YMMV / Battlefield V

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In The Last Tiger, did Hartmann really desert when he went on the scouting mission? Or did he simply extend a bit too far and failed to return to the tank in time when it was forced to retreat?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Like in Das Boot, it's surprising to learn the very true fact that the German military gained a fondness for "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" back in WWI that carried forward to WWII.
  • The elite multiplayer PC Wilhelm Tannstedt wears what the community derisively coined a "Phantom of the Opera mask." In actuality, it's a reconstructive face mask created during WWI to cover disfgurement. They were originally painted but the paint was discovered to only last about 20 years, ie. right around WWII, before chipping away.
• Awesome Music: This game has a lot of flaws, but the soundtrack is absolutely not one of them.
  • The rendition of "House of the Rising Sun" in the Devastation of Rotterdam trailer. It's also the same version played in the Cloak & Dagger (2018) trailer.
  • The Menu theme flute music, "Under No Flag" also goes for this.
  • All four of the End of Round themes in the "War in the Pacific" DLC are unique and beautifully written.
    • Pacific Storm has a bright, optimistic tune that brings out the US Marines' hope of taking over the Marshall Islands.
    • By contrast, Iwo Jima's theme is grim and almost sinister, which befits the desperation shared by the Japanese and Americans as they battle for the island.
    • Wake Island is a nostalgic remix of the original theme used in Battlefield 1942 and 1943.
    • And finally, Solomon Islands has a primal, Vietnam-like tune that perfectly captures the chaos of jungle warfare.
    • As a bonus, the post match themes for both sides are soothing remixes of the "We push, they push" theme from Battlefield 1.
• Base-Breaking Character: Billy Bridger in Under No Flag. He begins the mission as a whiny, incompetent bank robber who only joins the Special Boat Service as a way to get out of prison. He constantly complains to his superior Mason whenever the mission in North Africa goes south (usually because he screws up), and even blames Mason for taking him along, even though Bridger himself agreed to go on it in the first place. However, Bridger makes up for it in the mission's third act when he takes a level in badass and fights off several waves of German troops singlehandedly.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The war story Tirailleur has received praise for being the only launch war story to be somewhat based on real events and raising awareness about colonial infantry that otherwise go ignored in most shooters even if the writing of the actual campaign still leaves something to be desired as well as being the only launch war story to actually focus on combat.
  • The war story The Last Tiger is considered to be the best single player mission. Not only do players get to command the legendary Tiger tank, but the story is also praised for having genuinely tragic story and characters shown from the unique perspective of a villainous German tank crew coming to grips with their hopelessness.
  • Both of the initial Pacific maps have been recieved very warmly by the community, but Iwo Jima in particular has been showered in near-universal love, with the Breakthrough mode in particular becoming a swift fan favorite on the map, with SIX sectors, the most of any map in the game, spread across its massive size (roughly 70% of the size of the real life Iwo Jima, and the largest map in the game by playable area^note not counting the Firestorm-exclusive Halvøy) and the combination of infantry, ground vehicle and air vehicle combat as well as the amphibious beach landing that starts the first sector and the climbing of the iconic Mount Suribachi to end the last sector.
• Broken Base: Quite a few weapons and vehicles have a very polarized fanbase either loving it or hating it, not limited to...
  • The JU-88 and other bombers are hated on by most of the community because of spawn camping that would happen just after a game starts, although this has been remedied with delayed plane spawns on most maps. In fact, it was very common to see bombers topping the scoreboards before the Dec 4th update, when they received a nerf.
  • Playing Medic. While this is a choice of class preference, medic is considerably harder to play now that the class is given a weak SMG that can't shoot farther than 40 meters, making it a class one can only use in covered areas and under team support, where in Battlefield 1 the medic had a semi-automatic that can easily shoot higher than 100m. SMGs would eventually be buffed in the Dec 4th update, but they still struggle outside of close range firefights, and still do get outperformed at times even within that range.
