game just by itself, but it is enough to keep the game interesting, and that keeps people in the game even if their side is losing.

I think the only thing I don’t like are the near-invincible horses.

9

Hey, buck! I was trying to remember where I had friended you from. I’ve seen you on a few times. Will try to hop in on a game with you sometime.

And I totally agree on the horses. I shot one in the chest with a tank cannon- it didn’t die. Shot one in the head two times and in the body two times with a sniper rifle 100m away- rider finally wakes up to what’s happening, turns, and runs me down with his sword. :frowning:

10

Having a lot of fun with this one. using the assault class with AT mines can pay off big time if you take out a land-ship with 6 guys in it.

Agree that the horse needs a reduction in it’s armor/hitpoints - I hit one twice with the AT-rocket gun last night and the rider was still able to get away.

Try 360ce it’s an emulator that lets you map joystick buttons/axis to mimic xbox controller functions - takes bit of tinkering with (take a screenshot of the xbox control layouts in game for reference when you’re setting it up). Works fine.

11

This was my thought exactly. The trains and dreadnaught are capable enough, but the zeppelin is pretty innocuous.

12

BF1 has been released in a much better initial condition than BF4, which through patches turned into a very good game. It has its minor problems, but i struggle to find any major flaws.

Operations is a blast and my new favorite game mode. The Pigeons mode is also a nice change of pace. Of course I’m a Conquest whore and spend most of my time playing that when solo.

13

Alright, so after playing a lot over the last few days.

I love the maps. This may be my favorite set of stock maps in a video game ever. The variety and aesthetics are really well done. There are pretty few glaring flaws - the only one that comes to mind is on the third (?) segment of Monte Grappe, the B flag bunker, where the defending team can spawn in the bunker and it becomes a retarded version of Operation Metro down there.

The beta had better weapon balance. In release the SMG has a larger effective range and the LMG is a little more accurate. But it’s not that bad. It’s still a much better weapon balance than the laser-death-beam-no-downside assault rifles/LMGs from all the modern warfare games. All of the classes feel entirely viable and the weapons don’t feel samey. There’s a good mix of people and weapons.

I also like that they separated the anti-tank role and tank support role into different classes. In BF3/4 unless you were on an infantry heavy map everyone would just go engineer by default, because you’d have anti-tank, tank repair, and pretty good infantry killing in the same kit. The useful roles are split up much better in BF1 so there’s a lot more variety, and in general, the strengths and weaknesses of each class make them more different than in previous games.

There are no obvious balancing or bad design issues that are immediately apparent. I think giving the assault class an AT rocket is stupid. It’s not as easy to use and flexible as what engineers had in BF3/4, but it’s still stupid, ahistorical, and just generally makes the game worse. There’s a fun dynamic that to take out a tank you need to either close assault it, use an emplacement on the map like a field gun, or call in air support or another tank. Giving infantry a long range attack option against tanks makes them vulnerable from too many places in too many ways, it’s just a boring design choice like they were checking off a list of weapon archetypes and needed that one.

Vehicles in general seem well designed - potentially battle changing but vulnerable. I really like how the vehicles have a lot of crew slots - I love loading up with 4 or 5 friends into one vehicle and communicating and using it to its fullest. I also like the little details they added in terms of body presence by making you actually physically jump between seats in vehicles or hop in and out of hatches in tanks when entering or exiting.

Operations is a great game mode and the best way to play BF. Conquest is still really good, but operations make you feel like you’re in a real, chaotic war. War Pigeons is almost a great mode - I really like the small scale action and the hold the flag/king of the hill style gameplay, but what’s really stupid is the short window the enemy gets during a bird release to shoot it down and completely negate the fact that you just beat them by holding it for like 1-2 minutes. We had a match where we were dominating the enemy and released a pigeon like 6 times in a row, only to have it shot down every time. I suspect they did the original balancing on that on consoles where no one could hit anything anyway, so shooting a pigeon would only work maybe 5% of the time and wouldn’t be such a big deal. Take out that flaw and it’s a really fun game mode.

This game uses CPU like crazy. It seems extremely efficiently multithreaded because all my cores get roughly the same amount of utilization. But it uses about 85-100% of my 2500k at 4.4ghz so I’m not sure how other people with lesser CPUs are coping. I thought it was bizarre that they listed a 6600k as a min req, since nothing else is remotely that high, but it seems to actually need it.

14

I feel the same way about the E flag bunker on Argonne Forest. On a related note, the main game mechanic I think needs to be fixed are the mobile spawns, either on a squadmate or in a vehicle. The way it is now, one person sneaks to just outside the enemy’s rear objective, waits for his four squadmates to spawn on him, and then they en masse take it over before the enemy team has much chance to respond to this big threat that materialized out of thin air. Getting attacked from both sides leads to chaos for that team, all because one guy got through the lines.

I would change it so that the mobile spawns are only available if you are closer to a friendly objective than an enemy objective. Once you cross into enemy territory, you’re on your own. Which seems so obvious to me, but there don’t seem to be many others in the community that see it that way.

I don’t entirely agree with this just because I’ve been trying to take out tanks with the AT gun for the past few days as part of a medal and, frankly, it’s just not that good at it. The damage just isn’t that great against tanks and any half decent tanker will take action before you can take it down. I’ve had much better success with AT mines, dynamite, and AT grenades. The AT gun is great at blowing down bunker doors, though. And the soft targets behind them. :slight_smile:

15

What could require so much CPU resources?

