Good, this franchise needs some tough love. Free to play might bring more players, but it still would support their business model of selling specialist skins. Specialists are one of the major issues fans have with the game and EA shows no signs of reversing course and returning to a more balanced class based system. combine that with all the bugs and negative fiascos this game has had since launch, 2042 would need a major overhaul to become the success they wanted it to be.
Normally articles about Kotick getting payed undeserved amounts of money would boil my blood, but not today, we all knew he was never gonna get fired without a fat check. The money doesnt even matter, the payment is more about pride and respect. lets say money was beans and a person had 100's of millions of them, set for life, and that person then gets 100's of millions more beans to leave their job... its meaningless. Kotick is just enjoying seeing the bean count go up, yet it does nothing for him, and that brings a smile to my face because he is on the way out, he actually lost; though he will never see it that way.
The specialists are a tough dilemma, on the one hand they spent x amount of time making this system, from unique looks to gadgets and backstory etc but on the other hand just like you mentioned they are too unique. BF players want to be a generic looking nameless soldier, so that we the players put our own identity into them. Of the beta streams I watched it was pretty immersion breaking seeing identically distinct looking specialists' fight each other, it just looks like clone wars. Opposing factions also lose their identity when they are hiring the from the same pool of specialists.
The specialist lockout idea (limit 1 specialist type per sqd) sounds good but when players are given restrictions they will just go around them by not joining any squads or creating a squad and getting first dibs on their preferred specialist (I assume this is still possible just like in former BF games, but I didn't play the beta) and this will just encourage lone wolfing more. In past BF games some servers had rules forcing people to sqd up, which would cause frustration if a specialist limit per sqd existed.
I know the devs will stick with the specialist feature come launch but I hope they tweak it down the road. Personally Id scrap it for the old class system, or at the very least remove their unique faces and backstory, and go back to being generic soldiers with focused loadouts and gadgets.
Fall damage is minimal, if the quickest straight path to your next objective takes you off a cliff, jump instead of taking the long way around. Opposite this, you can climb small or even large mountains if you find the right series of scalable ledges.
refining materials like ore into ingots or raw hide into leather reduces the weight, allowing you to have more space in your stash.
buying a house also adds a separate inn recall with a 4 hour cooldown. And the house can give you more stash space and 1st house you buy has a big discount
Dont linger too long past lvl 25 in the four starting zones, even if you still have side quests (unless you are a trying to 100% everything). The rewards and xp gains from quests and enemies will be inefficient and it is better to move to the next zone within your level range. The range is displayed on the map under each territory name if you zoom out.
Use the recruitment chat channel for finding groups (5 players max), as you can not solo everything. there are several locations and quests that require groups, for example at level 25 there is a main quest that requires at least a group of 3.
I hope this is right, Id much rather they focus on performance and dlss than ray tracing considering they are pushing to 128 players and larger maps. The game footage already looks amazing assuming they dont have to downgrade the visuals by launch.
This is fine assuming they handle the de spawning of bots properly when making room for new players on the server, but it would be very weird to be fighting a bot and they just poof out of existence. Hopefully they make it so that when players fill up the server slots the bots stay until killed or they de spawn only when no enemy human players are nearby to preserve immersion.
hampton2003's comments