I've been playing every BF since 1942 but skipped 4 and 1 and was very intrigued by the game, but reviews + the negative media really turned me off the game, especially for full price... I finally gave in into buying the game about a week ago for 35€ because of the PSN Christmas offers.
My thoughts so far after around 35 hours of playtime:
Positive:
+ The core gameplay is fantastic, guns and movement feel extremely satisfying
+ Visuals and audio are top notch and more than often breathtaking
+ I really like the maps - Twisted Steel is great and Arras quickly turned into one of my favourite multiplayer maps in years. The variety is also great and for now the number of playable maps is fine for me.
+ Maybe it's because I haven't played BF since 3, but the squad focused gameplay really shines. Conquest is as good as ever and Frontlines and Breakthrough are awesome! Grand Operations are cool in concept (the Airborne part is so cool) but need some rework in regards of things like balancing.
Negative:
- Bugs, bugs, bugs!!! This is one of the most buggy releases (especially for a AAA studio like Dice) I've played in years. The game is so blatantly rushed out before christmas it really hurts. From characters glitching, getting stuck on the enviroment to menus bugging and displaying wrong things, it's such a pain.
- The netcode/server stuff seems really off, many times TTD is ridiculous and you die instant without getting any chance to react.
- The menus and load times are horrible!! The armory and company menus sometimes zoom in or out on items or display nothing, there are random things appearing in the background, joining a game but only having a black screen while being able to move and play the game in the background. Quitting a game takes fucking AGES and it's starting to frustrate. The menu as a whole is very unintuitive.
- Assignments not tracking, often times not making sense in regards to the gameplay and their variety.
- Customisation and company coin economy is bad! Things take far too much CC to buy, the stuff you can buy is mostly uninspired or crap, earning cc is hard and not fun.
Overall I really like the game and enjoy my time with it, but the negatives are starting to get worse and worse and frustrate. I really hope Dice puts all their time and effort into this game and work on it as hard as they can, because the groundwork is amazing and I could really see this turning into one of the best Battlefields.