There's plenty of "missing features" to highlight as a problem, but christ I'm so fucking exhausted listening to people whine about the lower map count and lack of a campaign.
The campaign was culled because building a campaign requires a specifically tailored production pipeline with its own dedicated staff and resource/time/cost requirements. Battlefield campaigns have been routinely criticised and dismissed, with Bad Company 2 seen as the last highlight. They are historically not a drawcard to the series. It sucks that people out there do love them and feel the loss, but highlighting the absence of a campaign is not some clever insight into "missing features" so much as pointing out the fucking obvious: DICE/EA didn't see a campaign as relevant to this game. The absence of one is not indicative of anything lacking in the production pipeline, not while there's an entire mode that ports across multiple maps, weapons, vehicles, characters, models, skins, sounds, etc from three other Battlefield games. Any argument that the missing campaign is evidence is lesser production is offset entirely by the existence of Portal mode and its content highlighting more work.
The maps are not the same size as maps from previous games. How hard is this for people to understand? Do Gamers really think an open world map requires the same amount of work a single map in a game like Battlefield? Bigger maps inherently lead to more content. More assets, more frequent balance pasts and testing, more hand tailored enviornments covering a wider stretch of terrain. It is fundamentally ridiculous to think something like a Battlefield 2042 that's two to three times the size of a Battlefield 3/4/1/V map requires the same amount of work as Caspian Border, Operation Locker, and St Quinten Scar. It's dumb. So fucking dumb. I can guarantee you more people worked in a single map in Battlefield 2042 than a single map in previous games, due to the scope of each one. Of course you're going to get fewer maps when the maps are bigger.
I don't even like the game. It's pretty quickly ranked as my least favourite rendition of Conquest and I think most of the changes DICE made to the meta make for a fundamentally worse, less-Battlefield-like game. I don't like the map design at all. But jesus fucking christ gamers are pants pissing babies when it comes to shit like this. Lists lists lists, devoid of context, divorced from any understanding of how game production and development operates.
