Lock Specialists in Hazard Zone, restore Battlefield classes to CQ and the rest.

I love how nobody asked for Battlefield to be a hero shooter and yet, here we are.

Utter rot.

If I know I'm going into the second seat in a tank or the little bird, I equip the repair tool.

If I know I'm going into infantry engagements with my squad, I equip the ammo crate.

If I know I'm on my own, I equip the M5.

Specialists have little to do with loadout choices - communication is what matters. This is why we need VOIP, especially when playing with randoms.

@filthy_vegans The point is that they already had a system in all past games where one character could have a repair tool AND something else that was useful in their field, requiring more than an army of assault characters with a trinket. The point is also that you DON'T know how long in a single life you may have such a limited role as ONLY repair or ONLY anti-tank that only one piece of equipment provides, and having to die or depend on a respec box to fall from the sky in order to fulfil a slightly different role in what would be the same class is just bad design.

@Buzzfunk As far as being incapable of removing them, I'd point you to the launch of Xbox One. Microsoft designed the console to require its camera to be always attached, always on, and attempted to forcefully remove the option for physical, transferrable copies of games for arguably a few minor benefits but almost entirely as a means to push new avenues of profit. They legit patented a mechanism as part of that push to use the camera to determine how many people were in a room so they could charge more for at home video rentals - to the extent that the system would pause if somebody walked in after you started watching. They swore up and down that the whole of it was hard-coded and irreversible...until the gaming community lost their collective *, at which point MS patched those things out in like a week.

Clearly they have a mechanism already in place to modify the roster or it would be a pointless and costly undertaking whenever they wanted add a new specialist. All they would have to do is change the roster to 4-6 "specialists" with the AI soldier skins, give each specialist a selectable ability that is gear which would fall within a class, and restrict the equipment slot to the same. Name each specialist for the class. Boom. Classes restored in the time it took me to type this.

As for will they? No, specialists are likely here to stay because the system makes people buy new, even more outrageously overpowered specialists down the line. Apex Legends, Rainbow 6, and others have been doing it for years; Force a "meta" of a few top performing chars, change the meta either through nerf/buff or selling access to new chars, giggle capltalistically as about 60% of your player base lines up en masse at every new season/char release, and ignore the rest who quit in frustration or protest.

By and large these complaints are coming from everywhere. 32% positive out of 50k reviews on Steam. People are right to be mad because the changes and omissions fundamentally turn away from what the series is known for and they exist purely so EA can squeeze every last cent possible out of the community. If anything, it's only a few people who picked up a previous Battlefield game and thought "You know what, this would be way better if everyone had super powers in stylistically vacant maps that are too large for infantry but too congested and with too many players at control points for vehicles to last more than a few seconds. That's what I want."

@Stew360  I assume that's why Portal exists, except 2042 doesn't have standard classes even in Portal and weapons are restricted to the specific game soldiers. So there is no option to play BF 2042 as a proper Battlefield game in any sense as of such. Even if there were, apparently Dice didn't consider a chunk of the community using Portal to make XP farming builds, and the solution of late, while not outwrite disabling advancement in Portal games, is to put some kind of cap on progress. I don't think I'm out of line to find it unacceptable to be told that wanting actual Battlefield in my Battlefield means I and the majority of players who complain are required to play the "extra" mode of previous games at limited reward.

The issue is not that they tried something new. It's that they REMOVED so damn much while pushing a mechanic which does not function well in open world games that allow continuous respawns, and they're doing it out of pure greed rather than as a natural progression of the series. If they had restricted the specialists to just Hazard Zone and really made it an engaging play/story option while giving us a CQ midpoint between BF4 and 2142, I would be thrilled. It makes sense to have unique characters there and that would at least explain the lack of a campaign. But they didn't. Instead, they sold a broken version of a different format of game and used name recognition to sell it.