I know that BF4 is still a juvenile and is probably having growing pains but I have some real frustrations with it at the moment. Playing BF3 again is quite refreshing and enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong but there seems to be a few things in BF4 that seem to be just odd.
Team balance
This seems to be all wrong. How many rounds have you played where in an 800 ticket game it has ended with one team still having 500 or more remaining. You can’t put that down to teams being genuine noob heavy (or light I suppose). That just seems to be way off what you would expect.
Snipers
I know most of moaned about snipers in BF3 but BF4 takes them to a whole new level. When you get a team that is 35% (and often more) playing as sniper it gets a bit weird. It can also make playing unenjoyable as they are so high up you cannot get to shoot them by normal means and have to resort to heli attacks or other drastic measure.
Weapon effectiveness
There are times when you can pound a tank with RPGs and they still are nowhere near getting disabled and when you get killed by them they show little damage. I know where you hit them and other player options will affect the damage your weapon scores but when you see your hit score 20% repeatedly and they are still near 100% that doesn’t make sense.
Aircraft
You get someone in a jet who is good and they can be almost invincible regardless of what you are using to get them. AA, rockets and jets just seem to be ineffective against them. Being good is one thing but being untouchable, for me, spoils the game and just becomes frustrating. Heli is the same, in one round yesterday one chap got 33 kills with heli out of 34 and only 3 deaths. That ruins the game for me as I then just have heli rage and will try everything to get them down.
Cheats
I don’t know if there are cheats on the servers but sometimes you get the spider sense feeling about folk. There are too many rounds where you are getting quite a few folk going 20+ kills to only one or two deaths. Again yesterday, I spent quite a while trying to kill someone in an attack boat without any luck at all. You pound them will TV missiles, burst guns plus hits from others on your boat and a couple of shots and a missile and you are dead. Try again and you get the same result. There is something wrong with that.
Another round I got killed a few times by a player shooting through a few walls and a tank between us. They went 44:5 and I was really suspicious of them. Nobody else complained so I kept my thoughts to myself. There are lots of players on BF4 getting really high K/D ratios that I’m sure would raise eyebrows if it was on BF3. And it is consistent too if you look at their round histories. They don’t appear to be getting revived so I can only assume it is not getting killed or some kind of magic they are empowered with.
Under this heading I’ll also include weapon effectiveness too. There are many times when you get a killed by one shot by someone from a ridiculous distance or a bullet that curved as there is no other explanation for how it got to you. BF4 is going to be complex and hard to get everything spot on all the time but I really feel that there are people using enhanced weapons with magical powers. Good players being good don’t give you that same feeling, you just know you are playing and have been killed by someone good with a lot of skill.
Reliability & bugs
There seems to be too many failures at the moment. You do well in a round and suddenly BF4 has stopped working pops up. Or you lose the connection to the server. Or the server crashes. Or EA seems to have pulled the plug and all servers have gone. Or the sound goes (spent quite a while assuming my PC was borked before realising BF4 was the culprit).
Sum Up
In general I find the game quite atmospheric but I do find it increasingly frustrating to play and enjoy.
Team balance
This seems to be all wrong. How many rounds have you played where in an 800 ticket game it has ended with one team still having 500 or more remaining. You can’t put that down to teams being genuine noob heavy (or light I suppose). That just seems to be way off what you would expect.
Snipers
I know most of moaned about snipers in BF3 but BF4 takes them to a whole new level. When you get a team that is 35% (and often more) playing as sniper it gets a bit weird. It can also make playing unenjoyable as they are so high up you cannot get to shoot them by normal means and have to resort to heli attacks or other drastic measure.
Weapon effectiveness
There are times when you can pound a tank with RPGs and they still are nowhere near getting disabled and when you get killed by them they show little damage. I know where you hit them and other player options will affect the damage your weapon scores but when you see your hit score 20% repeatedly and they are still near 100% that doesn’t make sense.
Aircraft
You get someone in a jet who is good and they can be almost invincible regardless of what you are using to get them. AA, rockets and jets just seem to be ineffective against them. Being good is one thing but being untouchable, for me, spoils the game and just becomes frustrating. Heli is the same, in one round yesterday one chap got 33 kills with heli out of 34 and only 3 deaths. That ruins the game for me as I then just have heli rage and will try everything to get them down.
Cheats
I don’t know if there are cheats on the servers but sometimes you get the spider sense feeling about folk. There are too many rounds where you are getting quite a few folk going 20+ kills to only one or two deaths. Again yesterday, I spent quite a while trying to kill someone in an attack boat without any luck at all. You pound them will TV missiles, burst guns plus hits from others on your boat and a couple of shots and a missile and you are dead. Try again and you get the same result. There is something wrong with that.
Another round I got killed a few times by a player shooting through a few walls and a tank between us. They went 44:5 and I was really suspicious of them. Nobody else complained so I kept my thoughts to myself. There are lots of players on BF4 getting really high K/D ratios that I’m sure would raise eyebrows if it was on BF3. And it is consistent too if you look at their round histories. They don’t appear to be getting revived so I can only assume it is not getting killed or some kind of magic they are empowered with.
Under this heading I’ll also include weapon effectiveness too. There are many times when you get a killed by one shot by someone from a ridiculous distance or a bullet that curved as there is no other explanation for how it got to you. BF4 is going to be complex and hard to get everything spot on all the time but I really feel that there are people using enhanced weapons with magical powers. Good players being good don’t give you that same feeling, you just know you are playing and have been killed by someone good with a lot of skill.
Reliability & bugs
There seems to be too many failures at the moment. You do well in a round and suddenly BF4 has stopped working pops up. Or you lose the connection to the server. Or the server crashes. Or EA seems to have pulled the plug and all servers have gone. Or the sound goes (spent quite a while assuming my PC was borked before realising BF4 was the culprit).
Sum Up
In general I find the game quite atmospheric but I do find it increasingly frustrating to play and enjoy.