The gaming landscape has changed drastically since BF2 days, and that means a little more flash and Hollywood is needed.
BF1 was well received by the community and for me, it's their best title since BF3. I understand thr frustrations with BFV - a lot ofnplayers are having thrm, especially when it comes to visibility. I believe starting fresh with a live service is ultimately what did them in but at the end of thr day, the player base wasn't split because of premium and a bunch of players spent lots on mtx like EA wanted.
BFV isn't a typical WWII game - DICE said right off thr bat not to expect the same old battles again. I've always found the WWII crowd to be worse than thr PC elitists - nothing good can ever come from tweaking a tried and true bread and butter battles of the second world war and it really bugs me.
My hopes are high with BF6 - I have no secret knowledge about anything BF6 related but can only assume a lot of care will be put into it with so many studios and people working on it
>> "The gaming landscape has changed drastically since BF2 days, and that means a little more flash and Hollywood is needed."
But what's enjoyable to players hasn't changed nearly as much. Just because DICE chose to ridiculously over-simplify the important parts of Battlefield while making useless complexity in other areas doesn't mean it was what the gaming market wanted. It wasn't, as I'll next show.
>> "BF1 was well received by the community and for me, it's their best title since BF3."
Bf1 absolutely was not well received by the Battlefield community. Coming off the success of Bf4, and promising a return to Battlefield's WW2 origin, Bf1 gathered the largest release sales in Battlefield history. But then it had the worst player-retention in Battlefield history and the number of players dropped like a rock after its launch and as soon as people played it and realized... 'this isn't the Battlefield I wanted, and this isn't very good'.
That's not the player trend of a game which was well received. By contrast, Battlefield 4's player-base continued to grow from Bf4's release right up until Bf1's release - the sign of a game that's well-received.
A series' next-game release sales are a comment on how good the previous game was. But it's player-retention is a comment on how good it is. Battlefield 1 stank in the view of the existing Battlefield community. And as happened when Battlefield 3 released and almost all the 1942 and Bf2 fans left the community because of the huge and awful dumbing-down and over-simplification of the series, the same thing happened with the Bf3 and Bf4 player-base with the release of Bf1, except on an even larger scale.
It was the new-gamer, console crowd which loved Bf3. And it was impressive to them because they hadn't played something similar or better before - it was their first-time experience. But most of those who had played something similar and better before were not happy at all with Bf2 - which is why the DICE forums were filled with criticisms and anger to the point that DICE permanently shut-down their forums (which had become nicknamed "Mordor") and wiped them of all the posts.
Bf3 would have sold huge no matter what it was, because the gaming market had grown many times in size since the release of Bf2, and people had loved Bad Company 2 (which the classic Bf fans had, incorrectly, unfortunately, assumed was a warmup for a full-scale return to the Battlefield main series, and so were satisfied with it), and because the console audiences had never played anything like a full-scale Battlefield game and were primed to be blown away. But then Bf3 was not the return to full-scale Battlefield that classic series fans had hoped it would be, and was instead more Bad Company 2 than it was a true sequel to Battlefield 2.
If DICE had delivered Bf2 style with Bf3, it would have been an even bigger hit and more impressive to those who got into the series with Bf3.
DICE have, so far, completely failed to understand what they have with their series, and have always thrown away the proverbial baby with the bathwater, seemingly oblivious to it when they do it.
Just because today's Bf audience is mostly fan of a certain gameplay style (because, for many of them, it's all they know, and also because the large majority of the fans from the previous games have left due to awful changes to the game design) doesn't mean it's what the gaming audience or Battlefield fan wants. If it were, then the large majority of Battlefield players wouldn't have left the series when the changes to today's style were implemented.
As the Battlefield forum feedback at the time made clear, that is simply not the case. And 80%+ of the people who stopped playing Bf1 after its release (especially the console players) probably couldn't tell the difference between DICE and community servers.
Also, saying that people left because of a lack of custom servers is saying that Bf1's core gameplay sucks so badly that the menu is more interesting than the gameplay. In the end, you're affirming what I said, which is that Bf1 did not impress and was not well received by the Battlefield audience, and so did not hold people's interest.
While good custom server options are important to have, just because people were playing on custom servers in Bf4 doesn't mean that's why they were playing. Due to too many large concessions and constrictions to its design, Bf1 simply didn't deliver on its promise to return to Battlefield's roots, and didn't provide nearly as detailed an experience as the game people had just been playing, which was Bf4. In fact, Bf1 is the shallowest experience ever offered in the main Battlefield series.
I didn't find Bf1 a dull game to play because of its server menu (though I really didn't like its server browser and limited options available, either). I found it a dull game to play because everything in it was maximum reduced to the point that it wasn't stimulating and engaging at a level that would be just average for the series, and it wasn't worth my time when I could play other things, including Bf4 - which, for the last few years, has had more people still playing it than Bf1.
