It really felt like I have had a lot fewer chances to use vehicles in 2042.

@ElliotLH
It is natural to find more fun a supersoldier who can partially ignore friction on their legs to slide on rough terrain and to mostly remain accurate while shooting on the move VS a tank that moves like if it has not been serviced for a decade and in that time it was left outdoors to rust.

@MADMAC50K
In most cases I maintain that the best thing to have vs vehicles is more vehicles. Because the more the vehicles, the more time vehicles will spend fighting other vehicles.
This can be seen most clearly in situations where one team has an Ace pilot. First they deal with the rival air force, then with the AA vehicle, then the "happy hour" begins. The way I see it is that the more time the pilot has to spend dueling other fliers the less time he has to bother infantry and ground vehicles.

Fewer and stronger vehicles create a Behemoth situation (to borrow the term from BF1) where one or few people have a lot of fun at the expense of everyone else. We also have a Behemoth situation in Haven CQ as far the the Nightbird is concerned.

If one would include Wildcats on this map and mode, the Nightbird would instantly have a lot less impact without making life much harder for infantry. Same if one added jets here. I believe this is a good example where "more vehicle is actually less vehicle problems"

@MADMAC50K
/nods Kill based achievements are a big stinking sore in the gameplay design of this game.

I really do not see that much of a pilots ignoring each other in 2042. That was more of a BFV thing. But the core issue that caused it both games is how messed up Air vs Air encounters feel since BFV.

Personally I am always going for the enemy pilot first because I do not trust them to not stab me in the back. 2042 does not give you the chance to recover from a backstab in a dogfight.

Here is some early 2042 footage I recoded that shows how AWFUL Air vs Air can feel in BF2042.

[BF2042] Helicopter Ballerina : Attack Helicopters are not supposed to move like that... - YouTube

@UP_HawxxeyePersonally, I find transports enjoyable to drive usually, when my teammates aren't being unbelievably stupid, which is most of the time. And transports are almost always available.

The only 2 vehicles I find annoying to drive/pilot are the Condor and TOR.

The Conder, while it can slow down in jet mode, that is not sufficient and you will want to often completely stop for a bit, which is a massive risk with that slow switch speed.
Even the slowest fly-by without hovering won't give people enough time to spawn on the point (nevermind that exiting the condor, they will retain its velocity and get flung off!), and the gunner guns are not designed with fly-by shooting in mind. It is possible to continuously spin around a point, but the gunners hate it and since people can't see your past movements on the spawn screen, it can be hard for them to understand that you're not fleeing and they can spawn on you to contest. The only upside of the Condor is that it's somewhat easy to reach the ceiling and hang out there hovering, usually out of range of most AA, but that's a very boring playstyle.

The TOR's playstyle is simply unfun to me, even trying to play more aggressively. It's not fun to get cheap kills with the stronger ammo type, the delay in shooting is too annoying, the weaker ammo type is a bit more engaging but it is crazy weak, it runs out of ammo incredibly easily for how low damage it does.

Jets have a ridiculously bad default control scheme (on PC?), but at least it's editable to be a bit better. Sad that this doesn't apply to the Condor in jet mode.

With jets specifically, more vehicles does not improve things. All it takes is one good player on one team to shift the balance. One jet loses a dogfight, now it's 2v1 or 3v2, and it's only downhill from there. New jets dribble in 1 by 1 and they have to fight 2-3 enemy jets at once when they spawn, and that disadvantage is almost permanent. Wildcats are a similar situation, on maps with 2 usually 1 will be used up by someone completely clueless because they HAVE to take the vehicle at the round start, they then use it as a taxi or are completely clueless about how it works, and with a bit of air threat, the team gets permanently reduced to 1 wildcat despite having 2. Though I guess this is moreso a problem with how mobile air is, how bad air counters are (especially against jets!), and the spawn system. Could have spawn waves for (some?) vehicles, like Team Fortress 2 has for players.

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@UP_Hawxxeye wrote:

One of the main things that got me hooked into BF since BF3 were the vehicles.

But in 2042 if feels to me like I ended up spending a considerably longer time outside of vehicles.

I am trying to do some brainstorming as to why.

1. It feels that there are fewer available vehicles compared to the team size than in older games.
2. The vehicle loss penalty prevents you from getting the same vehicle twice in a row unless nobody in the team wants it for like 15 extra seconds.
3. Most ground vehicles have clunky: turrets, mobility, turret angles and 3rd person view (it was improved a bit on S7).
4. Most air vehicles feel bad in terms of controlling them. The Nightbird is the only exception which is still the complete opposite
5. Some specialists had way too easy a time vs ground vehicles pre S7 (Mackay and Sundance and their now nerfed 3 C5 dives.
6. 3 out of 4 classes used to be able to quickly solo a tank up close  pre S7.
7. I think that never before did the infantry have such an overwhelming number of Anti tank gadget ammo and anti tank options.
8. A well played infantry soldier ends up getting more kills/score than most drivers/pilots. This probably has a lot to do with how much downtime a vehicle has vs a team that is not incompetent.

Does anyone else have something to add to the list

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Regarding your points.

1. I agree.
2. I agree, during the beta, you could queue for a vehicle whilst it was timed out. I HAVE NO IDEA why such a great QoL was scrapped. Hell, this scrapped feature should've been expanded upon, where you could reserve the vehicle so that if you deployed as infantry you would get a message telling you to use the tablet within 10 seconds to call in your reserved vehicle or your vehicle right would be passed on. If it was an aircraft that you reserved, your life ticket would be preserved but if you died within 60 seconds, you would lose 2 tickets for your team.
3. I agree, only this year, did we finally get some form of UI for where passenger turrets are aiming. How 2042 launched without this, I will never know. Much like bigmap and quick big map.
4. I'd argue the nightbird is too easy to control and is at times just defiant of gravity like the Condor. I miss BF4 aircraft physics and airfields.
5. The lack of proper classes is the cause of this. Assault shouldn't have C4, just Recon and Engineer.
6. See above.
7. See above.
8. I think it makes sense that vehicles receive less kills than infantry, it would be kinda wild if it was the other way around. And still there are many people who go 50 and 0 in vehicles by camping and not pushing, and then there's the 80 and 0 Nightbird mains.

I think vehicles were woeful in 2042 overall. The fishbowl effect still exists on many maps for aircraft, the balancing was all over the place across the seasons. It was not what I expect from a AAA game.

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@S3SSioN_SoL wrote:

 

I think it makes sense that vehicles receive less kills than infantry, it would be kinda wild if it was the other way around. And still there are many people who go 50 and 0 in vehicles by camping and not pushing, and then there's the 80 and 0 Nightbird mains.

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I meant that it seems like the average top infantry does more total kills than a limited big vehicle with large weapons like cannons etc.

I am not factoring deaths on this, just kills.

I feel as if a vehicle (especially a ground vehicle) has a smaller killcount within its life relatively to older titles. I am not talking about fringe cases where a team allows the enemy vehicle to farm without enough retaliation.

I cannot exactly put my finger on what the cause is. But I think that the nerfed 3rd person view in the last 2 titles has a lot to do with it.