Day one vet, Played all the prime titles and BC2. From my perspective the series tends to gain in some areas like destruction/visuals, but then loses on the competitive/strat/skill side.
We started the series with vehicles having “limited ammo” and the cooldown, reload system. Literally 100 primary and 500 secondary. Shoot 3, cooldown, reload, 97 left. When they got to 0 you hit a resupply point or you just didn’t kill any more. You had to be smart about how you played vehicles. Now it’s a spam fest.
Learning curve was pretty low in the base sense, but the skill gap could be huge player to player. Here’s a vehicle, this is what it does, ammo limit, hits limit, damage output, go. Here’s a flag, this is how you take it, this is the reason why you take it, this is why more matter, thus the objective, s’go.
People played for the fun of the game itself vs some other metagame like assignments, unlocks, mastering this or that, skins and such.
We generally had teamwork from spawn. We didn’t have squads, just a buddy list. I do like the squad feature. It adds to the games teamwork initiative. Squad orders are helpful too, but there shouldn’t be extra points for doing the obvious.
We didn’t need to awarded points for every single action. repairing, healing, spawning… it was a given that it would help the team win, so we did it. It’s insane that DICE had to develop a system that awards a player xp just to get people to do something. It should be a no brainer as to why you drop ammo and meds for teammates. If you don’t understand the reason why, then you should get roflstomp and lose every round.
Hand holding game assisted features … mainly the regen system. I can only imagine the outrage that would’ve ensued if regen was part of BF2.
It’s laughable that EA/DICE talk competitive this and that and then release a title having the most game assisted preset as default.