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Analysis: Battlefield Heroes And The Price Of Freedom?
by Michael Walbridge [PC, Console/PC]
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July 14, 2009
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[In a new opinion piece, writer Michael Walbridge look at Battlefield Heroes' community, asking how game features and ease of access affect play styles in DICE/EA's free to play multiplayer shooter.]
What to make of EA/DICE's Battlefield Heroes? Well, it looks like Team Fortress 2, and keeps the “team” part. Competition and stats like Quake Live. Leveling and revenue models are like Korean MMOs. These all have large differences, even if two of these titles are FPS games, yet Battlefield Heroes shares much in common with them all.
Before I get started on the community side of things, the actual game is pretty good. I find it impressive that I’ll never have to pay a cent for a game that’s 400-500 megabytes to download, has quality gameplay, and free servers with a decent ping.
But I’m not here to talk about the actual software so much as the social interactions it comes with.
Loners In A Multiplayer World?
I don’t know if it’s EA’s intent, but the community needs work. It’s strange to be in a team-based game that encourages players to go solo and be highflying hotshots, but that’s precisely what happens. This is likely due to the limited ability to communicate coupled with the grind of leveling.
Like its Korean inspirations, Battlefield Heroes requires no money, but plenty of time in order to level and gain new abilities. Spending money on battlefunds is more enticing than at first glance, due to how fun the game is and how long the ride to the top is.
Battlefunds generally don’t give the players an advantage over another except with two items that increase the amount of experience or valor points earned. Seeing really plain characters all over the place with the occasional stylish skilled sniper makes one consider upgrading the wardrobe, too. It’s a pain to tell who is who on your team.
And the kicker: if you’re doing really well, your outfit, which may be an old black Western hat and trenchcoat coupled with a mustache, gives a signature to your domination. As in Team Fortress 2, dead players get a zoom in on their killers, but instead of being humorous or entertaining, it only turns out be flaunting.
 So that old urgent need to level, combined with the silly keeping up with the Joneses, combined with the fact that you cannot ever switch teams or classes without disconnecting from the server, makes for plenty of all-star play. Emotes, the last thing that you’d think would fail to work, cost valor points. Three are free, but other basic ones cost valor points.
And there’s no voice chat, which makes the only current way to have a team coordinate at any level against another is to pay money for a private server and have a private match, and rent a Ventrilo server as well. But the point, which is free, casual play, becomes defeated by then; at that point, one could afford to pay for a higher quality game.
More Grudges, But More Friends?
The game is free, so it’s reasonable to understand why Battlefield Heroes doesn’t include these features. Plus, voice chat could have been a bad thing for the server, considering what the player base is like.
Language, taunting, team-blaming, uneducated accusations of cheating: these can certainly be found in other games, but they are much more abundant, in my opinion, in Battlefield Heroes. This problem is only exacerbated by the fact that people can add you as a friend without your permission, and the fact that names don’t change and stats are permanent. The potential for hate or grudgery is a little stronger (though it’s a better tool for finding friends, too, at least).
If an old or cheap game isn’t played for elitist or expert reasons (i.e., an earlier version of a current game, such as Halo 2 over Halo 3), it’s played for the self-evident reasons that cheap games bring more casually oriented players who are more potentially willing to mess around in the service of having a good time.
Is it ridiculous to think that the lower level of maturity and behavior on Battlefield Heroes is due to simple economic reasons? While Battlefield Heroes is an impressive offering as a piece of software and a good deal for the (lack of) money, the limitations in social interaction and offerings show that the rule still applies -- you get what you pay for.
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Or that in the counter-strike servers that have no VAT (meaning that you can use pirated versions... Thus being free to play too).
I also don't understand most of the complains, but I can't address them all one by one in a comment.
My biggest complaints would be:
1) terrible, unuseable visual identity.
I don't know whether it's all the customization, or the basic graphical design, but it's impossible to quickly and reliably tell the class of a player; you have to infer it from their weapon, but since shotguns look like sniper rifles, and two of the three classes can carry pistols, it's basically impossible to tell at a glance and/or from a distance. And the only way to distinguish between friends and enemies (at a distance) is whether or not they have permanent blue text above their head.. this is a really stupid design decision. It's like they tried to emulate TF2's graphical design but failed to grasp the most fundamental parts.. or possibly they clashed with their customization crap. Either way, very stupid.
2) no way to change load-out or missions without quitting the game.
This is another brainless design decision.. you have to quit the entire game and return to the lobby to make any change to your character! This means that every time you level up, complete a mission, or simply run out of healing items, you have to quit the game. If you don't want to lose your slot (cause you've found a good server/teams) you're stuck. Why not have the missions automatically swap out a-la tech tree? Just showing me "complete" again and again only adds to the frustration.
3) sloppy execution
No windowed mode?! No way to find out what my ping is?! I get that you want to keep ti simple, but why not hide the complexity in a menu or "advanced" section, rather than omitting it?
The mouse handling is _terrible_, horribly granular/non-smooth with sensitivity >1 (this is quite noticeable with the sniper scope -- with sensitivity=2 my crosshairs jump around in increments of 20 or more pixels), I don't know if this is an issue with loss of precision in their orientation/transform code, or something stupid in their input-handling code, but it really sucks.
Parts of this game are quite fun, but other parts seem pretty crap. Also the leveling is a blatant BS job, you only gain an ability every _2_ levels, so in essence every second level is useless.. hooray for casual "big flashy 'rewards' that have no real meaning or impact"!
"It’s strange to be in a team-based game that encourages players to go solo and be highflying hotshots, but that’s precisely what happens."
From what I could tell by playing it for a month or so, there are various abilities that encourage team play: the soldier's heal, the 6th sense, the gunner's speed up... Teams that utilize these abilities easily steamroll over any team playing as loners.
Instead of complaining about the absence of voice chat, you could have gone for a more interesting angle like how people get around the communication "limitations". Have you noticed how people use the limited set of emotes to communicate their intentions and how effective this can be in the game?
"Language, taunting, team-blaming, uneducated accusations of cheating: these can certainly be found in other games, but they are much more abundant, in my opinion, in Battlefield Heroes."
Please don't share what great online games you're playing that have great team play and a equally well behaved community. As far as I'm concerned, this community is relatively mellow compared to some of groups out there (Halo ? Dota ? CS ?).
Share some experiences you had with this community, make some interesting observations about the servers you were playing on ... anything to keep an article away from the incoherent rant it is now.
But hey - your opinion is free and in your own words: you get what you pay for.
Stop saying that the game suck because it is casual...
The game suck because it suck, it is nothign with being casual... Just read the current first post on gamasutra homepage to understand what I am saying.
However, once you break it down, you notice that this is just another Battlefield game with some cartoonish skinning and some neat abilities. Battlefield, in of itself, is very much a hardcore gamers game. Its no wonder that the kind of gamers that rule the game are hardcore, trollish gamers.
The heart of the problem is that I think DICE didn't really specify who this game was being made for. Long time Battlefield fans? FPS elitists? Casual, non FPS gamers? Perhaps their main goal was just testing out free-to-play games, the audience be damned. Perhaps their game design was locked by having the Battlefield name in the game.
Either way, with over a million people signed up, the game is a rampant success, no matter which way you look at it. I just hope DICE/EA see what problems this game has and learns from them, to execute even better on their next F2P game.