Had I just watched the 30 minute of reveal stream, I would be very disappointed. I was not very pleased with the devs talking about building stuff on the battlefield and what stupid customizations you can put on your soldier. It made the game sound like Fortnitefield. I also find it very unfortunate to put something on the stream, that bugged me a lot in BF1, and that is being bludgeoned to death by a guy that spawned on the person that I am bludgeoning to death myself thanks to overlong takedown animations.
The trailer shows that they go from the serious tone of WWI to the jolly good times of 75 years ago. Woopty-doo.
They did not talk about game mechanics at all, but the few things they did let out I was not that pleased with, either. Also they did not let anything loose about financing. Yep there will not be a Season Pass, but I would like to know how they instead want to get my money. If it will be just cosmetic items (yeah, right), or what kind of content they will lock behind a paywall.
It was not until I read some additional stuff on gamestar.de and through the german reveal, that I saw what kind of changes they will also implement. Also Jackfrags went into great detail about the mechanics. Here I acknowledge the fact that they changed everything from BF1, and that they will seemingly experiment a lot, but I can not agree with jackfrags conclusions or some suposed design intentions.
First of all, it is obvious that they focus more on visual mumbo-jumbo again, with the ragdoll physics, the flexible destruction and the super "immersive" customization options. To me it just seems that BFV will increase the workload on our PCs needlessly with a system that is also prone to bugs and exploits.
As far as mechanics go, getting rid of spread to a degree I find rather stupid, but is an obvious choice with the overemphasis on spread. I do not know what to think of recoil patterns but I have no idea how this increases the skilllevel, or how raising the ceiling is even a good thing. It is also counterintuitive and unauthentic.
I have no clue what game the developers played in the last ten years, but I think it is clear that revives never were a very common thing in the standard modes so why would they add a second-long animation onm this? Why would I revive anyone if I am a sitting duck for 3 seconds? Why would I grab and drag a guy to do the same? Players just do not work like that, and the fact that I can revive squadmates for an even longer animation does not help either.
Also why would I just not force a bleed-out and spawn again with likely more health? A tiered health system is just an as bad choice. If I am not at full health most of the time, why would I not always play a medic and drop my own bags? This lowers the incentive of playing other classes unless the medic weapons are horrible (which they will likely be).
While I agree with focusing more on teamplay and squadplay, I think they are totally not calculating with player mindsets. I am fine when I play with my mates, cool. But what if the enemy squads are just plain better and I have V1s coing down middle, left and right? What If I spawn with minimal ammo and have no flags to resupply, while the enemy team has 5 flags to do so? Wouldn't players leave and further increase the downhill slope of my team?
It is the same with the grand operations mode. Besides nobody having time for 3-4 matches in a row, if my team does badly on day one and is penalized for that, my team will just leave for the next.
My biggest issue, because this is obviously the main focus, since they only talked about it are the customizations. Putting leaves on your MG42 is cool. Painting your tank for better camouflage, or putting hay on it is cool. Playing a female German soldier with a Katana on her back and a clown wig is not. Yeah you can "roleplay" the standard GI, when 63 other players roleplay tankgirl, you will be the exotic one. It also has quite obvious balance issues: You never know what class and/or potential gun you are up against unless they make eight different variations of the same item.