Remember when the pinnacle of multiplayer shooters was big maps, two teams with a few dozen players, and a fleet of land and air vehicles smashing into each other at irresponsible speeds? Delta Force does, and for that it has my appreciation. Seemingly very little is binding this Delta Force revival, developed by Tencent subsidiary Team Jade, to the original run of '90s and early '00s shooters on PC—though there is a "Black Hawk Down" campaign planned for next year.
The inspirations behind the new Delta Force are fairly obvious. There are two modes right now: One that's a Battlefield clone, and another that takes after Escape From Tarkov. I've spent most of my time so far in the Battlefield-like Warfare mode, and I promise I'm not using the word "clone" lightly here—it's not just four classes, near-future military, and vehicles that Delta Force has in common with DICE's latest. Team Jade has mimicked very specific design choices that are distracting as someone who just reached level 90 in Battlefield 2042, from the layout of its menus, to the color scheme and graphic design of its overhead spawn map, how it divides objectives in sectors, and even the abilities of its operators and vehicles.
Some of the details are so exact I can't help but laugh at the level of unnecessary imitation. When you die, you stay in first-person and stick your hand out to call for a medic exactly like the last few Battlefields. The deployment phase of each map starts with an in-world voiceover explaining the narrative justification of the battle, a 2042 feature that I always found a bit repetitive. The first time I hopped into a four-person humvee, I was shocked to find the driver seat came stocked with the same two abilities as its Battlefield counterpart—an emergency smokescreen for quick escapes and a repair button on cooldown. The medic character I've been playing since the beta has specialties that are almost a perfect mirror to 2042's Falck—a stim pistol for ranged heals and a passive to revive teammates quicker.
There's a fair bit of modern Call of Duty in Delta Force too, but its influence comes across in original executions, like Delta Force's unexpectedly expansive take on Gunsmith. Every one of its 30+ guns have at least 10 customizable joints with dozens of attachments unlocked just by playing the game. "Unexpectedly expansive" is a theme of Delta Force: This is a lot of game for the price of free. Its gunplay isn't as snappy, maps as dynamic, or audio as impressive as the games it imitates, but I'm drawn to its charismatic operators and a few of its more original abilities, like my medic's steerable smokescreen wall.
I was having a fun, uncomplicated time for my first few hours. Then I discovered Delta Force's dark side. You see, on Delta Force's main menu there's a nice 60% of the screen where only normal, fun FPS elements like gun tweaking and operator profiles exist. But resting at the bottom of the screen are tiny buttons containing Delta Force's real business plan.
Sorting through Delta Force's various machinations for revenue generation last night made me want to immediately go to bed. Here's a (likely incomplete) accounting of ways to spend money in Delta Force:
- There's a battle pass ($7-$10), but there's actually three battle passes: One for the Battlefield mode, one for the extraction mode, and one that combines both
- There's a store: Visiting the store automatically plays a commercial for a $70 skin bundle. There's a handful of cheaper skins on offer too, but the real "prize" of the moment is…
- Gacha skins: There's an elite assault rifle skins that you can get by repeatedly buying $1 keys with a 0.30% chance of actually getting it. It's very likely you'll spend $100+ here before you get it.
- The Market: Where your hard-bought fancy skins can be sold to other players for premium currency, though the sellers are paid out in Delta Bucks that can only be spent to buy more skins from the in-game store
- Unique IDs: The rarest "pulls" of that AR skin come with unique ID numbers, conditions, and rarities that stink of NFT garbage, though as far as I know it's all a closed system in Delta Force. There's already one on the market for hundreds of dollars worth of Delta Coins.
- XP shortcuts: You can level up guns faster by feeding them XP boosts that you generate every time you do a gacha pull
- Currencies on currencies: There's Delta Coins, Alloys, Delta Bucks, Mandlebricks, Quantum Keys, and very likely a few other I'm forgetting
Man, what the hell is a Mandelbrick and why do I need one and a Quantum Key to have a 0.03% chance at a gun that looks kinda like crap? Spend any time engaging with these systems and you'll come away thinking they're confusing on purpose.
Which they probably are. There are layers upon layers of proper nouns and resource conversions at work here to obfuscate bullshit and heap importance onto what is ultimately a farcical circle of commerce meant to drive up prices as high as possible on goods that only matter in Delta Force.
Say what you will about Counter-Strike's marketplace and the ludicrous sales that occur on its grey market, but at least Valve lists items with the same currency I pay rent with, so I can look at a $400 AK-47 and obviously decide that's stupid. Delta Force is wading into similarly murky waters but filtering it through various funny monies. At a time when major games are grappling with how to monetize in the least exploitative way possible, Team Jade is throwing every type of FOMO at us at once. It's a precision attack on addictive behaviors. Pure whale fishing.
It's enough to make me want nothing to do with Delta Force, which is a shame, because it's throwing a big budget at a type of large-scale, team vs. team FPS that almost nobody makes anymore (and the Operations extraction mode seems like a worthy Tarkov lite). If I was starved for a game that's like Battlefield, I could probably leave those apprehensions at the door and have my fun with Delta Force. The game does not constantly push you to spend (at least not yet), so it's completely possible to enjoy its Battlefield-like moments and mostly ignore those buttons at the bottom of the menu.
But I'm not really starved for new Battlefield, at least not enough to bother with Delta Force's malarkey. I'd rather reinstall Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 1, or Battlefield 5, all better games that can still fill a lobby.
