battlebit's best feature is the voice chat
i've been playing a lot of battlebit, and i certainly didn't intend to. i'm always incredibly wary of any new indie multiplayer shooter. it's unfair, i know, but it's a market segment that is repeatedly doomed to failure. i get even more cautious when it's a game deliberately meant to replicate an existing game that the community has fallen out of favor with. this caution turns into outright go-away x-pac heat when it starts being heralded as "the best X game in years". the best cod, the best halo, the best quake, or in this game's case, the best battlefield.
this hesitance is based on past experiences. typically, this desire to prop up some new game as the new best thing feels like it's almost entirely based around having an axe to grind. "this small indie team did what a aaa studio with hundreds of millions in development costs couldn't" is a very intoxicating narrative, and one that rarely is true. the reason being that even if the team was able to make a game that truly is goated with the sauce and looks like a chad next to the virgin establish franchise, it ultimately runs into the issue that all of these games have: they just fucking die.
flash in the pan successes are, sadly, incredibly common in this area of the gaming world. the amount of "cod killers" that have been launched and failed is endless. ditto for games heralding "the return of the arena shooter". perhaps most damning of all is the tale of splitgate, née splitgate: arena warfare. i was perhaps the most poised to fall for that game. a clearly faithful but unique take on the halo multiplayer formula, with a unique central mechanic tying it together and generally acceptable f2p practices? sign my ass up.
however, i played it before it got relaunched as simply splitgate, and found it to be fun but not especially groundbreaking. so when it was suddenly the biggest game in the world, i was only tepidly interested, out of a belief that the game was simply getting this much focus because of it now being on console and having the air of being a new product. i assumed it was just flavor of the month. i was sadly proven correct.
it would make sense then why i would not be exactly super hyped to try out another game that seemed destined for flash in the pan status. a game meant to placate the grievances of battlefield fans. "2042 can barely handle 128 players? we did double that. low tick-rate bringing you down? we have 60Hz on even massive servers. hate battlepasses and cosmetic shops? he have none of that." etc etc etc. i was content to sit this one out, like i had others, and just see if it would last 2 months before falling off.
however, i got sucked in. friends on discord were playing and streaming it, and it seemed really fun. it genuinely seemed like battlefield 4 with the destruction potential of bad company 2 with some sprinkling of squad dashed in. i still wasn't fully convinced, though. so i held off a bit more. i didn't want to waste 15 bucks.
but then i heard the voice chat, and i was sold. that might seem weird, and it is. for a lot of people, their experience with in-game voice chat in recent years is either a) non-existent, due to them either exclusively using external means or simply because everyone else in your match is using external means, or b) negative as hell. yelling at people, flaming them for misplays, or just being a little too epic. this has been my experience with squad, a game i also enjoy because of it's voice chat almost in spite of itself.
i think the people behind battlebit recognized this and knew that they needed to do all they could to make voice chat not just something you tolerate but actively want to play the game for. they accomplished this goal via a few very key decisions (yes, we finally reach The Point of my blog):
- every time you start the game, you are forced to accept the games voice/text chat rules, with the reminder that if you violate you will get banned.
- they have global ban log in the top right corner of the screen that is updated fairly frequently.
- players will actively chastise anyone who is being toxic in voice/text chat, regardless of team affiliation.
- any time someone is talking in chat there's a note next to their name saying "Press F1/2/3/etc to Mute."
- they do actively moderate said voice chat.
- the game has proximity chat, and has an opt-in feature to open your mic when you die
that last point is the key. proximity chat is the thing. while it has great potential for the exact type of toxicity that led people to turn away from in-game comms, all the securities built in to try and stymie that urge to flame have made voice chat so. fucking. fun. my very first match, i hoped over a wall and saw a couple guys who shot and killed me. a medic ran up and started healing me. i said in local chat "there's two guys over that wall." almost immediately i see a red name in the corner saying "no we're not!" a little back and force sprung up. it was so fun.
nearly every match in this game i have a story like this. light role playing, playful trash talk with a guy you've killed 4 times already. mutually bitching about the state of the match to someone who is actively your enemy. really anything a typical person would do in order to just have some silly fun in roblox battlefield. the few times people have gotten even a little too epic? they get shouted down, muted, reported, or all of the above. it's genuinely refreshing to see.
i'm not kidding when i say that the voice chat is the reason i bought and kept the game. this is the thing that got even me, an ardent cynic, to take a chance on the game. more games should follow in their example here.