I intended to have this write up (more of a rant, really) completed a long time ago, much further from launch, but in attempting to sit down and complete it, I was met with all the procrastination of writing essays and lab reports back in high school (I wrote this sentence 5 days ago…). It was meant to be a comprehensive compendium of my time in the Open Beta, covering everything from the game’s optimization, settings customization, characters, campaign experience both solo and co-op, and lastly the competitive multiplayer experience. However, I immediately found that it was quite tedious working through the former when what I really wanted to do was provide my critiques of the competitive multiplayer experience. Even this intro seems a chore just to get to the discussion about multiplayer. All in all, I had very little negative to say about the games optimization, settings, and campaign experience. Those sections of my rough draft were all simply singing praises to Gearbox with little to no notes for improvement. But I’ve got a whole heck of a lot to say about competitive multiplayer. So without further ado, let’s cut the small talk and jump right in.
Battleborn is giving Gearbox an opportunity to venture into the arena of competitive multiplayer games. The closest comparison you could draw from their previous works is evident in Borderlands dueling system. However, this system proved to be extremely unbalanced and more of a novelty than a major feature of the franchise. But what if Gearbox wanted to expand on the system; by incorporating more players, objectives, mechanics, maps, and balance? Then you would have Battleborn.
Yet like anything in life, you are bound to make some mistakes your first time. Competitive games, no matter the medium, have historically shown mistakes that in hindsight or with foresight could have been avoided or remedied. One of the most glaring examples comes from Magic the Gathering, and the earliest cards made available. In the first set of cards printed, there was a monumental disparity in card balance, which remains evident to this day. The sheer level of efficiency and value of the “Power Nine” massively overshadows that of other cards of equal rarity made available in the same sets. But how were the card designers to know any better? After all, the creation of Magic the Gathering pioneering; there were no precedents before it and at the time, lacked the means of extensive testing through Closed Technical Tests or Open Betas. Despite this, even future Trading Card Games continued to make beginner’s mistakes. Take YugiOh’s Pot of Greed and Pokemon’s Bill: both cards offer “card advantage” at no cost. In each of these games, cards are your resource, and should you have more resources than your opponent, you are more prone to winning. Since these cards provided additional resources with no detrimental cost, you were strictly at a statistical disadvantage if not playing them. For this reason, the usage of these cards and others were limited or banned in various formats.
Moving into the medium of video games, we can still see disparities wherever a difference exists. Anyone who has played GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64 knows the distinct advantage playing as Oddjob holds. His character model and subsequently his hitbox was noticeably smaller than that of his contemporaries, making him harder to hit. Each iteration of Super Smash Bros has seen its meta broken down and its characters divided into tiers. However, in Super Smash Bros Brawl, the combatant Meta Knight was deemed so powerful due to his agility, recovery, and high move priority that he was summarily banned from numerous tournaments.
All of this applies to Battleborn in a number of ways. The number of beginner’s mistakes can be reduced thanks to the foresight offered by games of similar genres, to include MOBA’s and First Person Shooters. Games like League of Legends, Monday Night Combat, and Titanfall all display similarities ranging from unique and diverse characters and minion centric game types, to supplementary skills win cooldowns and impactful gear loadouts and resource economies. Much of the feedback from the Open Beta seemed to gravitate towards calling for the rebalancing of many of these aspects. Unlike Trading Card Games, Battleborn lives online, not in physical print. As such, it allows for constant updates to adjust these imbalances so it doesn’t fall prey to the same oversights as the “Power Nine.” Striking balance is essential to the success, enjoyment, and longevity of competitive games. League of Legends has seen countless updates and champion reworks in an effort to keep each champion relevant. Now in its sixth season, there’s no doubt that its success is due in large part to the feedback and copious amounts of data pooled from games played. Now I’m not saying that differences in balances in Battleborn are as starkly overt as Black Lotus and the Roc, but launch should be the time where balance disparities are at their greatest. Striving for balance can be the thing that separates a game’s lasting relevance rather than a short lived success.
As far as multiplayer goes, I spent the majority of my time playing the Meltdown game type. Incursion seemed to me to be the less attractive of the two available game modes due to its single lane traffic setup, reducing itself to little more than 5v5 head on skirmishes occurring at the line of scrimmage wherever the two teams’ minions would collide. On top of that, the vast majority of games I’ve witnessed ended up as 100 to 0 outcomes, be it due to skill on the players’ parts or the stranglehold-like, morale crippling detriment of being pushed deep into your base upon the loss of your first sentry. Incursion games seemed to snowball immensely based solely on whichever team wins the initial encounter; shutting the losing team out of experience while gaining map advantage, pushing lane presence, and taking control of neutral objectives.
Meltdown on the other hand at least offered two lanes. But apart from that, the game mode also suffered from numerous problems arising from the games mechanics and map layout.
League of Legends proves time and again to be the poster child for minion centric competitive games. The game covers everything from game phases and map roles to character archetypes and item builds. The current meta as it exists has been so heavily incentivized for a number of reasons. It makes use of the entire map and its resources while optimizing gold and experience gain for all players. There is a reason why sticking all five player in the middle lane in an attempt to show down mid lane for a quick victory doesn’t work. A number of failsafes like diminished experience gain and turret safety safeguard against cheesy tactics as five-man-mid, ensuring that games last until mid game when teamfights begin to break out, and eventually the prioritization of major objectives during the late game, when even being disadvantaged by a single player down for the duration of nearly minute-long respawn timers can be felt.
