5 Essential Things Breakpoint Desperately needs - Survival isn't one of them.
Breakpoint has huge Potential but it also fails in quite a few areas, while it tries to be "Realistic" it has quite a few shortcomings
1. Animation Cancelling
Currently in Breakpoint, if you are being shot at the player continues to do the animation until the animation is finished! Which means if an enemy is shooting at you. The game forces you to finish the animation while being shot at. "Realism" meet window.
Animation Cancelling is one extremely important mechanic Breakpoint lacks. Currently, Breakpoint uses the 90s system of looping animation until finished before player can move again. This occurs in key areas such as object interaction ( hacking a terminal ) or picking up a body or anything that requires an animation to be played.
The reason modern-day games uses a "Hold to Interact" feature is because it allows the player to cancel the animation if something goes wrong - such as being shot at.
So if the player releases the key midway - it stops the animation immediately and gives back user control.
While on the Note of Animation Cancelling player needs an option to drop from ladder and suffer fall damage based on height. Again an operator is not going to slowly go down a ladder and keep getting shot at. They rather fall and roll.
2. Reinforcement Mechanism Overhaul
Currently, the way Reinforcements work ( or not functions at all ) makes the game insanely hard or insanely easy.
If a Drone Spots you, instantly Hunter Drones attack in seconds.
Or if you attack a Base there is a limited number of enemies that can easily be killed because you don't need to worry about Reinforcements.
Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain is a great game to take a page from here. In MGS:PP each base has a "Radio Room" that means an Operators job is first to scout the area - locate the radio room and shut it down before enemy calls in reinforcements.
Breakpoint can easily take this a step further by having a Radio Operator and a procedurally based Radio Room. That means after the area is cleared the radio room can be placed in any of the other buildings next time the area refreshes.
That means each time it will be a different experience for the Operator.
3. Meaningful Day / Night Cycle
Currently, as players have shown the day-night cycle is meaningless - the difference in enemy vision is only 5m between the two.
Besides that there is 0 variation. MGS:PP again shows how it should be done. During the Day you have a larger the main building and few patrols outside.
During the Night there are more recon patrols and fewer guards in the main base. Many of them sleeping in beds.
Also, a reinforcement and guard change mechanism exists in Phantom pain. Early Morning hours a troop transport truck appears which will cause a gaurd change in the area. All the remaining troops head to the truck leaving areas vulnerable.
4. No more Omniscient AI.
The Ai in Breakpoint is terrible. On Red Alert Status - they always 100% know where you are.
This image below is me - more than 500m from any enemy, not visible to anyone. Yet a Mortar is constantly firing pinpoint shots at me magically.
The game obviously is using a simplistic cooldown mechanism instead of an actual hunting mechanism. Where red status is based on a timer instead of actually using the last known position. It is understandable you want the game to be difficult - but that is where Reinforcement mechanism comes in.
Once the status goes red have Enemies call in reinforcements by Chopper to land in an area within 750m of last known posistion, then have 2 - 3 fire teams sweep the area.
The Player is alerted by a Coms officer on how long before reinforcements arrive, letting the player decide whether to hunker down or bug out.
5. Civilian Interaction
Currently, the game lacks any meaningful civilian interaction. It is just cookie-cutter random events such as a Hostile holding a Civilian Hostage, then the animation stays like that for years until the player does something. The enemy needs to actually shoot the civilian after a period of time, or let them go after interrogation. Which could even mean interrogating the civilian to find our last known area of operations, which would increase alert status in that entire quadrant. So you need to take out the hostile before the Civilian spills their beans.
Then have the civilian actually thank you instead of just running away.
Finally Zip Tie Civilians. When an Operator controls a room they don't simply let civilians to walk around, they pose a threat especially if they are hostile in civilian gear.
When you point a gun at a civilian have them react in 1 of 2 ways. Either put their hands up, or try to run for the alarm \ gun.
P.S
I STRONGLY RECOMMEND developers play Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain - it is a much older game but done extremely well. With Solid Ai that actually hunts you realistically, solid combat that is not based on something silly like Gear Score, and tactically difficult. In Comparison Breakpoint feels like it is made by a B Grade Indie Studio.
Phantom Pain is 5 years old ( much older if you consider development time ) - and yet it has a better Ai, better stealth, better gun mechanics.
Which means Breakpoint has no Excuse for anything. We are supposed to improve on existing mechanisms ( that is how evolution works ) not find ways to make them worse.
I am still seeing 2D Bush Sprite Textures in some areas in Breakpoint which is just Ps1 level of Embarrassing. Vulcan is not going to make anything better when so many things in art need an overhaul. Which is best done Quadrant by Quadrant with each update doing an Art pass. The world is empty, bland, there is no detail or life to the world. It is just randomly placed fixed items and call it a day.
Division 2 Art team did a fantastic job adding life to the world. You should ask them for tips.
Or just Hire Hideo Kojima to take over Breakpoint Production and he will overhaul the entire system properly from the ground up.
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