  • The game fanbase can be divided into 3 groups, the reason being the various controversy the game is engulfed in prior to launch.
    • People who don't mind the extra customization options, and point out that previous entries in the series have always taken liberties with historical accuracy for various reasons.
    • Players (including prominent streamers) who just want to play the game and would rather focus on gameplay-related issues rather than the culture war.
    • Those who find the rewriting of actual historical events with women to be in poor taste, and see the female soldiers and cosmetics as distracting/out of place.
  • The Community being split between using bipod-equipped machine guns in prone to defend positions. In other games like Squad and Rising Storm, going prone with a machine gun is the definite way to use the gun, as that's how they're used in real life. While this is a clearly valid tactic, players who constantly die to prone machine gunners complain that this playstyle is overpowered and promotes camping. This split has existed in much earlier titles and will likely never be resolved while the mechanic is still in use.
  • The Community over large maps and small maps. While traditionally larger and smaller maps were favorites since Battlefield 1942 (and ever since), you might see people who absolutely detest the large maps...
  • The attrition system, which restricts ammo capacity and allows only partial health-regeneration. Although attrition was initially well-received for encouraging more tactical team play, it has gradually become hated by half of the community. This system discourages lone-wolf tactics and forces dependence on competent medic and support players, who aren't always present in public matches. Overall, while some like it for encouraging more tactical game system, others disliked for leaving players with inadequate supplies and adding unnecessary busywork in a chaotic game.
  • The Fliegerfaust anti-air rocket launcher is a source of ire for players who favour pilot combat as they see it as overpowered and too easy to use while ground combat focused players view it as a welcome respite. Before it was introduced planes were able to harass infantry who only had woefully underpowered AA cannons or lucky Panzerfaust or PIAT shots to fight back. It is a better man-portable AA weapon against planes than in the modern instalments of the series being a quick moving fire-and-forget weapon with no lock-on requirement, which the weapons in the modern games do require & have to deal with 'magic' countermeasures that instantly break locks, stop launched missiles from hitting and prevent relocking on for enough time for the plane to flee.
• Contested Sequel: Disregarding the backlash, opinions are fairly mixed regarding how well BFV stands up to previous entries. Some enjoy the more tactical gameplay, calling it a significant improvement over BF1, which some regard as too casual and shallow. In contrast, others bemoan the unsatisfying new game modes and lack of polish compared to BF1.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Last Tiger in general can be considered this for the war stories, but the tank driver Kertz has proven especially well liked due to his sympathetic status as an Only Sane Man among his crew and his cynical view towards the war (in which his side was losing).
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • There is a one-sided rivalry with Apex Legends, which was released just a month before the addition of Firestorm mode and was also published by EA. While Apex Legends fans were mostly indifferent towards Firestorm, many BFV fans were resentful of how Respawn Entertainment's free-to-play game ended up overshadowing their battle royale mode. Not helping matters is how EA provided continuous support for Apex Legends and treated it as one of their flagship titles while Firestorm was abandoned entirely, with many promised updates like an improved looting system getting cancelled.
  • A more significant rivalry came with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). Although Modern Warfare was released a year after BFV and has a different time period setting, that game was seen as a direct competitor given the long-running rivalry between Battlefield and Call of Duty. While Modern Warfare had its share of controversies, several fans and critics prefer that game over BFV for offering similar gunplay, better performance and a standalone free-to-play battle royale mode. Further inflaming the rivalry is how disgruntled Battlefield fans opted instead to play Modern Warfare instead of BFV.
• Game-Breaker: Quite a large number of things have been game breaking for a while, such as.
  • The Assault class during launch was notoriously overpowered, as a single assault player could make use out of a tank and deal with infantry at the same time, leading it to be a multi-use class in most scenarios. This was due to the original Archetype system dividing the class into an anti-tank and a general infantry, making players choose one over the other. As the archetype system was phased out just before release, there were obvious imbalances as the game was built on that system for most of its time.
