Hi YouTube, Darth Here:
I've recently come back after a hiatus and I got to thinking about the things that are
really important to Battlefield.
After having played the Battlefield V alpha, I had some sharp contrasts with Battlefield
4 become very apparent.
There are a ton of vehicles in Battlefield 4, where there were generally only a handful
on Narvik conquest.
The difference is really quite noticeable, at least in quantity.
But the core Battlefield gameplay did not seem to suffer in Battlefield V for there
being such a big difference.
So this has me wondering, just how important are vehicles to Battlefield?
I put the question to the most accurate source of information in the universe, Twitter.
There, I asked: What's more important in Battlefield?
Good Infantry Combat or Good Vehicle Combat?
I honestly expected a lot more even answers, but the poll turned out really lopsided.
In general, the twitterverse seemed to believe that good infantry combat is more important
than good vehicle combat.
By a vote of 87% to 13%.
Now, this question is both exaggerated and limited on purpose.
I wanted people to think about which thing is actually more important to the core gameplay
of Battlefield.
And there were a lot of good responses that pointed out the shortcomings of this question,
along with alternative answers.
Let's strip this down a little bit to the reasoning people chose behind the answers.
I think the best response I got was something along the lines of: infantry combat must be
good because it's what you're going to be doing the most of.
And in general, I'm inclined to agree.
Unless you're camping the spawn screen, you're probably not always going to be in
a tank or a plane.
And while there are certainly people who do that, there's always going to be a problem
with that thinking.
Let's think about a map with a huge amounts of vehicles, like for example Golmud Railway
in Battlefield 4.
On a 64 player server there still aren't going to be vehicles enough for everybody.
I think Golmud is probably the most extreme example, as there are three helicopters, two
aircraft, and six armored vehicles per side.
Even if every seat is taken, there still aren't enough places for a 32-man team.
And if your vehicle explodes, it's really just a skin to the infantry combat.
So the infantry gameplay has to be considered the building block for the rest of the game's
combat.
It's what you're going to be doing for the majority of the time that you're playing
the game.
It's of vital importance that infantry combat be good, and in that point I agree with the
twitterverse.
But let's flip this on it's head: if the infantry combat is not good, does it take
the whole game with it?
No, probably not.
But it certainly suffers.
Does the game feel like a Battlefield game even if the infantry combat is bad?
I think there are plenty of Battlefield titles that have launched this way, and there are
other pillars that Battlefield rests on.
What if there was no infantry combat at all, would it still feel like a Battlefield game?
You could certainly make a game like this, but as a Battlefield title, it would instantly
feel wrong.
But it would also be wrong to assume that vehicle combat is unimportant.
Or even more shockingly, that it should be removed.
There are a couple of popular YouTube players that have suggested doing this at one point
or another.
And here's where we come to the slight differences that distinguish Battlefield from War Thunder,
World of Tanks, and Call of Duty.
As many people pointed out on Twitter, both good vehicle combat and good infantry combat
are important to Battlefield.
And really, Battlefield is a series that has thrived off of embracing combined-arms warfare.
Tanks, planes, ships, and yes -- at its core -- infantry play are all vital.
But because both vehicle and infantry combat are important, it really makes it difficult
to nail down the differences between a good--or okay--Battlefield title and a really great
one.
I think it's harder for a Battlefield game to be great if it's infantry combat is flat
and uninteresting.
But if the vehicle combat is unfun, what's the point of even having vehicles?
Does the game even feel like Battlefield?
Oh, and one more thing to consider is the interaction between the two types of combat
-- an interaction which can make both either fantastic or incredibly unfun.
For a minute, let's consider infantry combat on it's own.
Hypothetically, I believe Battlefield 4 has my favorite infantry combat of the series.
It ditches many of the things I didn't like in Battlefield 3: for example, I didn't
like the suppression and infinite revive trains.
And generally Battlefield 4 has better and broader weapon balance than its predecessor.
Now to be fair to Battlefield 3, that game had far better maps -- especially for infantry
combat.
But between the two I think 4 is mechanically superior.
Let me pull from an example of a game outside the series to give some clearly lackluster
infantry combat.
Star Wars: Battlefront is probably an easy target.
That game has far, far more infantry combat than your typical Battlefield game -- and
the focus is also a lot more narrow.
At launch in particular, the infantry combat had a very low skill ceiling and was relatively
unbalanced in favor of progression over skill.
Somehow Battlefront II made that mistake again.
Both games suffered tremendously because of their lackluster infantry combat.
Why would you stick around playing a first person shooter game where the only way to
improve your game is to push a number higher?
And the only way to play was to play as infantry nine out of ten times?
You'd probably take your frustrations elsewhere, and at the very least, look for more vehicle
play.
Unfortunately vehicles are not that much better in either game.
And even if vehicles had been gameplay perfect, both games actively reject attempts by players
to stick to that one thing they like.
In Battlefront, all vehicle pickups are randomly distributed and in Battlefront II they are
based on time spent playing in the infantry game.
So here's where Battlefield has a bit of built-in advantage that both Battlefronts
can't touch: if you do not like the infantry game, you can get into a vehicle.
If you're tired of infantry, you can get in a vehicle.
If you just want to keep it varied in the same match, you can choose either/or and get
in a vehicle.
Obviously gamemode and map matter -- something that Battlefront might actually have a slight
edge on Battlefield over by having more varied game modes.
But the in-match choice does matter.
Now let's consider vehicle combat on its own.
What Battlefield game do I think has the best vehicle combat?
Well, I'll always have a soft spot for Battlefield 1942.
