What Tom's Played This Weekend: Battlefield V Open Beta

[Guest]

The open beta for "Battlefield V" has been out for several days, and it's going to end all too soon.

What Tom's Played This Weekend: Battlefield V Open Beta : Read more

 

[Lutfij]

In reality, spending time awing at the scenery can lead you off this world...figuratively and literally speaking. Best keep your sights and ears on the enemy.

 

[maestro0428]

I played both Alpha releases and this beta feels like more of the same, although there are now two levels to play. I like it, but Ive been a huge BF fan since the early days. It looks great, mostly plays great and my rx580 had no issues although its about 30 frames slower than bf1 is.

 

[canadianvice]

I hope this game fails. Publishers and the people involved need to learn that getting all political is not what we're here for.

Sorry you don't like some of the criticism your game is facing, but you don't get to insult your whole customer base over it and still sell well.

 

[SkyBill40]

I spent a few hours playing the beta yesterday and came away... with mixed feelings. It's a beautiful game for sure even without ray tracing, but the optimization is utter trash. For a AAA title in 2018 when DX12 is a thing, the game ran poorly when using that setting. I encountered stuttering, uneven game play, and low FPS. As soon as I switched over to DX11, much of that disappeared. While I do understand that the final version is likely to be a far more polished and smoother playing experience, given that the game is only two months from release, I expected it to be better than it was.

While I know my FX8350 @ 4.5 is somewhere in the lower end (but not the bottom) of processors, I felt it should have been a bit smoother than it was even in DX11 and with my 1080.

 

[marychathegreat]

Environment is too realistic and distractive.
So let's play on low settings.
All weapon work similar so you will not miss any.
Somebody plays whole life csgo on 720p and hate any changes or improvements in games?

 

[William_X89]

Just as Battlefield 1 gave mostly everybody semi-automatic rifles, submachine guns, and other designs that were extremely rare in World War I most players will probably be running around with STG-44s and proto-M14s which seems to me to sort of defeat the point of games set in WWI and WWII. I'm also left doubting that they'll be notable differences between sides but maybe I'm wrong.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

I hope this game fails. Publishers and the people involved need to learn that getting all political is not what we're here for.

Sorry you don't like some of the criticism your game is facing, but you don't get to insult your whole customer base over it and still sell well.

This really isn't true. Games have always been political, it's just that the stances they took were largely taken for granted by their playerbases. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 with the non-controversial (at the time) stance that Nazis = bad. The closest it came to a backlash was a ban in Germany. Not for it's anti-Nazi stance, but because it included Nazi symbols and imagery and Nazis = bad. It was banned for not being anti-Nazi enough.

Fast forward to 2017. Wolfenstein II: TNC is set to be released. The theme Nazis = bad, exactly the same. Reception? There are articles everywhere from The Verge to GQ to Forbes to the Washington Post to white nationalist outlets about the brave/controversial/popular/reprehensible decision to include the Nazis = bad theme. In 1992 it wasn't controversial because people took Nazis = bad for granted, and it didn't even register as being a political message. Now?

https://www.gq.com/story/wolfenstein-the-new-colossus

"It's been... really weird," says Wolfenstein: The New Colossus narrative designer Tommy Bjork. "It's both strange and unsettling, I think. Wolfenstein has always been a game series that has always had a really strong anti-Nazi message, and we're really proud of continuing that tradition with The New Order and The New Colossus. It's one of the main themes—being an anti-Nazi game. In 2017 that that's controversial is just really weird."

This isn't something that sprang up out of nowhere purely in the last 25 years. In 1992, there were significantly more actual Nazis living than in 2017. So why wasn't Wolfenstein 3D facing the same sort of criticism back then? Why wasn't their entire playerbase feeling insulted by the over politicization of a video game? Largely because people didn't even realize it was a political message. Most took Nazis = bad for granted and assumed everyone else did too. Only it turns out that they didn't, but were probably too afraid to speak up with an unpopular view back then.

If you take a theme in a game for granted you may not even notice it's there. Nazis = bad. America = good. It doesn't always work that way. Gameplay advantage lootcrates = bad is a sentiment shared by every gamer right? So you would expect every game that has them to fail, and not a single lootcrate would ever manage to get sold...And yet the most popular games in the world are micro transaction based mobile games. It's dangerous to assume that your views are shared by an entire customer base, it lulls you into thinking you're able to speak on their behalf.

You can go back as far as you want to find games with a political message. ET (widely regarded as one of the worst games of all time) on the Atari had you playing as a persecuted alien being chased by an "evil" government scientist and FBI agent. Despite the numerous, numerous bad reviews, that was never mentioned as being the games downfall. Everyone focused on the (horrid) gameplay. And yet now, there's a passionate debate over the appropriate role of science and the FBI in government affairs. If ET were released today, you can be certain those themes would be explored by people harboring an agenda.

And I don't know how a series like Battlefield has ever been anything but political. The entire basis for the games has been modelling actual wars that took place between actual countries with differing ideologies. Picking a side in a war is about as political as it's possible to get. They've already had one game set in Vietnam, and if people are only now noticing it's been political...I don't know what to say except that it must be something hitting even closer to home than that.

 

[gaborbarla]

Why are the characters running so much slower in bf V than bf 1? It is as if my character always running in mud.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

And a reminder why BF4 still has a lot of packed servers. BF V is yet again another epic failure by EA trying to "get back into the FPS fight"

 

[JamesSneed]

I spent some time on BFV this weekend as well. I have the same complaints but also there is something clunky about the gameplay. I can't put my finger on it but you feel disconnected a bit compared to BF2, BF3, BF4. It's like the difference of driving a sports car versus driving a buss. It is pretty though.

 

[Kenneth Hans]

Time to kill - that's why I stopped playing these games online. Every match was spawn, die, spawn, die. No fun.

 

[SkyBill40]

And a reminder why BF4 still has a lot of packed servers. BF V is yet again another epic failure by EA trying to "get back into the FPS fight"

I don't know if I'd call that fully accurate. It could also very well be attributed to the fact that a lot of people have a preference to the modern setting as opposed to one in the past. Don't underestimate that pull.

 

[bigdragon]

BF5 has unlockable buffs. The more you play, the more the game powers you up -- this is in addition to your own skill increasing. New players or those with limited gaming time will be at a serious disadvantage. I love trade-off systems, but buffs are not a progression system I want to deal with again. BF5 is DOA for me.