As a long-time Battlefield fan who has poured 1000s of hours into the series, I can't help but feel disappointed in this game. The beta was a buggy mess with the worst UI I have experienced in gaming and it's clear the game won't be ready at launch which is par for the course with Dice at this point. But somehow this is not even the thing that concerns me the most. The game is fundamentally flawed and doesn't feel like Battlefield at all. It's very clear that they were inspired by Warzone and it shows. The game feels more like a shitty unplayable version of Warzone than it does Battlefield.
- The movement system is completely off. Battlefield V had one of the best movement systems in the FPS genre and Battlefield 2042's movement somehow doesn't even feel as good as Battlefield 4. Grapplehook doesn't belong in a game like Battlefield and it's clearly resulted in the majority of people using Mackay due to how overpowered it is. It also doesn't feel good to use. Soldiers run way too fast and the movement feels a bit floaty compared to past games. This movement speed also makes gunplay less fun since moving targets are more difficult to take down, especially with the lack of proper aim assist on consoles.
- The gunplay is off. The guns have minimal recoil, ridiculous bullet velocity, range, and feel like lasers. It feels like I am playing COD here, not Battlefield. Battlefield V had some of the best gunplay in gaming. They just had to build off of that. Instead, they decided to work with COD gunplay that clearly doesn't work in a game like Battlefield with massive maps. I felt like I was being killed from insanely long distances. And the worst part is, while the gunplay resembles COD, it doesn't have the same responsiveness or crisp feeling to it. It's somehow worse. Battlefield 3/4/1/V all had much better gunplay. And Battlefield 3 had some major issues with suppression and Battlefield 1 with random bullet deviation. Aiming feels completely off on consoles. It's like there is almost no aim assist on controllers.
- The specialist system does not work at all. And it's not just because of the character design that makes it impossible to differentiate between friendlies and enemies. It's the fact that there are no distinct classes and the game has pretty much eliminated any semblance of teamwork and squad play. Everyone runs around like headless chickens, lonewolfing and looking for kills. ZERO TEAMWORK. I never thought the series would get to this point but here we are. This was one of the core features of the franchise and now it's completely gone. You don't have to rely on your teammates for anything. The specialist system further promotes COD-like gameplay. No more distinct, teamwork-related roles to play here.
- The map is absolutely massive, ridiculously open with a very noticeable lack of cover, and defeats the purpose of having an increased player count of 128 players. The movement may feel fast and floaty but the game still plays slow and sometimes halts to a complete stop. This is some of the worst pacing I have experienced in Battlefield and a multiplayer FPS. The new sector system doesn't work or make sense. Orbital is way too large and way too open. I was getting shot from all sorts of random angles. Hell, I could see most enemy players as tiny figures far away at most times because of how open and large the map is. There wasn't enough cover to make map traversal feel strategic and enjoyable without being shot from multiple directions and distances of 50-100 meters. It takes ages to traverse from one flag to another without encountering any action. The firefights mostly clustered around a few capture points. This makes objective play tedious and unenjoyable. It's better to stick around a cluster of flags and hope that the enemy still holds 1 or 2 nearby flags so the gameplay doesn't stop. This map was clearly not designed around conquest. Maybe it was made for Breakthrough or Hardzone. But it's one of the smaller maps and it plays like absolute shit. This does not bode well for the other maps. Dice will need to completely redesign flag placement and make some major changes to map design to make it work on conquest.
- The spawning is atrocious. This is the most I have died in any multiplayer FPS right after spawning. In fact, the majority of my deaths felt like they were within 10 seconds of spawning. Spawning on top of the roof, around the rocket and the 2 flags in the middle literally felt like a death trap. A lot of my kills were also from enemies spawning right in front of me. Worst spawning system I have seen yet in a multiplayer FPS. How much time and effort did they put in here?
- The vehicles are ridiculously overpowered and feel like shit to use. I died more from helicopters and tanks than anything else. I felt like there was no effective counter here. The rock, paper, scissors balance formula that Dice had mastered with Battlefield 4 was thrown out the window here. It was open season on infantry players. But the worse part of it, the vehicles don't even feel as good to use as Battlefield 4, 1, and V. They lack weight. They lack the same feeling as past Battlefield games. They feel more like Warzone vehicles. The passenger seat weapons on vehicles feel utterly useless. At least on controllers. The vehicle balance is completely fucked here.