Were BF3 and BF4 also CPU-hungry?

16

I’m not sure what eats all the CPU. There are different ways of lighting that require more or less CPU, or other deep technical issues I’m not familiar with. BF3/4 were not nearly as CPU hungry IIRC.
So operations are usually won by the defender. Are they imbalanced? My instinct says no, they’re probably pretty good, but that the people who play these games are very stupid and impatient. The limiting factor on the attack team is that you get a limited number of respawns. Every time you respawn your ticker goes down by one. And you have to conquer the whole map before you hit zero. So the defender is trying to trade time for lives. Makes sense.

But 75% of the people in game immediately hit “skip back to deployment screen” after they die. There could be a medic 5 feet away trying to revive them, but they skip out of it immediately anyway. Since when medics revive you, you don’t use up a respawn, this process basically just throws the lifeblood of the attackers away. The attackers voluntarily give up a large fraction of their respawn points where if they literally could wait 5 seconds they wouldn’t have used a respawn ticket at all.

So if the game is balanced around a team not being stupid and wasting their respawns, and then 75% of the players come in and waste their respawns then the defenders are going to win a whole lot of the time.

It’s especially stupid because you’re not getting back in until 10-12 seconds after you die anyway. If you skip to the deploy screen, that just means you spend 10 seconds staring at the deploy screen instead of 8 seconds waiting in corpse view and 2 seconds in the deploy screen. But people do it anyway, constantly, even with medics actively trying to revive them, because they’re complete spazzes.

So I’m happier when I get to play defense. Sure, people do stupid things on defense, but at least when I go to revive someone as a medic and they skip right as I get there, I don’t have the added frustration of knowing they’re using up all our resources in the process.

17

I think you may have misread me. I think AT grenades and dynamite are great. Never liked mines, but they’re okay. It’s specifically the AT rocket - the one where the assault can shoot far distances while prone - that bothers me. It’s too annoying for tankers to play where they can basically be tank-sniped from any infantry hiding anywhere at any range. It’s more fun if the AT infantry have to get close to you by using those other weapons. And same goes for the other side - making a badass rush at a tank flinging grenades at it is more fun than sniping it at a distance.

Other notes: I had crashing problems early on, but since I stopped trying to run the game through the steam overlay it seems to have stopped, so if you’re crashing that may be why.

If you get the glitch where you’re operating a vehicle and turret and can barely turn, alt tab will fix it.

Also, if you’re playing operations, and you get the order to retreat because you lost a sector, actually retreat. Dying at that stage gives the attacking team more tickets. So don’t try to fight it out and respawn later - actually run. You get a small score bonus and restore health/ammo if you run back to the next sector anyway.

18

I think operations probably do need a rebalance. Attackers would win a lot more if they didn’t throw away tickets as I mentioned above, but even good teams it’s very difficult to beat the operations. I feel like maybe tickets should be preserved across maps (no fresh start if you reach a new map) but attackers should start with more tickets.

I also think they should basically disable skipping back to the deploy screen for at least a few seconds. It’s really dumb - the reason people do it is because they’re spazzy and impatient, but skipping doesn’t actually get you back in the game faster, you just wait longer on the deploy screen. Whereas being revived actually would get you into the game faster.

It’s sort of like people I see in multiplayer game lobbies. They join a game, see it isn’t full, quit, join another one, see it isn’t full, quit… and repeat for 5 mintues. Meanwhile the people who just sat still for 2 minutes filled the game up and went. So the spazzes are costing themselves extra time to feel like they’re doing something, even if it’s the wrong thing, rather than just waiting for a minute.

In any case, it drives me nuts as a medic to run out somewhere dangerous to revive someone just to have them skip out as I’m jamming the needle in their ass. And when you’re on attack in an operation it’s worse, because you know they just got you that much closer to losing.

Other than that, I’m still having a blast. Their choice to remove proper joystick function is obnoxious. I haven’t bothered to emulate it through x360ce yet or anything. I just bound shift and control to pitch up and down and planes are manageable via mouse. I’m getting pretty decent at bombing with the attack plane. It’s harder to bomb with the bomber because it’s so slow and you can’t see anything when someone is in your front gun, but the front gun is super powerful and makes for fun teamwork.

Mortar spam can get kinda silly on some maps. I’m not sure what the solution is. Individual mortars are pretty well implemented in terms of setup time, lethality, etc. But on some maps where 10+ people on the enemy team are using them it can just get kinda spammy and irritating. I’m not sure what the solution is other than just limiting the number of people who can do it at once.

I’m really hoping one of the expansions adds some sort of off-map artillery barrages to the basic game modes. I feel like that’d be more organic than the mortar spam, since artillery was as much, or more defining than the machine gun. It’d be interesting if at certain points a team were able to call in some large off-map artillery barrage, maybe tied in to holding a certain capture point for a long time, or as something similar to behemoths in operations.

Otherwise I’m still having a blast playing it. I’m not sure the last time I liked a game more than this, it’s been years. And I really love the squad spawn mechanics - not unique to this game - but it totally solves the problem of simulating a big 64 player match while still feeling like you’re meaningfully playing alongside your friends and not just getting lost in the craziness.

19

Battlefield 1 has a surprisingly decent discount this early - $40 on Origin for the black friday sale.

20

It was $29.99 at both Amazon and Best Buy for the physical game (download code only). Waiting for my copy to arrive.

Does BF 1 use the online matcher for multiplayer play, or do they have a game finder built-into the game?