Tech
Five Things ‘Arena Breakout Infinite’ Needs To Fix Before Launch
The Arena Breakout Infinite closed beta has proven more popular than most people expected, but it is far from perfect and with the dev team teasing a release soon, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed first.
After the first round of Twitch drops was claimed within a few hours and subsequent rounds have also proven popular, Arena Breakout Infinite is currently one of the most popular games in the world and it is only in a closed beta, which is typically a good sign for a game going forward with its development.
However, after getting hands-on I was left a little underwhelmed by it and while it shows promise there is a lot that needs to be tuned up. A recent tweet from the Arena Breakout Infinite X account suggests a release date could be coming sooner rather than later, but before that happens, these are five things that really need to be fixed.
Make Movement More Natural
My biggest issue when playing Arena Breakout Infinite is still that the movement feels a bit clunky. Even when sprinting your character feels somewhat slow and lumbered. After playing for a while I’ve become more used to the movement but it still doesn’t feel great. An overhaul to movement speed and animation would do Arena Breakout Infinite the world of good, and I can only hope that it is something that is planned before launch.
Add Solo Queue
Arena Breakout Infinite is quite simply much better when played in a squad, and if you are playing solo it’s not a great experience. Whereas similar games usually have a lot of ways to avoid fights or even take on a squad as a solo player, that feels infinitely more difficult in ABI and it makes solo play frustrating. The simple solution to this is to add a solo-only queue, where the map is filled with other lone wolves. With the beta proving so successful there will surely be enough solo players to populate matches, which will give them a much better experience.
Improve Anti-Cheat
So far in the closed beta test over 2000 cheaters have been banned and more than 22 cheats have been detected, but there are still a lot of reports of cheaters being found in the game, and reports of false bans. Now, it’s not uncommon for cheaters to try and start a narrative that they were falsely banned and almost every other similar system has proven that most un-ban requests are from confirmed cheaters, but the official Arena Breakout Infinite Twitter account acknowledged the false bans and is looking into it, which adds some weight to the claims. If Arena Breakout Infinite wants to succeed it needs a robust anti-cheat system that can detect cheats and have minimal false bans.
Increase The Money You Can Make
While few people have played enough to experience this phenomenon, and the ones that have are generally quite good, it looks like it could be very easy to run out of cash in Arena Breakout Infinite as you start to play. This is hopefully just a balance issue and the team can increase the amount of money you can make, even while dying a lot so that you never get into a situation where you are out of cash. But the more cynical view is that being a free-to-play game, this is an intentional design aimed at pushing players to spend real money to buy in-game cash. If that turns out to be the case at launch then surely a lot of players will leave the game, because no one likes feeling forced into microtransactions. Instead, a smarter move would be to sell cosmetic items only and let the loot speak for itself.
Improve Spawn Locations
The Valley map seems to be the worst offender here, but there have been multiple times where within seconds of spawning I have been shot by another player. I think this is partly due to the somewhat barren landscapes in some areas, but the easier solution is to just move the spawns and put more cover around them. If it happens once in a while then it’s not a massive issue, but so far the frequency has been far too high and it’s another annoying issue in a game that seems to have quite a few of them.