Battlefield V: Lightning Strikes

With the release of the second ‘chapter’ of the Tides of War feature, I figured it was time to write a brief update on the current state of the game. For those unaware, Tides of War is a series of weekly challenges, similar in style to the daily assignments. The chapter is split across multiple weeks, and each week will feature a unique set of challenges to complete.

By unlocking and completing each challenge along a branching path, you can earn a new weapon or cosmetic item every week until the end of the chapter. These challenges also grant you chapter experience, which contributes to a chapter unique level system. By progressing through this system you’ll unlock various weapon, character and vehicle skins.

Overall, I have to say I quite like the Tides of War feature. It’s a clever way of not only keeping the player base engaged, but also providing regular rewards for doing so. It’s also useful for encouraging players to try out different modes or classes, as some challenges are mode or class specific. That may be annoying if it forces you into playing a mode you don’t particularly enjoy, but the challenges are fairly easy (and fast) to knock out – I completed all of the week 1 challenges in a single session.

But as fun as the Tides of War challenges can be, they’re not really what Battlefield V needs. As I said in my review, what the game really needed post release was more content and polish. I’m pleased to say the game is in a much better state, with many of the bugs and technical issues fixed – it finally feels like the game has now moved out of the BETA state it was released in.

In terms of new content, we’ve had a new War Story added which, like the others, was a fun if forgettable experience. Whilst the War Stories may allow the developers to explore a variety of locations and characters, none of them are long or substantial enough to really make you care.

Also added into the game post release is a Practice Range which you wouldn’t think they could possibly f**k up but they somehow do. All I – and I’m sure many players – wanted was a simple shooting range where we could test every weapon, attachment and specialisation. And whilst this practice range does feature a shooting range it –

A) doesn’t allow you to hold more than one primary weapon at a time, so you can’t quickly switch between two for easy comparison B) doesn’t give you unlimited ammo, so you have to keep running back to an ammo station to resupply C) doesn’t let you experiment with various specialisations, some of which can radically change how a weapon handles D) has a very limited target range which makes practising with sniper rifles rather silly.

Hell, you can’t even select a weapon to test from an in-game rack but have to enter a shitty menu to find it. And, at the time of writing, you can’t even test the new weapons they’ve since added into the game. The Practice Range also has a really crap system for testing vehicles, with only a handful being available to practice in. There are several absolutely terrible mini-games though! Seriously, how do you f**k up something so simple?

There’s been one new map added to the game since release which is okay, I guess, but it’s currently only available in Conquest, which isn’t my mode of choice, so I’ve not played on it much. They also added in a new mode called ‘Squad Conquest’ which is just a smaller scale version of regular Conquest with only 16 players. Fun, for a few rounds, but I don’t really see the point of it. I was going to write about the TTK changes they were testing, but that was a total mess and rapidly reversed so there’s not much to say.

I’ve played Battlefield V for over 180 hours now and I’m certainly going to keep playing it over the coming weeks and months thanks to these regular challenges and rewards. But we really do need more substantial content than just new weapons and vehicle skins. New maps – not modes – are a must, and I really hope they lay out their plans for more future expansions beyond the Battle Royale mode scheduled for March.

I still have my concerns that because Battlefield V didn’t perform as well as EA expected, they’ll just cut back on post release content. And that would be a damn shame, because there’s a lot of battles and locations that would be fantastic to see incorporated into this game. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.