@K4YBEL 2042 had both team and squad chat at launch. It did not have VOIP (though the betas had mic icons), and no chatting with the enemy team. I think is also had and still has the excessive censorship seen in BFV though. Where's my option to disable it? At least specialists tend to swear when shot at.
Even at launch prior to the attachments rework, 2042's attachments offered far bigger customizability than those in BF4. A short barrel + close combat ammo vs a long barrel + HP ammo can make the same gun drastically different: double the projectile velocity, ~35% slower ROF and greatly altered damage falloff, among other things. This is massive. 2042 had much more meaningful attachments than BF4, or Battlebit, or whatever other game. Even BFV.
BF4's attachments boiled down to sights, a lot of grips that change so little a lot of people didn't know they had negatives till DICE made a poor indication for those in the UI, laser sights that do change a bit, UGLs if you're playing the overpowered class and choosing between a heavy barrel for mildly more accuracy and recoil, regular barrel, and a compensator of some sort for mildly less accuracy and recoil.
The + system and the actually impactful barrels and ammo types are something I would rather be kept in every BF game after this, and expanded upon (penetrating walls with AP ammo? ammo that makes you MORE visible? etc.) rather than having a large array of guns with minor stat differences, I don't want another MG4 is the same as the M249 deal.
A singleplayer campaign is not necessary for a primarily multiplayer shooter, there are other much better singleplayer games I'd rather play. Good campaigns in multiplayer games are few and far between, and vice versa too. They are not going to make a Titanfall 2 campaign. They are not going to make BFBC3. You'd most likely get another form of RECKER RECKEEER OPEN THE DOOR RECKER. If I can choose between that and 4-8 more good multiplayer maps, give me maps. And the way EA were talking about it before launch, it seemed like there would have been a steady influx of remakes of classic good maps to portal alongside more than 1 AoW map. Now, that didn't happen. But if it did...
Commander mode doesn't fit into the gameplay. It would be either too boring and people don't use it like they don't do squad orders (nothing to do with 2042) / it needs a dedicated toilet pooperbase to be active, or it'd be killstreaks which I don't want. Unless you have some other idea for it? Or are fine with adding a slightly boring mode, but then, it's not a big deal if it's missing.
"We are going back to BF roots" is why I pre ordered. They won't get me with that one again. I agree with what you wrote but many here have been posting the same thing over and over. This has fallen on mainly deaf ears. I would like Battlefield to fall back to the BF3-4 days, but I think EA/DICE have other ideas. I could write down most of those things, but you covered them pretty well.
I agree with most of your assessment.
80-90% of this game's development cycle was used on a different game, focusing strictly on Battle Royale and Hazard Zone. The maps were built for those game modes, the GUIs were built for those game modes. No need for a scoreboard because they were last-man/team standing type game modes.
Then they pivoted at the last minute after closed-beta feedback and tried to shoehorn traditional BF modes back into the core of a game that was not intended for them in the first place. That is what we got at launch, a half-baked game with silly Specialists (go look at their punchlines to start the game), and some of the worst maps for Battlefield that you could ever imagine.
At its core, we still have a broken game, all running on poverty 45Hz servers just to serve last-gen consoles.
It is hard to strike out as many times throughout a game's lifecycle than they did with BF2042, but just when you think they couldn't mess the game up any worse, they add dispersion to all weapons.
