The basic TL;DR is this MP experience feels very sterile with how the weapons spawns are and the audio design is constantly trying to rail road me.
[Spawns]
Aside from grenades and power weapons, all weapons so far seem to spawn on a wall. This results in people gravitating to walls rather than risking going out in the open, I get the whole idea with these racks, but you could have weapon drop pods for areas out in the open and achieve the same thing. Generally though this just feels super sterile and uninteresting.
Less weapons seem to be populating the maps compared to previous games
Some spawns feel like a ‘luck of the draw’ instead of memorizing where the weapon that interests you spawn at, “Oh am I getting that scatter plasma gun or the bulldog, let me cross my fingers and hope it spawns the one I want this time!” Not very fun.
The AI, player characters, and announcer all seem to be competing to tell me the exact same things about whats spawning on the map, where and what happened to the enemy team or my team. This was presumably done to be a placebo for real communication. It doesn’t though, most people seem to be just filtering out or turning off these sounds when possible and completely ignore them. It’s happening too often and youre trying too hard to hold the players hand.
The weapons feel very muted, it makes it kind of harder to differentiate why these weapons are NEW or special when theyre all very quiet and the kill sound effects on them are even quieter (The gravity hammer and needler for example), to make it worse you guys put a lot of much louder “BLEEPS” and “BLOOPS” to tell me I pulled the trigger enough times for them to die. This is just a more obnoxious way to relay the information to me that was already in a text box on my screen, if this is for accessibility, PLEASE let people just customize how large the text is and where on the screen it is located!
[Summary]
It all just feels like a way too ‘cleanly’ made experience that results in people just grinding their shoulders on the walls instead of exploring and populating the map. This results in a lot of cover shooting and no one making risky plays most of the time. I can feel the designers hand firmly gripped on mine, trying to tell me to ‘HEY LISTEN’ throughout the experience with the constant noise in my ear and on my screen, when I’d rather just gather this information through actual communication and using my eyes and chat with my mates.
It doesn’t matter if you put a toggle on this, it’s the clear core design and a lot of peoples first impressions will be with these systems. First impressions matter and I think a lot of people are going to have a negative one if the final results are like this.
I’m sorry if this sounds negative, I really love FPS games in general and just want this to succeed and be a fun experience to play socially and competitively.