What Would You Change About… Heroes and Generals?

November 23, 2015 9:43 ( Articles, F2P News ) 0

What Would You Change About... Heroes and Generals?

We’re looking at Heroes & Generals for our newest “What Would You Change About…?” article, a dual free to play MMO where players can enjoy real time strategy as a General and distribute troops and resources across a real time map or play the first person shooter element as a Hero and engage in mass team based PVP. The game is set in WW2 and has a lot of positive and unique features, however, it also suffers from a few major, but easy to correct, problems that we feel are really holding the game back:

• Upgrading Gear Takes Too Long - Buying new items and upgrades as free to play is very grindy. Heroes & Generals is far from the only MMO title that focuses on getting players to stockpile their earned resources/currency so that they can purchase new gear if an MMORPG, cards for TCGs, weapons for Shooters. The problem is that the pace that players bring cash in compared to how quickly it goes out means that levelling up your gear is extremely slow and painful, almost to the point where we would question the pace being a deliberate attempt to manipulate players to paying for Premium member status. Instead of having a playable base game and membership offering extra perks and conveniences, it feels like the game has been made a grind and purposefully inconvenient (and at times just not fun) and membership removes the penalty as opposed to just giving a perk. We feel if they wish to stay with this kind of model then they need to readdress the cost of their items, as buying them is even more difficult because…


• … You Also Pay For Repairs - You have to constantly pay in game currency to play the game. Whilst plenty of games have money sinks to spend currency on and keep you in game, players of Heroes & Generals get double whammied with the high cost of new gear and the ongoing maintenance of their current items. Gear gets damaged and so players must pay to repair it or it becomes redundant. Players also have to pay for every consumable they might use in a battle and constantly replenish them. Want to throw a grenade in a battle? Do a quick accountancy, check to see whether the rewards earned from a kill make financial sense. Loading up your bazooka to take out an enemy tank? Check your maths again because the number of missiles it will take to kill it may put you in a deficit. That’s the reality of the game and players have to decide whether it makes financial sense to use these items, or save the cash for the inevitable repairs and upgrades they want and can’t just play the game and have fun. We’d suggest sticking to a single money sink model; buying expensive items, repairing gear, or buying consumables…. don’t triple whammy players so that they are once again forced to consider investing in membership.


• Early Access/Open Beta - The game is STILL in Early Access with no end in sight. It has become a bit of a trend where developers keep games in a permanent state of “Beta” and yet inevitably players see little change to the game in this time or developers acting on suggestions and feedback that you would expect a test to be about. If it’s more of a stress/technical test then it doesn’t need to be a year long. Honestly we feel that developers keep their game in beta so that they can brush off any negative feedback with a “well the game is still in Early Access” even though it’s clear it will be 90% the same as the eventual launched product. Stop saying the game is Early Access a year after open beta started; take the negatives about the game and deal with them.


• Limited Maps - The same old game modes and maps get a bit boring. Whilst the maps in the game are pretty decent for the most part, with a few individual issues here and there, and are at least fun when you first start playing the game; unfortunately this doesn’t last. The pace at which new maps in particular are brought out is extremely slow and so players are left to fight over the same locations, camping the same points, capturing the same locations in an endless back and forth that, in itself, can also be quite tiresome. We’d love to see more maps, but in the event of lacking developer resources we’d prefer some more objectives, or switch up the constant three point capture mode and instead change it to two points every so often or even one, or even have points spawn randomly across the map each game so no game is ever the same.


• Inability to Switch Characters - When playing with a character in a match you can quit the game and switch to a different character. This is particularly frustrating as some games can be really long is Generals keep pumping resources into the game, and if you see that your sides composition is lacking then it sucks not being able to do anything about it. There’s plenty of games where after each death in game you have the option to switch characters/classes, which with Heroes & Generals would make sense as the concept is that each side has “lives” and each death is the death of a soldier in the war, so it surely makes sense that the next soldier you play could have a different set of skills right? We feel this would add a much more tactical game with constantly changing strategy depending on the flow of the battle.

So that’s what we’d change with Heroes & Generals, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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