Battlebit: Remastered || The Breakout Indie FPS With a ‘Fun-First’ Approach to Game Design.

Battlebit Remastered has taken hold of online FPS discourse for weeks now. “This game is what Battlefield should have been” many say, or something to the effect of “ take notes Triple AAA studios, this is how you release a game”. I understand where these comments are coming from, but I'm unsure if these are the real takeaways of Battlebit’s success or how they should be applied to the Triple AAA Battlefield franchise. If anything, there are wholly different mistakes that each game makes that we can learn from as consumers and developers can learn for up and coming projects. Many of the people who made popular videos on Battlebit are variety content creators - seasoned creators who go from one FPS who have phenomenal insights into the Video Game landscape. Instead of hyper focusing on Battlebit “being a better Battlefield” I want to talk about why people are praising Battlebit over Battlefield 2042 despite each of these games glaring problems. 

Battlefield 2042 was a disappointment to players. Between the lackluster sandbox, hollow progression system, horrid optimization for pc and console, the gutting of the conventional class system in favor of the in-vogue ‘heroes’ system that so many other FPS games have adopted in the wake of Overwatch's success (how far we have come since then huh?). Battlefield 2042 felt like everything that was wrong with not just contemporary Battlefield, but with many triple AAA games that were being released at the time. Gamers were, and still are, fatigued with these underwhelming releases. I’ve been playing the Battlefield franchise since Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I've sunk a fair bit of time into a majority of the major releases afterwards. As a fan of the franchise, I tried to have fun with Battlefield 2042 in spite of the glaring issues. The shooting was, and still is, rock solid. The sliding and mantling is snappy all while maintaining the faux-realistic gunplay the franchise had built its name on. The moment to moment experience is, debatably, the tightest it’s been. Where the game falls short is everything surrounding the micro play. Basketball needs more than just a ball and some concrete. You need a half decent net, a solid wood/concrete floor to play on, some well drawn court lines don’t hurt either. Battlefield 2042, at many times, feels like you’re playing with the nicest basketball money can buy, but you’re using it on a rundown court.

Battlebit, when compared to Battlefield 2042, launched without any technical hitches. Granted, the games are of entirely different weight classes. Battlefield is coming in as the primetime heavyweight, whereas Battlebit is an Amateur lightweight. Battlefield is a ‘higher fidelity’ product, a franchise known for its stylized realism, with a heavy emphasis on realism. Since Battlebit is a new-comer indie game, it can afford to use a minimalistic ‘voxel-like’ aesthetic that benefits both the players and the developers, since there is a different expectation for the indie scene. Battlefield 2042 is a great looking game, but struggles to be a stable and smooth experience even when there isn’t much happening on screen. Battlebit, by comparison, runs like a dream. Yes, the game looks simple by comparison, but FPS games live by their game feel first and their graphics second. Do I like a stylized, visually appealing game? Of course. What I enjoy even more from my online FPS games is stability. There’s nothing worse than peaking a corner in an online game and the game stutters and you know that it’s not your pc, not your internet, nothing in your control, but instead the fault of the game. Battlebit circumnavigates this problem through its visual and technical design.

There are many added benefits to how Battlebit looks. For one, visual clarity, ease of readability, is something that many online games strive for but manage to miss the mark on for one reason or another. Battlebit’s rectangular character models and barebones, simplistic buildings make it so you, the player, can identify targets with ease. There’s no visual white noise. All the gunfights feel fair, there’s no visual clutter polluting your screen. No poorly lit corners, no obtuse bushes (for the most part), no strange particle effects and no oddly textured wall that player models can get lost in. You see a guy, maybe he sees you, you guys get in a gunfight, and only one walks away the winner. Does this mean that all games should look like Battlebit, no. We need artistic diversity in the genre. What developers should take from Battlebit is this: make sure the style of your game doesn’t hinder the readability of your online shooter. Clarity is king. You even look at the changes that Valve is making with its upcoming Counter-Strike 2, and many of the quality of life changes are ones related to readability and clarity. Clarity and style can live in harmony, and I (for one) want to live in a world where that’s the norm.

Beyond visual clarity, Battlebit has reminded me of how much fun playing with can really be. I’ve just finished climbing DPS and Tank roles on Overwatch 2 for about five months. There are, to say the least, many choice and unwelcoming experiences that have happened to me throughout my role cue sessions. The interactions I've had with The Battlebit community has been a phenomenal palette cleanser. There’s something to be said about the amount of hilarious roleplaying that occurs in every game. Not a game goes by where I don’t hear enemy players or my teammates scream out for a medic, followed by the most corny ‘near-death’ noises you’d hear from a B-list action flick. In Battlebit, there’s a jovial spirit that is otherwise absent in many of the other online PVP offerings out there. When playing Battlefield 2042 at launch, there were no voice comms even amongst your fellow squad mates. There was no opportunity for coordinating your squad, no room to tell your team where that sniper is hiding or that there’s an apeshit player running in with an SMG. Not only is there comms with your squadmates at launch, but you also have proximity chat with both your whole team AND the enemy team. I’ve had many memorable moments with Battlebit. Some of the most memorable have been when I clear out buildings with an SMG, securing multi-frags, outgunning players with ‘the element of surprise’ , — but the moments I truly cherish are the ones that come from  proximity chat.  The one moment I tell all my friends over coffee or in a discord call, is when an enemy player heard me reloading, ran up to me (claymore in hand) and said in a soft voice “hey, hey buddy…. Hold this” and then placed a live claymore right in my face, killing me instantly. I immediately laughed, he outright disrespected me and I thought it was just hilarious. Him and I exchanged a few laughs and exchanged a few ‘ggs’ for good measure and both went on their way. I cannot recall the last time a PVP game made me have this much fun with dying! It’s because Battlebit understands one of the most important components of online games, it’s that you’re playing it with other people and NOT AI. Interacting with the enemy team, as well as your friendlies, through voice chat is unlike any game out right now. Without any doubt in my mind, Battlefield, and games like it, need to implement this feature in their next entry - it’s non negotiable in my book. 