  • Originally, bombers would be able to spawn earlier than infantry at the beginning of the match, allowing for bomber crews to kill full squads of infantry as they were standing idle.
  • The Recon class' anti-materiel rifles. They're effective against light transport, but their damage to tanks is negligent. The real kicker is their effectiveness against infantry, killing in one shot to the torso at ranges all the way up to 100m.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: For some reasons the game is rather popular in Japan.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Each war story is only around an hour long meaning that there's simply not enough time to actually get attached to the characters before they end and the actual campaign is pretty short.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: There are a fair amount of complaints related to the game's similarities to its predecessor Battlefield 1, such as the historical setting, campaign structure, and weaponry. The game also reuses multiple guns from its immediate predecessor like the M1907, Selbstlader M1916, and Model 8, despite many of those guns being entirely outdated by the time.
• Memetic Badass: Günter◊, a grizzled German character available in multiplayer as one of the player models, has reached this status in some circles.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Calling me uneducated was the LAST STRAW." ^note An infamous rant in which a user was quickly caught lying about their history credentials while calling out the Politically Correct History, which has been memed in forums all over, often used a poster child for those that try to use historical accuracy as a smokescreen for simply not wanting women in the game.
  • "The right side of history." ^note Criticism over the amount of historical accuracy or women on the front lines will be met with an inversely sarcastic, "Because you're on the wrong side of history", or "Then how will I explain this to my daughter about that [insert-issue-here]?"; parroting lines from the devs.
  • "SANITÄTER!" ^note  What German soldiers say in game when they're wounded/downed.
    • "SONNY TATER!" ^note  The flavour text for one of the Tides of War challenges humourously took the point of view of an Allied soldier observing the cries of two wounded German soldiers and misinterpreting them as calls for someone by the name of "Sonny Tater".
  • A shot from the Operation: Underground trailer of a British soldier with a thousand-yard stare◊ as he realises he'll be fighting in the subway tunnels rapidly went memetic.
  • "GIVE CHAUCHAT" ^note A popular turn of phrase, coined by a particularly determined Reddit user. The Chauchat LMG, previously featured in Battlefield 1, has been in the game files since launch and is available to use in the singleplayer War Stories and the online Combined Arms co-op mode, but has yet to make the crossover into PvP multiplayer proper. The weapon could actually be glitched into and used in multiplayer at certain points of the game's life cycle, and the May 2020 Update actually retroactively unlocked cosmetics for the weapon for players that fulfilled unspecified kill counts with the Chauchat. The weapon would finally be added into the multiplayer during the game's final content update, the June 2020 Summer Update.
  • "COMING SOON" ^note A popular turn of phrase for DICE's constant content delay. Most notably, the advertised tank customization was originally said to be coming soon only to arrive 18 months after launch.
  • "TECHNOLOGY" ^note  DICE employees claimed that "the tech isn't there" to support Double XP events and add new modes without removing existing ones. Many fans were outraged as the previous Battlefield games and the ongoing Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) were able to support these features while running on older versions of the Frostbite engine. To add insult to injury, BFV has functioning XP boosters that cost real world money. Players proceeded to lampoon this claim with Stone Age-era images on Reddit and Twitter.
  • Datamining is cheating◊ ^note A DICE dev tarred fans datamining for upcoming content with the same brush used to tar actual cheaters. They were beset upon by players calling the team's Skewed Priorities (that of going after curious dataminers rather than actual cheaters.)
  • M ^note The "M for metres" symbol for the fuse adjustment setting for the RMN-50 grenade launcher has a tendency to get stuck on the player's HUD.
• Misaimed Fandom: For some players, the primary takeaway from The Last Tiger was the idea that not all Germans were evil in WW2, just misunderstood. However, the takeaway that the writers seemingly intended was that whether "good" or "evil", all who fought for Germany were culpable in enabling the Nazis' atrocities. Müller's childhood story about his friends stealing candy while he did nothing is meant as a metaphor for this.
