BlackBoxBETA - Beta Test Community

Early impressions/reviews of the beta for Battlefield Heroes selected at random from those who provided a full writeup. Thanks for your feedback guys!

blu?

Was "lucky" enough to be one of the 75,000 to recieve keys to the BF Heroes Beta and yet they deny us 1000 keys, what a loss that would have been.. anyway, it does leave me in a position to give some running updates of how the beta is shaping up, especially as it's now close enough to release that any characters created will be allowed to continue into the live release.

Setup

Login and setup via the play now page has all been done very smoothly, and given your downloading a full game it's truly amazing how little downloading actually takes place.. the whole install process was over in under 10mins, with no problems whatsoever other than some slightly annoying account details stuff through the site.

Character Choice/Web-Based Interface

A fair bit of the game outside of the actual battle is arranged through a small web-browser type interface which runs independentely of the game and allows you to edit your charcter in a number of ways, select missions and of course, search for a server and launch the game.

One immediate but not suprising dissappointment is that to fully enjoy the game it's required to purchase "BattleFunds" which are EA's ingame currency. Although it's been kept fairly controlled and theres no items that will give a big advantage over those not paying for items, there is a number of things that could make the game both more enjoyable, and a lot easier. Experience and currency bonusses can both be purchased for BattleFunds, and it's already apparent even this early in testing who has done this, and who hasn't by the quite massive gap in levels between players which of course dictates what extra abilities you have within the game and so can make quite a large difference to how it plays.

The character selection and customisation itself is simple and rewarding, with a huge number of accesories, clothing and weapons for your character which can be purchased for BF Heroes' other currency: Valor Points. These are much more simple and are earnt for pretty much any action withing the game, although the most reward at the moment comes from missions which can be chosen before you enter matches and feature things like killing 10 infantry without dying 10 times yourself, and steadily get more difficult as you progress.

All in all the system works well and runs smoothly in it's browser, I would have prefer the BattleFunds to be earn't in another manner (especially in a game that claims to be free to play..) but I can't say I'm suprised at EA's decision.

The First Few Games

Getting into a game is simple; click the Play Now button and your launched into an auto-matched game using your current level to determine your skill level.

It's immediately clear that the game has been designed to be easy and fun to play, but this has had some bad effects also. The graphics and controls are immediately inviting and finding your way around your first few maps is relatively simple with a clear map and any important objectives clearly marked with floating icons on the screen. Most of the maps are also quite small and close quarters meaning no frustrating running around trying to find someone to shoot.

Although cartoon-style there is plenty of detail in the well designed models and maps, and with a good series of slightly comedy sounds to back it things are very complete on the surface. Once you come into your first fire-fight it becomes clear that although the game is polished outwardly, the combat itself still needs some work to make it properly stand out as a worthy game. The mouse control seems very loose and aiming accurately is a challenge especially to begin with, with the aim swinging wildly at times as the sensitivity of the mouse seems to vary as you move it in very odd ways. The accuracy of the weapons further frustrates this, with only the sniper rifle actually offering any form of accuracy at range. Otherwise it's often a frustrating blur of attempting to center your crossharis on the enemy with some difficulty, and then seeing most of your shots still land far and wide - expect long range firefights to take ages as you also have a large amount of health in BF Heroes and so actually killing anyone at range becomes a challenge in patience more than anything else.

Things do improve with practice but having since returned to a few other shooters since playing some BF Heroes I find myself almost unable to control things again while I adapt back to a "sensible" control system without it's unnecesary tweaks.

The Verdict so far....

This is far from the end of my testing, or writeup.. but for now I'm going to leave BF Heroes with a "good attempt, but not quite there yet..." Hopefully things will improve both with level, and with the beta still running and the game certainly has a lot of potential to be a great fun shooter to play on the side, much of it is already very good and the cartoon style has been used to great effect resulting in a very satisfying game to look at. Small problems with shooting and controls aside, it's well worth a look and I have great hopes the controls can be polished for the full release..

Xer

Fist off, I have not played any of the previous BF games before,
only some Quake, Unreal, HL-based games like CS, and some CoD4 and 5.

BF Heroes introduces itself as a free cartoon-style shooter.
It seems to be aimed at a much broader audience than most shooters do.
While that may sound interesting and more fun for more people, I'm afraid that won't be the case.

BF Heroes has stripped many options and details which you would expect to find in a shooter.
More experienced and "hardcore" players will find it annoying not to be able to tweak the game to their own taste.
THe more casual players will be able to enjoy the game somewhat better, they don't have to go through all the hassle to setup their game properly.
BF Heroes is also surprisingly easy to pickup for beginners, but it also includes some complex game mechanics that might be hard to grasp.

