This was kind of obvious to anyone who spent more than an hour with the game, but it’s nice to see them officially acknowledge it all the same.
The admission came from Matthew Everett, one of the community managers working with EA on Battlefront. When a member of the public hit him up and asked if his failure to defend Hoth’s shield generators from the hulking AT-AT’s was all his fault, Everett uttered words that many soldiers would be pleased to hear.
@Focalin Nope! Its a balancing issue within the Beta.
— Sledgehammer70 (@sledgehammer70) October 13, 2015
The lead multiplayer designer, Dennis Brannvall, also said the Rebel experience was too difficult and indicated that the information retrieved from the beta would result in changes down the road. There hasn’t been any communication about what those changes would be, but as long as one of them fixes the spawn system they’ll at least be on the right track.
[PC Gamer]
Comments
26 responses to “DICE Admits Star Wars: Battlefront’s Walker Assault Was Actually Imbalanced”
It’s funny, so long as the Rebels were working together they could easily win by the second phase.
Agreed – but it only took a few imperials to head behind the spawn area, jump in a turret and kill the rebels as they spawned to turn a game into a massacre.
The mode was fun for a dozen rounds until you realised the game mode was unbalanaced and unpolished – then it was back to chasing Drop pods. That mode on the other hand was loads of fun – and i’m not normally a huge fan of infantry only modes.
Yeah, I really wish the Imperials couldn’t access the Rebels turrets and power ups.
yep for me it was the spawn camping that did more damage than the imbalance, I won a few with the Rebels. The Other game mode was mostly pretty good, but again the spawns weren’t great, people would spawn everywhere, including to your flanks and behind you which did make it a bit of a cluster fuck at times.
A shameless plug (feel free to remove Mods) but you can see my thoughts here: https://youtu.be/XMlN7a5EtFY
I seen an AT-AT knocked out before reaching the AT-AT wreckage in the first phase, rebels just didn’t know what they needed to do until late in the beta.
It’s funny how ignorant people can be. What more messages do you need to be slammed into your head? The description of the map told you what you needed to do, the comchat constantly goes off with what you need to do. The uplink icons are always on your HUD.
People jsut assume its TDM, objective based games arent the norm so you tend to find most people are hunting kills, and not the objectives. i was playing with a mate and told him to help with the AT-AT, and he said “Oh, we’re meant to be taking them down”. Once i’d finished laughing my ass off, I explained to him that its not all about your KD ratio, and that it was an objective based game mode lol
Yep. I hope they leave it as it is, I personally enjoyed the extra challenge playing as the Rebels presented. Once the full game is out and people start to realise kills/kdr isn’t the goal then I think we’ll find the Rebels will have a much higher success rate.
Totally with you. Like other people have said the Rebels can most definitely win and its not impossible. They just need to work together as a team and its definitely achievable.
One of my favourite things about the beta was just how “unbalanced” the game is, it makes it different to your usual cookie-cutter FPS games and delivers a fresh experience that’s actually very fun to play whether you’re on the winning or loosing team. Also last time I checked, I’m pretty sure the Empire won the battle of Hoth in episode V. I like seeing the battle replicated how it should be, makes the players playing on the Rebel team actually have to work together to win.
This! Why do games need to be balanced?
Timesplitters was hugely unbalanced and the funnest shooter ever.
Agreed. I actually thought it was a bit unbalanced in both directions. If Rebels didn’t work as a team, it was an auto-win for the Imperials, however if they did work together and play the objectives, it was ridiculously easy for them to win by P2, let alone clean up with the snowspeeders. Some fine tuning to make it a little closer wouldn’t go astray.
As others have mentioned, the only major issue I found was with the spawning/ability to camp behind enemy lines, which I basically dismissed as ‘Beta’.
Yeah, in one match I saw the rebels melt our AT-AT around the second phase – it just comes down to people working as a team, and completing the objectives. It was the same with the other mode, so many games where I felt like the only one activating the pods.
Just fixed up the embed on the tweet there.
Interesting thing is that a lot of the difficulty stemmed from the broken spawn system. If you fixed one, then would the challenge have been a lot more tolerable for people? Maybe that is their solution, although the language makes it sound like they’re planning to do a lot more.
Agreed. Once the rebels knew how to play the game it was quite fine. The spawn points were the issue. Not the game mode.
Even an extra turret or two would make the difference. I don’t think it was THAT unbalanced, just that people werne’t playing the objectives in most cases
I’d even be happy, spawns aside, if you could freely control the aiming on all the turrets (the one that fires the green laser is rigid as all hell).
But I grew up in the days of CS 1.5 and de_cbble where one half was always 10+ rounds so maybe I’m a little biased in terms of the challenge I like from these sorts of games.
I think they need to have a third Uplink in the third phase if there are still two walkers by then.
Why? This is when snow speeders are available which can quickly take down an ATAT with good use of the cable
The rebels did lose in the movie, it was always an unbalanced battle.
I like unbalanced battles like this, it is fun to be the underdog, as long as it is just more difficult, not impossible, I don’t mind.
Whats the obsession with balance?? I like that its unbalanced. Most battles in history are heavily unbalanced.
Its those against all odds victories that make you grin at the end of an epic game…
I think the best thing they could do would be to keep the Imperials out of Rebel turrets. That would go a long way. The imbalance was fun and caused team work to be vital on Rebels. I’ve seen the whole team fire on the AT-AT when it was vulnerable after a whole bunch of people yelled in team chat to get it done. I think that speaks a lot for it.
At the end of the Beta the rebels got their shit together and were winning on hoth in a lot more games.
I do think spawn points are the major thing needing fixing. If they get that working better it could be a lot more fun
I didn’t have an issue playing the Rebels. I didn’t have an issue playing an Imperial.
The imbalance was only present when the Rebels didn’t play the common goal and the Imperials took every advantage.
It seemed easy enough to overcome any early advantage the Imperials had by focusing on the up-link stations and readying the orbital strikes, rockets and infantry barrage for the vulnerable AT-AT’s. The Ion Charge ability can cripple an AT-ST in only a short time if you don’t get blasted before you deplete. Two players with Ion Charge on the same AT-ST will destroy it pretty quickly.
Maybe some sort of balancing is necessary. I’ll leave that up to the experts.
Didn’t have a problem with it personally, apart from the default key bindings.
Yeah, i’ll be honest i had way more fun as the imperials on this map… the spawn’s definitely didn’t help.
Even just hat would be bring a LOT of balance to this map, i found the bigger issue than the team not focusing objectives (on the rebels side) was how easy that map is to camp, unless you have a team full of shielded guys it makes it very difficult to defend the uplinks, not to mention how many times my team got wrecked by AT-AT and AT-ST, more regular spawns of the missiles would be nice.
isn’t it the point that of Hoth, Rebels lost that battle