• Moral Event Horizon: In The Last Tiger, if sending the scared Hartmann out to scout and then show Last Disrespects upon finding him dead doesn't really count, Schröder absolutely crosses this when he kills Kertz in cold blood for surrendering before he turns his gun on Müller for doing to the same thing.
• Narm:
  • The Nordlys treats the German nuclear weapons development as the ultimate evil. Seems dramatic until one realizes that entire cities are bombed to oblivion on a daily basis, making their fears seem like a double-standard overreaction.
  • Nordlys is pretty hard to take seriously in general due to the plot armor that Solveig has, surviving a large drop with only superficial injuries and somehow winning a hand-to-hand fight despite suffering from hypothermia as well as Solveig getting constantly caught by German troops that blatantly teleport into existence out of nowhere, coming off like a badly written B-Action movie but taking itself seriously.
  • The Heroic Sacrifice in Tirailleur is once again something like a bad B-Action movie script with a Contrived Coincidence as Idrissa pulls the pin on a grenade before the Tank Commander actually opens the hatch, proceeds to instantly kill the commander with his pistol so effortlessly that John Wick would blush and then holds the tank's hatch shut despite the fact that the crew would almost certainly not be able to throw the grenade out, while the last part can at least be excused with desperation or panic, everything before it comes off as tone-breaking action movie antics compared to the grounded tone of the earlier cutscenes.
  • Elite cosmetic skins in general, as they're merely faction restricted and not theater restricted (Meaning that you can have Japanese soldiers fighting in Norway, or British and French soldiers fighting in the Pacific.) and a few have over-the-top looks that feel out of place in a WW2 setting. The following two are egregious examples of the latter problem:
    • The trailer for the "Misaki Yamashiro" cosmetic character features her taking down an entire group of American soldiers with a katana sword. However, the sheer ridiculousness of the scene and the laughably poor aim of the American soldiers caused many fans to not take it seriously, with some unfavorably likening it to an anime scene.
    • The "Steve Fisher" cosmetic character is meant to be a cool badass American soldier yet comes of as a cringe-inducing walking Eagleland caricature. His egotistical lines, hairdo and aviator glasses drew unflattering comparisons to Tom Cruise's Maverick character.
• Nightmare Fuel: The bombed-out Cologne cathedral in 'The Last Tiger' is littered with bodies and burned husks of tanks. The sky outside is a smoky haze, and dozens of lynched corpses of German 'deserters' hang high from the roof. This is a church, so it's only appropriate that it resembles a scene of biblical apocalypse.
• Older Than They Think: Quite a few games set in World War II did a lot of things before this game came out.
  • Despite the outcry, this isn't the first World War II game to have female characters in online multiplayer, not even in recent years. Call of Duty: WWII had a variety of gender and race customizations, meaning that one could play as a black woman on the side of the German Wehrmacht. However, unlike Battlefield V, customization was limited and not overly advertised due to its use of multiple factions in Multiplayer. There is also the likes of female soldiers, Captains and Majors, in the Soviet campaigns or earlier COD games, Manon of the French Resistance in Medal of Honor, the real life Violette Summer of Velvet Assassin, and the woman in Battlefield V turns out to be a Norwegian freedom fighter rather than a rank and file British soldier.
  • This also isn't the first FPS set in WWII to have a German campaign, averting No Campaign for the Wicked. That honor goes to Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with its Wehrmacht campaign. Though, when compared to The Last Tiger, this campaign comes off as more of an Excuse Plot than anything else. Outside the FPS genre, Germans have had campaigns since at least as far back as Panzer General.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The game is mostly remembered for the controversy over the inclusion of Character Class customization (which allowed players to change the character classes' race and gender) which caused many in the community (and outside) to fight over historical accuracy and representation, the developers' statements towards those who criticized the addition, and the poor post-launch support the game had with the official (and very poor) reasons for the game's (very) slow rollout of highly-requested fixes and content souring the community's relationship with the developers.
