[quote][b]Warning:[/b] Constructive Criticism and Opinions ahead. Try not to have a knee jerk reaction, it will just make you look really silly.[/quote]So it appears that Battlefront III has been announced and the forums are full of clearly hyped individuals who have waited for this day for a long time. This is well and good. However, I would like to take a moment to garner your opinion on what direction the series should take going forward. I'm going to cut to the chase: Battlefront II was not a very well balanced game. Don't get me wrong, it was very fun, and I did invest quite a bit of time into playing it; that's why I know that it wasn't a very balanced game. In my mind the core problem that plagued Battlefront II was the addition of Player Controlled Heroes. While it's fun to lead your army into battle as various Jedis and non-Jedis from the Star Wars Universe, the way that the Hero system worked in Battlefront II was extremely poor from a Game Design standpoint. The dominant strategy of the game revolved around farming as many points as possible so that you could unlock the chance to play as your Faction's Hero. At that point, you would immediately find the Enemy Hero at some location at the center of the map and duel him to the death. The result of this duel would decide the outcome of the match, because there are very few ways for the default units to coordinate an attack against a Jedi opponent, they are simply too powerful. For one, Jedis had extreme mobillity. I've played games where I won that Lightsaber Duel and I would immediately dash off to the rear base to capture it before my opponent could respawn. The enemy AI, now attacked on two fronts by my forces, would soon collapse. Occasionally, I'd find that the enemy player would be attempting to recapture one of the outposts I'd have taken. I'd simply dash over and execute him, and in the time it took him to respawn I'd already half captured another base. I never even needed to fight any player controlled characters to win the game, if encountered one by one of the command posts, I could just sprint off to the other and capture it by the time he caught up to me. It was pretty ridiculous. I also hope I don't need to convince the reader of the Jedi's Dominance in combat. You can literally mow through scores of enemy soldiers in seconds with your dash attack, dwindling the enemy stock by dozens every time you pass through their base. Many of the force powers were also very unbalanced, if you wer lucky enough to get a Jedi that had Force Pull, you had the exclusive right to win against every Playable Character no matter what they did, there's just no way to stop force attacks. Battlefront with Jedi heroes is just far too binary. Either your Jedi wins and you are roflstomping the enemy team, or your Jedi has lost and you are fighting tooth and nail to hold on against an opponent with superior mobillity and superior firepower. And on certain maps, there wasn't even a balanced "Jedi vs Jedi" matchup, you'd have something ridiculous like Leia vs. Darth Vadar. There's no way that's balanced or good game design, that's just throwing elements of the sandbox together and hoping that wishful thinking with make everything work. Battlerfront III needs to make a decision on what sort of game it wants to be, because in this day and age of connectivity and online play, the sort of things that happened in Battlefront II are unacceptable, and people won't want to play an unbalanced and unfair game, no matter how nostalgic it is. On one hand, Battlefront could return to it's roots. The original Battlefront was a great shooter, with good maps, solid controls, and a sort of relatively balanced fun that could last for hours. Hero units could exists as rewards for players who are doing well, they just need to be balanced. Giving people control over Leia or Boba Fett was never too bad, because those characters had roughly the same amount of mobillity as the default units did, and they were most certainly more killable than the Jedis that could force pull you or block your attacks with their Lightsabers. And you know what? If they did that, Battlefront III could still be a pretty fun game, even if you can't dash around the map slaughtering everything with Lighsabers. On the other hand, Battlefront could both embrace and properly own the concept of Jedi Heroes. If people are drawn to Battlefront because they want to zip around the map as super powerful Jedi, then why even bother with the infantry bullcrap? A much more balanced way of implementing Jedis that avoids the entire binary outcome that plagued Battlefront II is to spawn people as Jedis instead of forcing people to unlock them as a temporary powerup. If you balance the game around the idea that you are playing as a Jedi who is leading his army into battle, it could be a very different but still very fun version of Battlefront, much more like a MOBA than the original. What do you folks think is the better path? An Infantry based Battlefront, or a Hero based Battlefront? Or do you have an even better idea? Because Battlefront needs to evolve to survive the modern era in many ways, the Hero unit is but one aspect of the game that I feel could use work, and if people aren't too put off by my constructive criticism, I would be happy to discuss it more in the future. I put together this topic rather hastily so forgive me if there are any errors, and if you feel that I'm wrong about anything, feel free to let me know politely, we can debate a bit over the disagreement.