So I Played Some Battlebit Remastered

“Battlebit Remastered” is trending on YouTube at the moment.

At a glance, it has low-poly graphics, and is touted to have a lot of the charm that older Battlefield games had. (Maybe a lot of that is just nostalgia?).

I don’t tend to play multiplayer games. I did watch a video that pointed out the game had voice-chat enabled, a feature which relies on trusting the community to not be full of assholes; and puts it in contrast to high-budget multiplayer games where the playerbase is restricted from even using text chat.

So, it sounded friendly enough to try out.

I played it quite a bit.
I found the players are mostly friendly.
The gameplay was mostly pretty fun.
But, overall, I’m not inclined to think I’m missing out on tonnes of fun by only playing single player games.

Games Are Fun When They’re Competitive

I do play chess online against others.
Chess.com and lichess both allow chat; most games won’t result in a chat. The most common interaction is “good game” (which is often more polite than sincere), sometimes people get a bit rude, and very rarely will someone compliment.

But, since in chess there’s only one person in control of the moves, then chess is ultimately quite personal. Winning is good, losing sucks; but one of the better feelings is reaching a stalemate position when you’re in a completely losing position. – In one game, my opponent had taken all of my pieces, had my king trapped on the side of the board, had three queens on the board, and wanted to gloat by promoting the rest of his queens; fortunately for me, he made the one move which led to a stalemate.

One of the things that’s fun about that, with so many people playing chess online, it’s easy to have a game with someone who has about the same skill level as you.

With Battlebit.. I’m not very good at it. My experience was that “I saw the enemy, and we both shot at each other” happened 5% of the time. For the rest, I’d either get shot by a sniper some distance away (fair, I guess?, since these can often be avoided), or I’d get shot 0.1 seconds after seeing the enemy.

Perhaps there were times where I was the guy the enemy saw for only 0.1s before dying; but I ended up doing a lot more dying than shooting.

But my point is: if I were playing with people who sucked just as much as I did, I think it’d be more fun.

I guess having balanced teams is supposed to have the same effect. Coursely, it does.. in that whether a game is ‘won’ or ‘lost’ will be closer with a balanced team. – One of the least fun matches I played in ended up with one side completely dominating the other side, such that the losing side couldn’t make any progress beyond the spawn point.

At the individual level, there are roles to play other than shooting enemies up close (or from a distance). It’s reasonably fun to play the medic in Battlebit; being able to heal others and revive them if they’re shot.

I wonder about other solutions for making the game fun for people who suck at it (without depriving the fun for those who are good at it). – I’d heard that TitanFall 2’s multiplayer includes a bunch of weak bots in the game, which sounds like it would allow for players like me to have some gratification from helping out by killing those bots.

Social: Good and the Bad

I liked Zero Punctuation’s reply to “playing games with other people is more fun” with “watching paint dry is more fun with other people”.

I think some of the most fun while playing Battlebit was the random messing around in the peaceful pre-match preparation period. It was also fun when people goofed around in character when attacking an enemy’s defense.

Less-fun was people expressing their frustration about how they thought their teammates suck. (It’s a casual game; chill out).

There were also accusations of cheating.. and, eh… idk. – With chess, it’s easier to tell if someone’s cheating, because you can look through the game and see if the moves are moves a human would make. But generally, accusing others of cheating makes you look butthurt about losing.

Overall, I felt a lot of the gameplay involved following your squad or your team up until you encountered the enemy, and then either keeping the enemy back or following on whoever made a successful push.