• The Scrappy: The Elites were never really beloved by the community for having "gimmicky" and "goofy" personalities and uniforms that felt out of place in the setting, but this really came to a head with Steve Fisher, whose Eagleland personality was far too cheesy for many people. It also didn't help that his trailer was released at around the same time that support for BFV was ending, which didn't sit well with most fans either.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Grand Operations mode. Many fans consider it to be inferior to BF1's Operations mode with many deriding it as a mashup of various unrewarding game modes. The first day of Grand Operations has defenders parachuting in on transport planes that can easily be spawn-killed by defenders, making it nearly impossible for the attackers to make any progress. Yet Grand Operations still progresses to the second day regardless of whether the attackers or defenders win, rendering the first day effectively pointless. The third day however it considered the worst, as whoever wins day 3 automatically wins the mode regardless of prior performance, and the final stand bonus round only occurs when the mode ends in a tie. The mode feels poorly designed and frustrating especially since Operations was considered a highlight in the previous game.
  • Air-vs-Land combat is generally hated since anyone who isn't driving an anti-air vehicle or armed with the Fliegerfaust anti-air rocket launcher is utterly defenseless against planes. In the BF1, infantry could fight back against aircraft given how planes are fragile and slow enough to be harmed by small arms and stationary weapons. In this game, however, planes are not only too fast and durable to be harmed by most firearms, but the aforementioned attrition system means that infantry lack the ammo capacity to harm planes. The JU-88 and other bombers are particular hated because of how planes keep bombing spawn points just after a game starts.
  • Player visibility has been an ongoing source of ire for many players. The low color saturation and minimal contrast makes it virtually impossible to see players who are lying prone. This in turn encourages camping and has made it difficult to effectively counter support players armed with bipoded machine guns.
  • Patch 5.2 was generally hated by fans for reducing weapon damage and increasing the time-to-kill (TTK). Although DICE intended the overhaul to shake up the meta and make the game more accessible, the existing fanbase felt that it turned their weapons into nerf guns and with the popular FG-42 light machine gun requiring 13 bullets to down an enemy at ranges beyond 50 meters. This was made all the more maddening in that DICE had pulled this exact same stunt a year prior and almost instantaneously reverted the changes amidst massive backlash, so the fact they had the gall to push such changes through a second time, and once again falsely claiming that "the player base asked for it", clearly showed that they didn't learn from their mistakes. The weapon overhaul was so poorly received that it blunted whatever goodwill garnered with the Pacific Theatre update, forcing DICE, yet again, to revert the time-to-kill values.
  • Team balancing, or rather lack thereof. The game doesn't have any skill-based matchmaking which have lead to players entering losing games or newbies being pitted against experienced players with maxed out weapons.
  • The battle royale mode Firestorm has a whole host of annoying mechanics.
    • The looting system. When enemies die, all of their gear spreads out next to their bodies. Problem is that each item has to be manually selected and the clumping of gear means that one could accidentally pick up the wrong item. Not helping matters are the unfavorable comparisons to the rival BR game Apex Legends, which offer more intuitive looting with all of a dead enemy's gear found in a death box.
    • Matchmaking. The game's rollout and paywall limited the availability of Firestorm to general audiences, making it more difficult to find enough players for matches. The mode can only be played if one bought the base game, and Firestorm was released 5 months into the game's lifespan, long after many players who had bought BFV on release had since moved on. These hurdles means that the playerbase of Firestorm is relatively small compared to its rivals, leading to matchmaking times that could last as long as 10 minutes and non-European players being forced to play on EU servers with high ping rates. In countries with weaker internet infrastructure or low player bases, like Australia and New Zealand, the mode is virtually unplayable.
