I want to just start with saying that I’m loving the game, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering to take the time to give all the feedback I’m about to.  So in no way am I trying to trash the game, I’d simply like to see it get better and hopefully one day be more popular as a result.

As a background to my experience with the game, purely for the sake of giving some credibility to my time spent with the game; I’m currently #8 overall on PS4 with over 160 games played and a 75% win rate.  I started with the beginner control system for about my first 20-30 games before realizing that some people were flying in ways I simply couldn’t, which was the point where I made the switch to expert controls and I’ve been flying that way ever since.

Do note that of course these are all just my opinions and I can’t speak for everyone. So with that in mind, if anyone disagrees with me, remember I’m just a person trying to help the game get better in the only way I can. If you take the time to disagree with me, try to be nice, I’ll appreciate it a lot. :)

Without further ado, here is my hopefully comprehensive list of feedback and suggestions to make Dogfighter WW2 even better:


Rewards, Experience, and Air Pass

- The exponential nature of experience required for reward levels and the fact that the Air Pass and standard levels don’t share the same experience pool is a pretty big problem. Currently there’s only one play playing at a fast enough pace to potentially complete all 70 standard levels and even then I have my doubts to whether or not he’ll make it.

- If this games wants to go main stream the reward system and Air Pass will need to work to be more accessible/complete-able to a wider audience. 1/35k + players is no where near the right threshold.

- Reward levels giving out items that are only temporary and last a few days has a pretty bad feel to it. I’m sure this is because there’s only limited stuff to reward players with right now, and you want to push in-game purchases, but this should be fixed asap.  Please don’t take away things that you reward someone with for playing your game.

The Zone

- Zone movement and duration's could use some improvement to make them more noticeable.  Sure, I’m making out fine and I’ve got used to following and anticipating them, but sometimes more clarity would really help know when to end a fight and get moving or not. This is especially true early on when the zones are the largest and your in the middle of a fight, you don’t always notice that the zone dropped and now is the time to resupply and get ready for the next zone to appear.

- The minimap having some kind of indication of where the next zone is would help a lot. Not that opening the big map is a huge issue or anything, but I’m often checking the minimap during a fight anyways to get an idea where enemies are or what an opponent that escaped my field of view is doing so I can get them back in sight. It’d be a small step to help address the above concern.

Player Names

- It’d be nice to see other players names above their planes while on the loading screen. I’ve learned to identify some frequent higher threat players by their unique customization's, but I still can’t easily put a name to the plane.

- When I get shot down it’d be nice to see a name of who just shot me down, maybe even having a spectator cam so I can watch them for a bit before I exit and join the next match. Potentially even add some output of their leaderboard stats so I can know how good the player you just shot me down is.

Controls

- Expert controls are by far the best and only way to play the game at a higher skill level, there are simply things you can’t do without them, and many of the evasive maneuver controls can be done yourself without using the button while in expert controls.  That being said, it does bring some difficulties of it’s own along with it’s benefits.

1) You no longer have aim assist (a thing I personally love, I have to earn my shots!), but that means every time I get an upgrade to roll or speed my aim sensitivity essentially changes. So every match I play I’m constantly having to re-adjust myself to the current sensitivity, this makes it really hard to get used to constantly landing accurate shots and following others smoothly without undershooting or overshooting and having to correct all the time.

2) Clicking and holding the right-stick and then moving it around to check your surroundings is just way to hard to do constantly and on the fly, so in turn I pretty much never do it which is unfortunate.

- In general looking around with the right stick doesn’t have any options for inverting the x and y axis, so it’s hard to wrap my head around find people while mid combat. Please add more options here!

- Being able to re-bind controls in general would be awesome, I’m not exactly sure how and what all I’d switch up, but using and switching items means taking my thumb off the flight stick which can lead to bad outcomes. In general I might be inclined to switch all the options of the d-pad with the face buttons. Either way, more customization would be great here.

Combat

- By far the shining star of the game is the superb dogfighting, the good mix of planes each with their own strengths and weaknesses makes for a really interesting and engaging experience.

- I’ve already posted this before, but I think the new items are a bit cheap and can make for easy I win experiences if you land them, and they aren’t that hard to land I don’t feel.  I preferred when winning a dogfight was purely based on your ability to out maneuver and gun down your opponents. Of the current 3 items, flash bang is the most disorienting and actually painful to listen to, but also the most reasonable if the duration was toned down to maybe 1 or 2 seconds instead of 5 like it is now, just enough to help you get away.  EMP is way too much, and has way to many ways you can use it to end your opponents game, beyond the most obvious get behind them, freeze them, and mow them down approach.  Air mines are pretty blah, but if your close on your opponents tail they do hurt for sure, so most of the time people just drop them in the middle of circling each other and then it forces a disengagement and re-engagement (which is reasonable compared to the other 2)

- Fuel seems like a kind of blah system to me, I think the game would be a lot more fun if you didn’t have to constantly make sure you weren’t running out of fuel and crashing. Without the fuel system it’d allow more focus to be placed on the combat itself. One kind of silly idea to keep the fuel around but replace it a bit would be to make it a nitrous type thing, so you don’t need to it to stay airborn, but when you have it accelerating would be closer to the speed boost effect and would consume fuel quickly.

- Crashdown is probably my least favorite mechanic and also the most confusing to me. It’s not the fact that crashing into another plane results in exploding, it’s the fact that both planes don’t explode and lose. For the life of me I can’t tell who wins a crashdown and why. Is it the location of the contact? Is i who gets credit for flying into who? Is it who have more hp+def and tanks is better? Until it’s made more clear and the system makes sense and seems fair, it just seems like RNG to me, and I don’t like it. I’d honestly prefer both players blow up and get eliminated at this point, that’d seem logical and fair, and it’d help discourage players from rolling the dice on a midair torpedo maneuver.

Environment

- I don’t know how it’d work in this game, or which direction you’re aiming to go (more time period based and realistic, or more arcade based and crazy), but whatever the case, having more environmental hazards to fly around would make combat more interesting.  The most interesting fights often happen near mountains or at low altitude when crashing is a threat and someone tries to use geometry to their advantage (for cover or to force you to peel off of a pursuit). I also like using blimps during combat because they add something interesting to a dogfight.


Well that’s all I have for now, hope the feedback is well received and comes off as positive. Again, loving the game and looking forward to seeing it get better and better. Thanks for reading!

Update (things that came to me after posting):

- Leaderboards. It'd be nice to have 2 separate Leaderboards, one that is point based like it currently exists and one that's based on some kind of ELO system. That way players can compete for top rank in both dedication to the game as well as pure skill based ranking that fluctuates and isn't as time intensive as the current system.

- You guys should replace your trailers for the game with better ones. I saw them after having played and fell in love with the game and I honestly don't know if I'd have tried it after seeing them. You need someone footage of skilled gameplay and interesting combat, glitch free.

- Item looting. I just had a match where I ran out of ammo for both my guns and I went looking for more and looted 10+ packages without getting more. I feel like that shouldn't happen, some kind of bad luck protection that gives you guaranteed ammo when your below a certain threshold and vice versa I've had matches where I've looted 4+ ammo drops in a row when at max ammo. It'd be nice to avoid that kind of stuff.

P.S. - Despite all my criticisms I'm loving the game and I just bought the Air Pass to support the team! Hope you guys get the time and support to keep updating for a long time to come.