Open vs locked weapons per class
Traditionally Battlefield has always been about classes, and with that came class locked weapons. This how it was and how it should be! One of the big mistakes they made with BF2042 was to first int...
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People will choose what weapon they'd like to run before worrying about what class they're going to play.
And why would that be? Because it is catered for by EA/Dice! During the beta on the open modes almost everybody and their grandma was running an AR, they might as well remove all the other guns from the game.
This travesty of open weapons was introduced in BF2042, not coincidentally the worst installment in the entire franchise.
Open weapons is a CoD mechanic and it’’s clear who they are trying to cater for, Battlefield has always been about the class system with locked weapons.
I was switching between a few weapons myself. I really liked using SMG's.
What about COD are you trying to compare though? COD plays a lot different than BF does, it has a completely different design philosophy. Any game will have a meta, that will never change. One weapon will always out perform others, until the devs do an update and change the meta to freshen up things. Nearly every shooter functions this way. And that's all they can do when you have 10 of the same weapon type. It's just about which feels best to you and which ones are viable in a particular meta. You don't have to follow metas, but usually more fun to do so.
All weapons should have similar TTK, but at different ranges, so here's hypothetically how they should be balanced (distances are just made up to illustrate my point):
SMG's should have the fastest TTK under 20 meters, damage drops off after that, then AR's become the top choice for medium encounters.
LMG's should have similar TTK to AR at the same range, the penalty for using a LMG should be less accurate hip fire, and longer time to ADS. The benefit is holding down angles without having to reload, and possibly the only weapon that should have suppression fire.
Shotguns should be very niche, and used for clearing out rooms basically. They should be only one hit under 5 meters or something like that.
Weapons should have defined roles, the problem is that sometimes it doesn't feel good then to use LMG's, especially the smaller the map is. Also, the community cried about the ADS speed of LMG's, which I can understand to a point, but we gotta figure out a way to define the roles of different weapons somehow.
