First let me start off by saying that I think the game is great and I’ve pre-ordered it, and forced two of my gaming friends to purchase it when it comes out.
I understand that this is not at all like Borderlands, but I wanted to give my thoughts on things that could be done to help bring the casual BL lover over to play (and hopefully fall in love with) Battleborn. The idea would be to bring them over for the Solo/Co-op and hopefully get them to ultimately dip their toes into the competitive side. The more toes you can get to dip in the better chance you have of increasing that competitive player base.
I’m gearing this more specifically to the type of player who likes to play solo most of the time, and when time permits plays co-op with friends.
I really like the fact that you only start out with 7 characters, and you can unlock new characters at a pretty good clip. This helps in reducing the intimidation factor of the game. If a new player loaded up the game and saw 25-30 characters to choose from…they might just walk away because there is just too much to grasp.
With that said, there really needs to be a training ground of some type for players to be able to get a handle on each of the characters. This training ground needs to include the following:
1.) Needs to be short. (Perhaps 10-20 minutes long) I can do the first two episodes solo in about 50-60 minutes, but that seems to be too long of a period of time, especially if it is a character that you don’t think you are going to like.
2.) Needs to have greatly increased in-match XP gain. This is so you can get to level 10 quickly with-in the short time period to get a feel for all of the choices and how they can impact the game.
3.) Needs to be both ranged and melee friendly. (No ISIC floating heads for Melee)
4.) Probably little-to-no Command Rank XP, Character Rank, & Credits for playing it. Perhaps you could have a little bit, but you’d want to make certain that playing the Story or Competitive offers far more rewards/time spent to avoid abuse. You could offer a guaranteed common gear pack as an incentive for the newer players.
5.) I don’t think this should be a ‘tutorial-style’ event. (Where it explains things like gathering shards, building deployables, making helix choices, ect.) I think something like that would be great for very new players, but this training grounds would be for someone who knows the basics of the game and wants to really get a feel for all of the characters. Deployables should be part of the training ground, I just don’t think it needs to be in a ‘tutorial’ style.
6.) Finally some difficultly sliders for the training ground would be great, just to see how well you’ve got a particular character down.
Anyway, I’m thinking of my friends who I want to play (and love) this game, and I can see them not getting intimidated by the game and soaking a good amount of time into this game if something like the above was implemented. Then, it would be a lot easier to get them to try out the competitive side if they found the characters that felt ‘good’ for them.