Yes, it did.
BF1 launched in an Era very few in the BF community were even anticipating or desired. It’s setting was lambasted consistently and droves of community members were perplexed as to why DICE didn’t just make a ww2 game. It launched with significantly less content than its prior 3 predecessors did.
It didn’t get it’s first dlc for 6 months and as of February 2017, it lost nearly 50% of its peak 24h player base. There were consistent complaints about netcode, lagging players, gunplay being boring, the game being full of explosive spam, maps being horrible, games being unbalanced, people cheating, elite kits being overpowered, behemoths being cheesy, etc.
It saw multiple overall weapon balance changes, one of which was permanent, and changes to its gadgets to prevent spam that plagued the game throughout its first year. It had one of its dlc releases split in two because DICE was running behind. It saw a change to the game to make it better by applying server-side hit reg to players with over 100ms, and literally reverted the changes less than a week after they were applied and caused a huge controversy over it.
I mean, really - look at the guy’s comment above mine. There were plenty of issues, bad streaks, and controversy surrounding bf1.
People praise BF1 for its setting and authenticity and accuracy when it is objectively the least historically accurate and authentic portrayal of ww1 to ever exist in mass media. They literally made up and altered the hell out of battles, included weapons and cosmetics that were never used in ww1, didn’t faction lock vehicles, had inaccurate war stories, etc, etc, and people STILL to this day insist that BF5 is the sole title that did it wrong. Meanwhile people praise BF1 while running around as a black German soldier on a map based on a location no fighting happened in, using a gold plated weapon that never saw a nanosecond of combat, alongside golden and bright colored tanks that the Germans never used - and say BF5 “isn’t a ww2 game”. Pfft.
It’s just now the community is doing to BF5 what they did to every other game. The next bf title comes out and has issues like every other BF title, and all of a sudden the previous BF title was the best thing since sliced bread and has no issues. It’s complete BS and it happens every time another BF title drops. People said BF3 launched in a baf state and BC2 was better, people said BF4 launched in a bad state and BF3 was better, people said bf1 was nooby trash and that BF4 was better, and now people are saying BF5 is trash and bf1 is better.
I’m willing to bet cold, hard cash that in my post history on this very forum, there are multiple posts from 2016/2017 where I pointed out people exhibiting this behavior toward BF1 when it came out, just as I’m pointing it out now for BF5.
It’s a never-ending and consistent cycle that I’ve witnessed firsthand on these forums and Battlelog for YEARS. The moment a new title drops, people throw their rose tinted nostalgia glasses on and seem to completely forget the past 2 years we went through with the most recent game. People in this community seem to only have a memory that spans like 10 months.