• Sequelitis: BFV is the weakest of the mainline games (1942, 2142, Vietnam and the 5 numbered titles) in the franchise. The overall gunplay was well-liked enough but as a whole it was considered a step down in design and polish. Many fans compared it unfavorably to its predecessor BF1, since that game was released in a bug-free state and gradually improved over its lifespan while BFV was mired in a broken state and will eventually be left that way when the game support is shut down. It's widely accepted as a very missed opportunity as Dice & EA took what was a highly anticipated game that was going back to the World War 2 roots of the series right as the War On Terror setting was losing popularity, and created a buggy, controversial mess that was dreadfully anachronistic and flat out ignored the most iconic settings a game in World War 2 should have included.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus appears to be that BFV is a competent game on its own, but doesn't quite seem to improve upon or even equal its predecessors BF4 and BF1. This is evident in the fact that BFV's Metacritic scores are noticeably lower.
• Spiritual Licensee: The Last Tiger shared similarities with Johann's Tiger from War Stories by Garth Ennis as both dealing with a Tiger tank and their crews at the tail end of World War 2. The only exception is that The Last Tiger ended with Bolivian Army Ending that was not sure if the commander survived from a gunfire from a zealous crew when he surrendered while Johann's Tiger ended a Downer Ending with the Commander failing to get his crews alive to desert to the Americans while not intending to live with the guilt of his atrocities.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The reveal trailer showed a number of character customizations, such as a female soldier with a prosthetic arm and a cricket bat wrapped in barbed wire, a male soldier with a Japanese katana strapped to his back (in Europe, not even remotely close to the Pacific Theater), and an Expy of Kratos. This drew all sorts of backlash directed at various aspects of the trailer, ranging from the anachronistic cosmetics to the presence of playable female characters in a WWII shooter, with the developer response to said backlash best summarized here.
  • Outrage over customization and identity politics aside, the marketing for the game didn't do much to boost interest and confidence. Instead of a traditional promotional push, EA and DICE restricted most gameplay footage to select Youtube content creators. Furthermore, EA focused more on its sports games and the then-upcoming Anthem (2019) at the major gameshows at the expense of Battlefield V. It also didn't help matters that initially advertised features like co-op and vehicle customization would be added post-launch without a proper explanation for their initial absence. This marketing strategy gave the impression that the game was rushed out to market in an incomplete state, and left many casual fans and general audiences confused and uninformed.
  • DICE announced that there will be no more single-player stories after the "The Last Tiger" chapter. Needless to say, many American and Russian gamers were incensed given how the single-player mode could showcase the historic roles their countries played in the conflict.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Grand Operations mode has been criticized for being a step backwards compared to BF1's Operations mode. Many fans feel that BFV's mode felt shallow and disjointed since it lacked the gravitas, continuous flow and overarching narrative of Operations from the previous game.
  • Long-time fans were also disappointed with game's Mildly Military cosmetics, which was rather jarring given how the previous games have always strived for authenticity in soldier and weapon appearance.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Much to many players' frustrations, BFV only covers a tiny fraction of WWII, mainly focused on the early battles between France, Britain, and Germany. At the launch, there weren't any of the expected set piece battles such as D-Day, the Eastern Front, and the Pacific Theater, nor are any of the associated factions, which only serves to make the game feel insignificant in scope. While DICE would later add the Pacific theater with the American and Japanese factions, that expansion didn't arrive until nearly a year after launch while other major battles are still absent. The delayed arrival of the Pacific Theater was particularly egregious as many fans feel that it should've been at launch so that the game could've stood out more from Battlefield 1, which was largely set in Western Europe and the Middle East. Not helping matters is that DICE announced that they won't be adding the iconic battles after completing work in June 2020, leaving out important theaters in WW2 like the Eastern Front and the Italian campaign.
  • While the "Tirailleur" war story does involve a group that suffered racism, for some reason the developers essentially made stuff up instead of actually depicting actual racism which is seen as a missed opportunity. (Especially since the reason for the Tirailleurs not being involved in the Liberation of France was actually due to America, not France but they did screw them out of their pensions and that led to the often forgotten Thiaroye massacre with only the pensions being briefly mentioned in the ending text.)