The vehicles felt awkward and clunky to use, but once you mastered them you really felt
like your own skills were rewarding you and your team.
Conceptually, Battlefield 1942 has my favorite vehicle combat for that reason.
But mechanically I think it's a toss up between Battlefield 3 and 4.
It depends on your thoughts on the rock-paper-scissors model in Battlefield 4 and the critical damage
system.
For me, the most important thing when it comes to vehicle combat is that I feel there is
a key difference between skilled players and somebody that just crawled into a vehicle
for the first time.
I must have the feeling that *I* am the one making the critical difference for my team.
And this has two important components: skill differential and round impact.
For example, I felt that skill differential was very limited in vehicles in Battlefield
1.
However, in Battlefield 4 I feel like the round impact of vehicle play is also very
limited.
Let me break down both of these things because they're very important.
First, skill differential.
If I'm in a vehicle and my time spent mastering that vehicle has little to do with the outcome
-- I'm not going to be very interested in playing that too much.
If it's too easy to get kills, if power difference is decided by progress and not
skill, or if there isn't any variance in play -- these are all going to be major turn
offs for me.
For example, I feel like in Battlefield 3 and 4 the armored angles add a lot to the
skill of armored players -- knowing how to minimize damage means a lot in a 1v1.
Knowing when to angle yourself right or when to time your countermeasures can mean a lot
in an outcome.
In those games, vehicles are fast enough that knowing when to withdraw or flank is also
an option.
But in Battlefield 1 that vehicle combat just felt slow and deterministic.
Whomever had the better armor, opening shot, or teammate dogpile simply won.
The difference in the games skill differential is like the difference between poker and war
in card games.
Vehicles being too powerful is also a major detriment.
Thinking back to Battlefront, you could get in an AT-AT and just melt faces -- you'd
easily score 92-0 in a Walker Assault round without thinking much about it.
But it felt hollow and meaningless because it was easy.
So skill differential is of vital importance.
Now let me talk about round impact.
My definition of round impact here being how much it matters when you do well in a vehicle.
As an example, while I like the combat of Battlefield 3 and 4, something I learned to
avoid very quickly were the concept of instant vehicle spawn servers.
Because what does it matter if you can take down two, three, or even four armored vehicles
when there will just be a fresh one right behind that last one?
There's no time to press the advantage -- and in fact you're probably at a disadvantage
against a full health armored vehicle that just came from the spawn.
The round impact of you doing well is basically nothing on these servers.
I feel like having maps with too high a mix of vehicles-to-infantry also produces this
feeling.
It's why I tended to play a lot of air vehicles towards the end of Battlefield 4.
The ratio was a little bit less lopsided and you could get some sense of accomplishment.
But there's a danger there -- if vehicles are too good -- they can really make the infantry
game suffer when one team has an advantage.
With that in mind, let's talk about the interplay between infantry and vehicle combat.
Because here's where the twitterverse is right: that in Battlefield, there needs to
be a balance of both.
And to get back to my original thinking, while infantry combat needs to be considered the
core of the game, vehicle combat cannot be ignored.
But if the way they play together, their interplay, is bad, both are going to feel bad.
Here's an easy example.
Infantry players in Battlefield 1 probably hate aircraft.
Aircraft in Battlefield 1 are extremely powerful against infantry.
As an aircraft player, I really hate how powerful AA guns are, how far they reach, and how common
they are on maps like St. Quentin Scar.
The interplay between the two feels bad.
Why?
Because there is no meaningful interaction other than quick or annoying kills.
The disconnection between the air game and the ground game hurts both.
On the ground, armored vehicles at least have the advantage of taking points in conquest,
which biplanes cannot do.
And hilariously in Battlefield 1's Beta there was no point at all to playing aircraft
as they contributed no score to the round whatsoever.
During the beta, kills didn't even count towards tickets.
I do think that the air game has been the weakest bit of franchise vehicle gameplay
since Battlefield Vietnam -- something I do hope that Battlefield V corrects.
But I've seen nothing to indicate as much in the Battlefield V Alpha.
The interplay between vehicle and infantry is something that I genuinely thought was
good in both Battlefield 3 and 4.
I didn't think that infantry had a distinct advantage over vehicles in either, though
they got a bit of a helping hand with disables in Battlefield 4.
Though the sheer overwhelming volume of vehicles in Battlefield 4 offsets that, and the volume
of lock-ons are certainly annoying.
Finally, I think map design as a lot to do with how the interplay of vehicle and infantry
feels.
I was thinking recently how much I liked the Aftermath DLC of Battlefield 3, and how much
I disliked the Armored Kill DLC of the same game.
And it's because Aftermath generally feels and plays like Battlefield 3 -- a few vehicles
that are very important but mostly infantry gameplay.
Armored Kill is the opposite -- it has a ton of vehicles and there is very little round
impact to them.
In fact, Aftermath is quintessentially Battlefield 3, and Armored Kill is basically a prototype
to Battlefield 4.
Think about that one for a while.
So to my original question: does Battlefield need vehicles?
Absolutely.
The vehicles are literally what make a Battlefield game feel -- like -- a -- battlefield.
Infantry combat is absolutely more important than vehicle combat.
Because for the whole game to feel great, the thing that you're doing the most, that
you should be doing the most, needs to feel great.
But both are ultimately extremely important, and my biggest hope for Battlefield V is that
it nails both, hits the right stride with the interplay, and has good maps.
Getting all those right is super rare for a Battlefield game, and it would blow my mind.
But how do you feel about infantry combat vs. vehicle combat?
Do you have a favorite?
Is one more important than the other?
Let me know in the comments below.
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if you want to see more content.
And as always, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time, YouTube.
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