Battleborn’s Meltdown offers little to none of this, at least none was apparent to me. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is still too early for a standard meta to exist. The most notable concern was that experience toward levels was awarded for minion and structure kills as well as enemy play kill participation. On top of that, the first set of grinders are located practically in the middle of the map with no safety of “farming under turret.” The first line of defense in this early game are likely to be your Logistics, which serve to hasten friendly units and slow enemy units. From here, we can already begin to see the advantages that ranged characters hold over melee characters. Unlike League of Legends, DOTA, Smite, or similar MOBA’s, the majority of Battleborn’s ranged characters do not have a standardized limitation to their attack range. For this reason, ranged characters can safely engage enemy minions and structures for experience while remaining in the safety of their half of the map. Melee characters must actively put themselves into the line of fire to participate in these kills for experience or shards. It is widely seen across games of this genre that a Ranged character has the advantage at range, but should a Melee character close the gap, they should have all the tools they need to be rewarded for doing so and be put in an advantageous position. This brings up the problem that is “disengaging with sprint.” Suppose a Melee character does close the gap and begins to wail on their foe. But if the Melee character fails to 100 to 0 their foe in time, if the opponent has the presence of mind, they can simply run away by sprinting, initially putting them out of melee range and eventually reaching the safety deep in their base. This tactic is only furthered by Logistics and the fact that characters cannot attack while sprinting. A ranged character, even in the absence of cooldown skills, can output damage onto an enemy so long as they can maintain line of sight since their range (in general, sorry Ghalt) is limitless. Melee on the other hand, must remain within range, within line of sight, and out of harm’s way. But more on all of this later.
What I really want to cover in this section is my experience with the in-game resource economy: Shards. As I explained in the prior section, competitive games cannot be won if deprived of resources. In trading card games, that draw step is everything. Having watched the LoL NA LCS (poorly timed in tandem with the Open Beta), it is very clear to see the hierarchy of resource and objective management, but at the crux of it all is gold income. Creep Score is everything: it gold leads beget item leads, which beget kill leads, which beget objective leads, which leads to winning games. I expected this to be the case in Battleborn, but thanks to a particularly egregious example of a match, I was soundly proven wrong. Below I’ve prepared an infographic of the match in question, and attached below that are the raw stats of the match.
What was an otherwise even match in terms of general statistics, yet a blowout in terms of shards and buildables, turned out to be an absolute trouncing, and not in the way I’d expect. The conclusion at a glance is that buildables do your team more harm than good, Super Minions are nearly useless, and shard lead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Draw your attention to the Objectives stat: 75-31. Examining this in line with the score limit of 500 means that each objective (or minion sacrificed) by the opposing team was worth an average of 6.66 points, which comes close to the average of each minion wave (four 5 point minions and one 10 point shepherd minion). Our team’s meager performance of 31 Objectives and a final score of somewhere in the ballpark of ~300 points seems very skewed despite an overwhelming advantage in shards, buildables, and even average level lead, not to mention a Super Minion advantage in excess of 300%. Despite all of this, the enemy team only held an advantage of 11 more minions slain.
After a scrutiny of this match’s stats, I’ve come to the conclusion that the economic mechanics and balance of the Meltdown game mode needs a huge overhaul, and that’s an understatement. For starters, Super Minions are nowhere near as fearsome as they are in Campaign. Remember encountering the MX Elite on the bridge leading to Geoff? Remember getting gibbed for 1000’s of damage in its rapid fire salvo? Or how about its wide and lengthy AoE stun before which it briefly shields itself? None of these are to be seen in Meltdown, and on top of that, it doesn’t have an overshield and it’s pathing (on the map provide in the Beta) doesn’t take it past your Logistics. Ultimately, Super Minions are too easy to kill and lack serious impact unless they go totally ignored by the enemy. As the stats will show, I spawned 10 Super Minions, in pairs with the intent of ushering one down a lane to safety while the enemy has to deal with the other. Even so, they were systematically ripped apart. But that’s not the worse part. On my end, I had to invest 600 shards for each minion, which merely granted me some experience and proved a minor hinderance to the enemy. However, on my enemies’ side, they managed to kill the minion for experience and shards in pocket, all at a cost to me. In League of Legends, spending gold is virtually strictly a boon to yourself and almost never positively impacts your opponent (barring the meager 30 gold from a destroyed vision ward or the stat-stealing ability of Trundle). The fact that an expenditure of shards on my part can lead to leveling up or funding an enemy doesn’t sit well at all.
So, my question to the devs is this: Was this intended? I mean, this cannot possible be how you wanted the game to be played. Following this match, I became exceedingly more stingy with spending shards and targeted enemy buildables, in the hopes that they would reinvest, thus netting me more experience points to grow a level lead. In doing so, the enemies were starved for experience, since I could match the XP they gained from building buildables simply by destroying them, and leaving them with getting an XP lead only by killing players or our buildables (of which we built none). I urge you, rethink the meta. As it stands, resource leads are unimpressively negligible and in some cases end up punishing yourself, and this is a huge aversion from objective play.
Ugh, I’m tired and I still have sooooo much more to say, but if I keep procrastinating, this stuff may never get said. So I’ll post this now and may return to this thread once I have more thoughts committed to words. I’d like to hear what others have to say on the topic or any other concerns about the game in general, even if they do not pertain to competitive multiplayer.
Edit: I was unable to upload the source captures of the aforementions match stats due to file size limitations. I can upload them to an external host if requested.
It’s a long post, analyzing ONE match and offering thoughts from playing a few more matches. We’re still sifting through a pile of data from millions of matches. We certainly respect thoughtful analysis, though; we do that all the time here in design.
