Massively disappointed with BF 2042

I agree with a lot of what has been said. I've gobbled up everything DICE has given us since BF2 and loved it. I even thought BFV was great when a lot of people seemed to hate it. So, I was really looking forward to 2042, I thought they would knock it out of the park. But got to say, from what I've seen so far, I'm bitterly disappointed.

The sound is a huge step backwards. DICE were always head and shoulders above the rest when it came to sound. It was big, multi-layered, immersive, detailed, added so much to the atmosphere. And it added so much to gameplay too, your sense of what and where things were happening. But the sound in this is terrible, it lacks any oomph, it feels muffled, it's just so underwhelming. But worst of all, they seem to have mucked up the directionality. You can hear footsteps etc but get no clear idea of how far away they are or from what direction. It's like they were trying to emulate the kind of sound from a Christopher Nolan film but it just doesn't work.

I don't like the maps so far. Maybe a part of that is just me needing to learn them better but there are some fundamental things wrong. There's a lack of cover, a lack of detail and a lack of that gritty, messy feel of a battlefield. There's too many bland flat surfaces, no texture to things. A lack of little incidental bits and pieces lying round the place to make it a more believable environment. And I'm so sick of seeing shipping containers! They seem to have gone all in on the huge maps but at the expense of creating detailed environments. The only exception to this is the foliage and plant life which is done brilliantly.

The maps seem to lack flow, it seems hard to see a clear way to flank, there's no sense of a frontline (in conquest that is). It just seems hard to have any sense of situational awareness - of what direction enemies or likely to be coming from, of where you need to be heading to next. As @hairy1611 mentioned. they just seem to be big for the sake of it.

The destruction seems disappointing too. A big draw of BF games was the way it felt like a real, tangible environment that you could interact with and affect. The way at the start of a round, you could have a flag area fully fleshed out with farmhouses, forests, outbuildings and at the end of the round it could be unrecognisable with everything levelled to a WWI type cratered moonscape. I thought they'd build on that but it seems almost dialled back. Remember the very early tech demo they showed with a skyscraper crumbling? That never made it in.

The movement feels clunkier. The gunplay feels off. They binned the health/ammo system from BFV which I thought worked great. You could find yourself low on health, down to just your pistol but you knew if you could just somehow survive to make it back to that flag with the med station and the ammo dump, you'd be back in the game. Or if you were out of RPGs with an enemy tank nearby, the tension of trying to sneak round to re-supply so you could take him on. That was a great gameplay mechanic, gone now.

The frame rate is shockingly bad sometimes as well - and I'm on console. That might improve in updates but we've all just paid top dollar for a finished product, it shouldn't be an issue.

The interface is astonishingly bad. There's no server browser, no filters. There's no personal stats screen. There's no way to go in and manage your loadouts etc without going into a game. You basically just get a play button for each of the 3 modes, nothing else.

When you do join a round, you don't stay with that group of players from map to map. I enjoyed when you could - if you got hammered by a group of opposing players one round, you knew you had the chance to get your own back on them in the next round.

And there's no scoreboard! I mean, seriously??!? You can get a snapshot of how you're doing in game - but not the rest of the players. And even then you can't even do that when you die and are waiting to respawn - which is precisely the time you would want to take a quick a look at how things stood.

The only step forward they've made that I can see is bigger maps and a higher player count. But it seems to have come with a heavy cost with a lack of improvement in other areas and big steps back in a lot.

I've really been trying to like this game. Maybe they'll improve on it over time. But at this point, it's been a big disappointment that I'm not enjoying at all.