  • Many fans pointed out that if EA and DICE wanted to focus on untold stories of diverse soldiers, there were numerous historic examples of actual diverse people and units that fought with distinction in the war, such as the Japanese-American 442nd infantry regiment, the African-American Tuskegee Airmen, the various RAF squadrons composed entirely of national exiles, the all female Night Witch Russian bomber crews, Mariya Oktyabrskaya, and more. With so much material to work with, DICE didn't need to have heavily fictionalized "War Stories".
  • There is no single player plane-focused war story, especially notable since there was the all female Night Witch Russian bomber crews as mentioned above would have been a good fit.
  • Once again like Battlefield 1, the game teases a Hotswap-like mechanic in the opening War Stories prologue but shifts almost entirely to one-person stealth for the rest of it, instead of having large open battles where the player can press a button to instantly swap to a pilot, vehicle crewman or another soldier like Battlefield 2: Modern Combat.
• Tear Jerker: "Kertz! Keeeeeertz!"
  • Really, the entirety of The Last Tiger is this. Leading your crew in a Hopeless War, against an unstoppable enemy, fighting a war that you know is outright lost, but still has to fight out of duty for an insane, oppressive regime. And then the moment above comes.
• Uncertain Audience: A common complaint about the game is its lack of identity and inability to find a definitive audience. The more tactical gameplay is supposed to appeal to the hardcore gamers with reduced ammo capacity and scaled down health regeneration. At the same time, the game had wacky cosmetics and made numerous TTK changes that are supposed to draw in casual audiences. Likewise, DICE and EA dabbled with modes like Firestorm and the now-cancelled 5v5 mode, which were attempts to copy the Battle Royale and eSports trends, respectively. Unfortunately, the game failed to fully appease any demographics; casual audiences were frustrated by the high difficulty curve, hardcore gamers were turned off by goofy cosmetics that were seen as too juvenile, and veteran battlefield fans were alienated by the game for chasing trends instead of building on the core experience.
• Win Back the Crowd: If you filter out the cesspool of controversy, BFV does contain some redeemable features;
  • Fans initially turned off by the reveal trailer and the Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) debacle were won over by the E3 demo with many liking how the game fixes the gameplay issues plaguing previous games.
  • DICE confirmed that the game will not have the much-hated Premium pass and Battlepacks that had been in previous Battlefield entries. The Premium pass was disliked for splitting up the community and increasing matchmaking time by locking maps behind a paywall, while the Battlepacks were derided as a glorified slot machine that rewards players based on chance rather than skill. By removing those two systems, the game became more accessible for everyone and reward players based on skill and dedication.
  • During the open beta, gameplay was said to be a mix of old-school Bad Company and Battlefield 2, which gained praise from many fans participating in this period.
  • The dialing back of the spotting mechanics present in the most recent games to a more Battlefield 2-esque style gathered near-universal praise from the community. ^note Specifically, the "3D" spotting introduced in Battlefield 2142 is now reserved for full suppression of an enemy with one of the Support's combat roles and the Recon's spotting gadgets, rather than being applied to manual spotting as well, as it had been prior. Manual spotting now applies a static marker, like the one in the Incursions mode of Battlefield 1.
  • After a series of War Stories that received lukewarm reception, The Last Tiger was widely praised as the best War Story of them all, thanks to its genuinely tragic story and characters, as well as a perspective that until now has yet to be explored in a WW2 AAA game.
  • The trailer for the Pacific Theatre won a sizable crowd back for its increased historical accuracy compared to the base game which, even after the removal of a lot of the over-the-top customization items from the pre-release trailers, was still seen as inaccurate. When it released, the new content was very well-received, with the maps praised for having a classic Battlefield feel, and the weaponry and vehicles all being popular within the community, including the long-awaited and much-requested M1 Garand.
  • EA eventually announced that they would also release the game on Steam, which came as a surprise to many, given that not only had for 8 years, EA largely turned their back on Steam due to launching their Origin service, but even before that point, the Battlefield franchise had basically ignored Steam, with Bad Company 2 and its Vietnam expansions being the only entries to be available on the storefront.

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