One of the first things a player has to do is to get registered.
I don't know if the final game will have the same procedure for registrering and logging in, but in the beta you have to login to reach the beta site, and login a second time to actually get into your game account.
First you need to create a hero in your browser, you can only chose between 3 classes, you can customize the color skin, hair color, hair style and facial hair style, and you need to give your hero a unique name.
Then you have to press the "Play Now" button that will launch a browser plugin which currently is only available for IE and Ff, the program will either download the game (456mb atm) or validate the existing files, followed by launching the game.

Once the browser-like interface has loaded, you can select your hero.
The interface is pretty clean and easy to use, but by keeping the number of menu options low, you find some functions to be somewhat hidden in the options menu.
"Credits" and "Connect to server" are not typical functions to be found inside the "Options" menu.
There are very limited options available which is easy to setup for beginners.

The Home tab shows a welcome screen and some explanation of the browser-like interface.
There is also a "Join a friend" function, but I haven't tested that yet.

Other tabs are "My stuff" "Store" and "Missions". In the Store you can buy stuff with Valor Points or BattleFunds.
BF's are only bought with real money. With BF's you can buy emotes, customes, and special perks (called "Widgets" like XP boosters, nothing that gives any real gameplay benefit over other players.
That is understandable since it is a free-to-play game. If paying gamers would gain real advantage over non-paying players, players would be forced to pay to be able to stand a chance.
But if it's only for cosmetic and leveling changes, will people open their wallets? That is a big question and personally I wouldn't.

Valor points are earned while playing, but it isn't quite clear how that exactly works. You can gain them by completing missions but also just playing the game.

Valor points are used to buy weapons, emotes and widgets. All weapons of the same type are pretty much the same, except they come in different flavors for instance short range with high fire rate or long range with slow fire rate.
It just means that you won't be able to beat opponents easily by just buying a bigger gun, they are all about the same.
Widgets bought with VP are just bandages. Bandages to heal the player and wrenches to repair vehicles.

Hero Points are a mystery to me, after playing the game for hours, I still don't know how to earn them exactly. It might have something to do with the character's level.
Hero Points are used to buy and upgrade special abilities. While you do spend the points, you don't find this option to spend them in the Store !
Apparently you have to look in the abilities menu under "My Stuff". The abilities are comparable to perks in CoD and other games, or like a talent tree in MMO's.
Unlike MMO's like WoW, you can only spend your Hero Points once. If you wish to specialize your character in a different way, you would have to start over from level 1.
For beginners and casual gamers, this is a huge disappointment. Compare it to CoD4 and 5, where you unlock new perks by completing achievements (missions) and levelling up to unlock more achievements, and then you can customize your characters with those perks switching them in and out until you are happy and then go into a game. If you don't like the combination or you want to try something different, all you have to do is go back into the menu and recustomize. This kind of flexibility is not present in BFH.

To play the game you have to press the Play Now button so the matchmaking system will find you a server, or you connect to one of your bookmakred servers.
There is currently no option to manually connect to specific server, unless you have been there before and bookmarked it.

The gameplay itself is pretty straightforward. You run around with a huge crosshair, and when you see an enemy you point and click.
Speaking of running, I think crawling is more accurate. Players move really slow, especially the gunner class which seems to be glued to the ground.
A huge part of a shooter game is the ability and skill of a player to dodge bullets. OK, BFH is designed to lay less emphasis on skill, so I suppose it would be considered as working as intended, but it can be incredibly annoying to more seasoned players of the shooter genre.
The crosshair is really big, which is good for beginners but frustrating for more experienced players who cannot seem to place bullets accurately.

While players start with limited abilities, it is enough to confuse beginners. In fights, using or not using an ability can lead to totally different outcomes.
A beginner won't have many abilities to chose from while a higher level player will have more perks and stronger versions too. A beginner will have lost the fight before it even started.
This again, does not fit with the broader audience and easy gameplay for casual gamers.

The beta only has 1 gameplay mode, I don't know if the final game will have more.
The current gamemode mode is a combination of Dominiation and Team Deathmatch.
Each team starts with 50 points, for each kill, the opposite team loses a point, and for each Flag that you "dominate" the opposite team will lose more points.
The first team to reach 0 points, loses. It's pretty much the same system that other games use, except those games start with 0 points and teams earn points and fight to reach a winning score limit.

This system leads to interesting gameplay, a dominating team can actually lose a game by dying a lot more than the other team.

Wrapping this all up, BFH has simplified a lot of aspects of shooters, while keeping some more complex systems like the Hero Points.
It is easy to start playing for beginners, but it will still have enough for those players to learn. Experienced players will miss a lot of features of shooters they are used to play.
I don't see serious shooter players to play BFH seriously. It lacks too much detail for that. I can see casual players picking this game up and having fun shooting and running around, but other than trying out the game and its perks, I really don't see anything that would appeal someone to play BFH rather than one of those other shooters that are out there that each casual player might already have installed on their pc.
This free-to-play game is however a pretty decent game to introduce new players into the shooter genre.