I quit playing BF. WAs my go to for a long long time.
I never bought the last one. I actually liked the big maps of 2042, but was completely unfinished and buggy as usual and they didn't seem to know what made the original games great.
Bfv made everyone sit in the weeds. AT least that's what it forced me to do.
BF1 was pretty good in many respects, but everyone would just rotate flags constantly. And the game let matches continue on long after they were over. And sometimes they were over in 3-4 minutes but went on and on. Also not good for the experience of the many when they let people quit constantly when their team isn't dominating. Another annoyance was how players were too focused on doing their BF homework instead of playing as an army and a team. If xyz weapon assignment was out then everyone would be doing that. Felt stupid. And if the assignment was sit in a flag zone prone with a pistol and a med kit that's what you'd see everywhere. Also missing from BF1 was the nice big maps and vehicles mostly in the DLC. The DLC only had 3 maps with tanks and planes. The map vote system was tyranny of the majority which meant the same 5 maps got vast majority of play time. Should have been like Mario Kart where votes are names in the hat. And the map is drawn out of the hat.
BF4... was rescued by Obliteration mode. Which they gave up on too quick. But the beauty of that mode was the need for teamwork to get objectives and how you had to pay attention to objectives or you would lose the game. Killing people was in a way secondary. IF you were just going to sit back and peg people off...then you're likely to lose because you're eventually you'll die and get overun by the people playing the objective. Made really good use out of giving each other rides in vehicles. And another beauty was the game was over quick if the teams were lopsided. You could knock out the enemy sort to speak. Instead of the game dragging on lopsided for another 10-15 minutes.
Another problem with the franchise. It would send the side modes out to die. The ones they did support say in 2024 and BFV were really just the same modes. REduced to a choice between do you want big battles all the time or a combination of big battles and small battles.
The first games were best. Once the franchise got mainstream... the gameplay got watered down. And seems people care too much about stats and how many versions of an assault rifle the game had.
Oh another big knock is balancing out matches with roughly equal skill levels. Obviously not possible to be perfect. But too often in too matches one side is loaded and ...that's a big reason people quit. To various degrees they allowed team switching which almost always was people switching to the dominating side. They never seemed to address this. LEt me people do however they want to the detriment of the overall experience.
Another example of their horrible management of the experience is starting rounds with lopsided teams. I played the small conquest like mode in BFV a few times and every session there would be too many rounds that started with 1v6 or 2v7... Super lazy on their part. This was present in other BF games as well.
...an example of a well managed online shooter is Splatoon from Nintendo. They actually gave a lot of thought to the mp experience in terms of varying and showcasing maps & modes, penalizing quitters and not letting people pub stomp with friends in casual modes among other things.
