Battlefield Briefing: What We Learned From The Open Beta

Thoughts:

• Most of this is good. Hopefully most community updates are this detailed and clear. We've seen other AAA shooters enrage their community with vague updates (eventually corrected). I'll take infrequent detailed context over consistent garbage.
• UI changes cover pretty much everything I had an issue with. Woo!
• The game looked good and ran reasonably well on medium settings for me (PC). High and ultra were significantly worse. I'm confident this will get better.
• The issue we all seem to have with the specialist route is that near unlimited choice of equipment (more so than weapons IMO) will make it easier to meta chase what works best for the individual (especially in random squads... which is most people). There needs to be some separation beyond 2 special abilities. IMO, gadgets should be grouped into categories and locked to certain specialists. That combo should then be visible to the squad. If not that, then there has to be some way to clearly show that your squad is narrowly equipped and some nudges to diversify. TLDR: If everybody is special, nobody is special. I understand you want to appeal to players of that other AAA shooter... but getting too close isn't appealing to that audience either.
• Quick thing on controller mapping. PLEASE, please, let us bind individual buttons to vehicle controls and don't lock movement to just the sticks. L/R triggers are great for forward/back, up/down (muscle memory from racing games).
• Air vehicle movement was a step back from previous BF games. I get that you wanted to make things more approachable for new players... but I would argue the effect was the opposite. Everything felt floaty, no sense of momentum, nothing felt natural. Given how powerful air vehicles are... there needs to be a skill curve. Light ground vehicles have physics/momentum... so should helis/jets. BF4 helis were strong, but could be easily dealt with by ground/vehicle AA... but a skilled pilot could get the most out of them and overcome AA strength.
• Also, air based projectiles were all over the place. Some felt like shooting paintballs, others felt like they decimated targets. There needs to be some balancing on that front
• Hopefully I'm not the only one... gun sounds (indoors and outdoors) were pretty disappointing compared to previous BF games. Some more punch would be welcomed.
• The beta sniper bullet velocity was comically slow. Something like 600m/s. Sniping was rewarding, felt good, but that really stood out. Hopefully the initial bullet velocity is much higher and bullet drag takes effect and balances things out long range. Hopefully different snipers offer a more snappy experience.
• PLEASE, please add a reload animation when switching ammo types. I should not be able to fire 100 rounds in an LMG and then magically teleport 50 rounds from another ammo type in .25s into my gun. In addition... if you want to refill different ammo types... you should have to switch to that round and then get the refill. Sometimes things are too easy.
• From the sound of things (obviously without hands on)... it doesn't seem like the improvements to faction identification will be sufficient. This was something that was universally confusing. A cool solution could be a toggle for IR lights/strobes on friendlies (line of sight) like IRL soldiers. Other visuals like large faction emblems (flags) on skins or something like bold colored accents (arm bands) on all skins. Ideally, each specialist would have a wide variety of skins, specific to each faction (but that's a lot of work).

Honestly, even though core BF players are less amicable to change... I think most people understand that change is necessary to grow the player base of the game, sell more copies, make more money. It's a business. That said, IMO, to BF veterans AND new ones... squad play/teamwork is the central pillar or USP of BF (even before all out warfare). IDK what your market research is telling you... but as a long time player of other AAA shooters... ATM... there is legitimate wide spread burnout of modern warfare FPS games that empower/incentivize you to be a lone wolf/play your way (even if you are in a squad). It sucks. If the specialists structure is here to stay, every effort needs to be made to promote teamwork through the cooperative application of equipment and abilities. Without that distinction... you won't get player retention.