Boy I have a lot of feelings on this one. I've been playing BF since 1942 but put in most of my serious online time since Bad Company 2. I thought BFV was a great game that they killed just as they started getting it right. At the time the silver lining was that their team was moving to BF2042 to make it even better.
Having played around 10 hours of the beta I have to say, that almost all of the issues I immediately thought of the second they revealed the game are present in the beta, plus some new ones.
Before I say anything else can we just move on from the phrase "It's just a beta" or "it's an old build"? Whatever DICE says the betas and alphas are always 90% accurate to the game that ends up coming out. To think anything else is the case is delusional.
Firstly the stuff that seems good: The graphics are nice. Not a huge jump over BFV but considering they doubled the player count it's good they don't seem to have had to make any concessions. The "plus" system that lets you change attachments is neat and helps negate the issue you might have going from long fights between points to tight fights inside points. Shooting people still feels fun and there are a lot of fun ways gadgets can interact (C4 on drones, grappling onto the roof of a tank, etc). Overall my intial impressions are that I've had a good bit of fun.
The issue is with... almost everything else.
I don't want to be uncharitable but I would be lying if I said this isn't the worst UI I've ever seen in a Battlefield game. Buttons that open menus arent the same buttons you use to close menus. Things that are clickable look greyed out. The scoreboard replacement is enormous yet provides almost no information. You cannot see the ping of anyone but yourself. Half of the UI is broken but that's less of a worry than the fact that the design of a lot of it is fundamentally bad.
The movement system has removed a lot of features that made BFV feel great. No more crouch run, no more rolling after a fall. Instead it has just lifted the super sprint from MW2019. I'd be fine with adding that but it seems like they removed a lot of good things as well. This is a theme across the entire beta. It is missing loads of no-brainer, objectively good features from the previous games. No grenade indicators, vehicle spawn menu requires a click through to see if there is anything available.
The biggest issue however and one that there is almost no chance of them backing down on is the way Specialists absolutely destroy the class based teamplay that made the game different from CoD.
I'm going to give DICE a freebie and only briefly bring up the naked capitalism that is almost certainly the driving factor for them to chase the 'hero shooter' model.
Instead I'd just like to say that as it stands, without a huge rework, the Specialist system makes team work almost impossible. The only thing fixed to a specialist is 1 gadget and a passive perk. Everything else from what gun they could be using, to which gadget, to which grenade is all invisible to everyone but the person playing them. This means I have no idea which team-mate might be using a rocket launcher, and need ammo or who might be using a repair tool and keep them near my tank. The free for all grab bag means that you cannot rely on any of your teammates. This is awful.
The way gadgets are selected also strongly disincentivises team work. Since each Specialist comes with a unique gadget locked in it means you only get one other than you actually have any choice about. It means that you cannot pick, for example, a rocket launcher and a repair tool to play the classic Engineer role. You have to chose between something that directly helps you frequently (a rocket launcher, armour packs that give you extra hp, C4 etc) or something that much more situational that helps others (ammo boxes, health crates, repair tools). As a result in my 10 hours of the beta I found that almost no one was using anything other than offensive gadgets or armour packs. I do recognise that teamplay is always at an all time low during an open beta but I don't see this getting much better for the following reason: "meta".
Like it or not games like these are strongly influenced by Streamers. High level play of getting many kills is always more popular that support roles so they tend play very aggressively using solo builds. Because of how unrestricted tools are DICE is going to have to spend the entire life cycle of this game trying to prevent a meta where 1 or 2 combinations of Specialist/Gun/Gadget are dominant, usually lead by whatever is discovered and replicated by the high skill streamer community. Even without Streamers if one combo is clearly dominant it will spread on it's own. If you think these OP Meta Builds are going to be teamplay oriented I have a bridge to sell you. Already in the beta you see way more of Mackay (the Alex Navarro/Jake Gyllenhaal guy with a zipline) than any of the other class because his gadget is immediately useful across a lot of situations and benefits the player directly, rather than his team.
Then there's the whole issue of how they make team recognition impossible. A problem DICE could solve by limiting skins by US/RUS but its a problem DICE has needlessly created for themselves.
There is more I could go into, the but the Specialists are going to be a huge issue to overcome if this game is going to retain any sort of identity. My concern is that obviously DICE knows all this. They have hundreds of people who actually know game design, so they must know this, but they seem to be doing it anyway, so they must not care.
It's not unsalvageable. If they restrict gadgets across class lines or provide a second 'free pick' gadget instead of the unique specialist one there is a chance teamplay will survive but as it stands I'm simply not convinced its a goal they have.
Reading what I wrote you'd think I hated my time in the beta but the sad part is I've had fun, but it's just on the cusp of being truly great. I play often with friends on VOIP and with that we are able to replicate some of the class synergy from the previous games but it has been harder than it ought be. There's way more I could say but the criticism is all out there. The BF2042 reddit has a lot of hyperbole but it also has a lot of really accurate observations of all the ways DICE seems to have thrown the baby out with the bath water.
I hope they pull off something really incredible by release but at this point I'm honestly almost wishing for another delay.
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