There is so much fun to be had with Battlebit. As I unlock new weapons, play all the classes, and learn more and more about the maps, I have learned that The Battlebit sandbox is not a balanced one, and yet, I’m still having near unparalleled amounts of fun with the game. As a player that enjoys a tight competitive experience, I do also find myself pining for a game that is casual that also allows for skill expression. Despite all this, Battlebit does struggle with keeping all the weapons, on first glance, fair. There are weapons that are just potent at securing numerous kills in quick succession, like the Kriss Vector (a 60 round low recoil SMG), the Groza (a potent PDW with a lethal Time To Kill, as well as a few other oddities. These weapons are, by in large, outliers. Most weapons in the game have distinct enough of an identity to be distinct while also not invalidating a majority of the weapon roster. I've found it easy to pick up a new weapon and learn its nuances. Each weapon in Battlebit is a tool that the user has to learn how to apply to different scenarios, and with the game boasting a respectable 40+ weapons, there's tons of different firearms for players to learn and master. Beyond just the weapons, there could be a few minor tweaks made to the class system as well. Each class has a greater sense of identity than even the ‘operator based’ system present in Battlefield 2042. Each class has a set amount of gadgets, a particular weapon pool (with some overlap) as well as interesting and engaging passives. The Support class has the most exclusive weapon pool. 2 Light Machine Guns with the largest ammo capacity in the game and Light Support Guns, the more nimble cousins of the Light Machine Guns. The support also has the option to equip the EXO armor, the most durable of all the armor classes — you borderline become a walking super soldier, albeit a slow moving one. To top off the class, they get access to exclusive fortifications and place all fortifications instantly. They are, by far, one of the most unique and interesting classes in the game. Great things can be said about all the other classes too! The engineer is the uncontested vehicle buster in the game. Sporting many rocket launchers and various explosives. The Sniper class is unrivaled in its long range kill capabilities. The glaring problem with the class system lies within the medic and all the classes' relationship to healing. 

Unlike many other battlefield-likes or arcade shooters, Battlebit chooses to lean into its Mil-Sim gameplay roots by not allowing players to passively heal. In Battlebit, all healing is gate kept by the medic. The medic has a healing crate which brings all players back up to full health, including themselves. Let me make it clear: The Medic is the only class capable of self healing. There are no stim pens or other options which allow for Non-Medic players to even heal themselves once or twice, whereas all medics can heal themselves as many times as they want in one life. This in and of itself isn’t the only thing that makes the Medic feel like an outlier, they also have, debatably, the best pool of weapons to pick from: SMGs, Assault Rifles, PDWs and Carbines. By comparison, the ugly duckling of the classes, Assault only has access to Assault rifles, full stop. Beyond that, the medic has access to C4, allowing them to be an okay vehicle buster, team player and one of the most sustainable fraggers on the battlefield. Admittedly, I have too much time on medic because it enables me to be the aggressive frontliner I tend to play in nearly every online game.What I would like to see for the game, is to give some of the other classes a tool that gives them a finite amount of sustainability to aid them in between medics stopping in to heal them. Despite this class power imbalance between The Medic and the other classes, it hasn’t stood in the way of me having fun with the game. Never have I thought that I died because the other person picked Medic. The Medic is just an efficient fragger, an all around capable soldier. The other classes are less malleable than medics, but dangerous in their respective spaces. Walking towards a bunker downed Support with barriers and a 100 round machine gun is nothing to scoff at, especially with this game’s low Time to Kill. The Snipers will clip you when you least expect it, and be able to shut down key choke points if they are versed in the class. Battlebit's balance could be improved. The classes could be tweaked and the weapons could be tuned ever so slightly, yet all the aforementioned components of the game drown out so many of the nitpicks one could make, and do make, with the sandbox. 

Battlebit is something special because it is a step forward in gaming. Not in the way that we as gamers are used to seeing. Typically games are marketed on their leaps in graphical fidelity, new game modes or heroes, or they talk about how their game is oriented around being competitively viable. None of these aspirations are intrinsically bad, but we have seen how they can be used as a smokescreen to hide an otherwise lackluster experience. Battlebit doesn’t hinge on any of these. The Battlebit  development team instead looked back at games and combed them for which gameplay pillars and systems were worth featuring in their game. Proximity chat, a feature most often found in military-sims. Large scale, class based, objective oriented  combat synonymous with Battlefield. A minimalist, but stylized graphical look seen throughout the indie shooter scene. All these features come together to make a game that is oriented around a Fun-First. The development team has made a game that prioritizes fun first and isn’t concerned with trying to sell you elaborate skins or won’t keep you locked into a strict skill based matchmaking system. Battlebit is worried about carrying forward a fun-first gameplay in the FPS genre. Battlebit isn’t a better battlefield, it’s the first game in what’s sure to be the next big IP in the FPS scene.