I already posted this in the burstfire forums, but I feel like there will be a lot more discussion happening here. I haven't played the game since the Alpha ended, and I can't justify buying a game that may or may not improve over time.

If anything has changed since then, or if you agree/disagree with my points, please comment and let me know.

Original post (much more readable): http://forum.burstfiregame.com/index.php?/topic/178-my-thoughts-so-far/

We all know that this game is a ripoff of siege. There's no sense in denying it. It doesn't mean the game will be bad in the end, but it's already known as the Siege clone, and presumed to be yet another scam. However, I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet. From what I have heard, it seems you are a completely new group of developers. I can't say where the game is going at its current state, but I hope for the best.

I'll start of with some of the game mechanics that bugged me. The first thing I should say is that there is pretty much nothing unique about it. Most of what I have seen so far is taken directly from Rainbow Six Siege. You even kept the hit markers! One of the major things that irked me is the super short match times. 2-3 minute rounds in a 'tactical' game? I don't think so. Matches should last upward of 5 minutes, if both teams are smart about it. But the thing that annoyed me most of all, is the player health. They have way too much. Don't get me wrong, 5-6 shots to body armor is a reasonable amount, but that's not what I experienced in the Alpha. At one point, I shot a guy in the upper body/neck 4-5 times, and then 6-7 times in the face and he finally went down. It took half a magazine, most of which were headshots, to take one guy down. I'm not trying to change the game completely, but this needs to be fixed.

One major problem I had with the pre-game setup was the fact that defenders couldn't shoot the drones. If you saw five ball drones zipping around the building you are trying to defend, what would you do? You'd shoot it. But when you try to do it in the game it just says "now's not the time to do that", or something equally crazy. This needs to be changed. Making it possible to destroy the drones makes it a whole different ball game. Literally.

The graphics weren't the best, but I have to assume they will get better in the future, since it is in alpha. The UI was a bit annoying. It took up a third of the screen and made the game hard to play. I found that you could get the names to disappear and just leave the pictures, but they were still huge. Removing it completely was not an option because it would have put me at a disadvantage. A UI scale slider would go a long way in making the game look and feel better for players.

The movement was also a disappointment. In what world do trained combatants get winded after running for a few seconds? Even with body armor, it doesn't make any sense. I know that it's supposed to encourage moving slowly and tactically, but that isn't the way to do it. A better way might be to restrict movement while sprinting, or making the recovery time longer. I can't say for sure what would work best without actual testing, but it's worth looking in to.

And that brings us to jumping. Which was both hilarious and ridiculous at the same time. I'm against removing jumping completely in games, but something needs to be changed. Maybe it's just the animation. I can't remember jumping when I was playing, except for getting over barbed wire. Which was really easy by the way.

Anyway, the survey asked how I felt the "One Life, One Round" gameplay affected my playstyle. And I'm just now realizing that I didn't talk about the one round part in the survey. Oh well. That's what this post is for. My answer to the question as a whole is this: It didn't. Having only one life seems to be counteracted by the fact that you have Rambo amounts of health. There's nothing to make you go slow if you know you can just shrug off bullets while breaching. It removes the only sense of fear that tactical games usually give players. Now, it's not my decision (obviously), but If I was going to make a tactical game, I would make it high risk. By which I mean, players go down after taking one or two bullets. That would change my playstyle.

As for the one round gameplay, it doesn't work well at all. I found myself on the defending team a total of twice, one of which was ended right at the start because of a crash. I played almost every game as the attackers, and it wasn't very fun. Teams should switch at least once.





There's a lot more I could have added to this wall of text, but I think I got my main points across. I expect things like animation, audio, and server stability to improve in the future, and these problems are to be expected during testing. But please, just make the game unique. The 5v5 breaching/defending game play is appealing, but not when it's a clone of a different game. Thanks for reading, and good luck.