Friendly Fire, Grouping & Chat

When looking to make a game above and beyond the call, it is a good idea to look at the top titles of the past couple years. Battlefield 3 is a top tier title, and a very good game, but there are two glaring omissions that prevent it from being a truly great tactical game. CCP, as you develop your next enjoyable experience, DUST 514, we like to point out a couple things that we felt DICE could have done better.






Friendly Fire - If there is one aspect that separates hardcore games with consequences from cookie-cutter mainstream games of the casual variety, it's friendly fire (ff). Games without it are missing a critical element requiring players to carefully choose their targets or risk harming their teammates. Features like bombing runs, mortars, grenades, and even undisciplined gunfire instantly become horribly unbalanced when players are immune to them for no other reason than they happen to be on the same team as the person pulling the trigger. The first SOCOM made the mistake of incorporating Friendly Fire OFF and was rewarded with "force field" grenade and gunfire barrages that players took advantage of by having a number of their immune-to-injury forces rush forward to secure critical choke-points and other high-value areas due to a game loophole. This generation of players is too resourceful for gameplay elements like this. The only person immune to lethal ballistics, energy, etc is the person who isn't in the area.


Grouping - Quite possibly the most important part of playing social, team-based games is the ability to play with your friends. While there are certainly players that enjoy playing by themselves, or fighting for that impossible victory with players they are unfamiliar with, there is an entire hardcore community of players that want to play with people they know. To overlook this fact is to quickly and forever alienate the 'familiar players.' For these players to be happy, there must be options to group up, easily regroup if player(s) are disconnected, STAY grouped up despite player limits (meaning that if 20 of them are grouped and enter a 16-player game, the other four will stay together), and eliminate the risk of random players breaking their teams up. This may seem a bit excessive to some, but some of the more organized players do not enjoy the totally 'fun' experiences with random players. It's important to allow them the option of not having that experience if they choose.


Voice Chat - Developers too often overlook the social aspect of gaming. When people can communicate, strategize, banter back and forth, identify other like-minded players, group together and hear their enemies (limiting our interaction with rivals to message boards is so last-gen), games take on a whole different meaning. The experience goes from one with nameless, faceless players that just happen to be on our team, to one where we identify that we're part of a real community, and that we're playing with other PEOPLE who are our teammates. While MAG had many flaws, one aspect that was above criticism was their chat system. The result of that was the formation of a hardcore community complete with heroes, villains, and other notable personalities that players will always remember. Additionally, the ability to talk to every friendly player in-game is an aspect BF3 overlooked with the complete lack of a 'Proximity Chat System.' While every person can or will want to have access to every chat channel, can a game really call itself tactical when we can't ask a player right next to us to for some ammo, medical attention, or relay simple instructions such as 'Hey, go around this building and flank the enemy while I hold their attention here,' simply because we aren't in the same squad? This is a mistake games with depth simply cannot repeat. Proximity Chat is a necessity in the shooter genre.


Most important, however, is a chat system that works. While we understand that the ability to connect players to the game (and keep them connected) is priority, developers simply cannot make the mistake of advertising features that are broken or that only work intermittently. BF3 HAS a chat system, it just fails to work when too many mics are logged in or at peak times, turning a potentially great team-based game into a single-player experience. Chat, as the BF3 developers are quickly discovering, is priority as well.


In conclusion, while we agree that "opinions are like assholes, everyone has one," we think these 3 details are a fantastic way to make DUST 514 better. If DUST is going to be the game changer, let's start with the small things. EVE has shown that if you forget those, things don't go well.


Editors Note: For the love of shooters, implement these.