YMMV / Battlefield 4

• Abridged Arena Array: 24/7 Operation Locker server is the new 24/7 Operation Metro server. After Second Assault came out, it's 24/7 Operation Locker servers AND 24/7 Operation Metro servers.There are also many 24/7 Seige of Shanghai and 24/7 Golmud Railway servers.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Despite the derisive reception Irish got in this game, upon the news of the character returning for Battlefield 2042 where he appeared at least for the short film spin-off, "Exodus", is now considered to be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, as his actor Michael K. Williams untimely passed away on September 6th, 2021.
• Awesome Music: Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart"? Sure, why not.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans are really split over how overwhelmingly samey the game is to Battlefield 3. Either they think it's a good thing for DICE to finally polish the working formula from BF3 to a mirror shine, or they think DICE should've really worked on Bad Company 3 or 2143, or at least shake things up a bit if they're still going with the modern day setting.
  • Any time there is a major patch that alters the way the multiplayer is played is met with this. The 2015 Spring Patch is a notable example, for reducing the power of the fan-favourite SRAW rocket launcher, and giving downsides to using underbarrel grips and flash hiders, which previously didn't have them. Another smaller example was the new rush layouts for base maps, or more specifically the reduction of vehicles, including the removal of scout helicopters, in all of the maps. While many appreciated the added emphasis on infantry gameplay and were glad to have no more scout helicopters, some felt that Rush was neutered because of these changes and that the removal of scout helicopters were unnecessary.
  • The frontal counter-knife system. In theory, a mini-game is initiated where the first to press the melee button on cue gets the other person's dog tags. In practice, since all the victim has to do is press the melee button on cue, with no penalties for spamming or pressing early, it became guaranteed death (and loss of dog tags) for the initiator. Half the fan-base thinks that the system should stay as it is, being a panacea to panic-knifing and Call of Duty-style knifing, and (rightfully) relegating the knife to something to be used very sparingly, while the other believes that the system should be made fairer and more forgiving to the initiator for successfully closing the gap on the enemy, especially with the game's notoriously buggy netcode.
    • The ease of counter-knifing has led to players sneaking up on an unsuspecting sniper and, instead of going for an uncounterable Back Stab, walking right in front of them in melee range just to bait a frontal knife attack from them so they can go for an even more humiliating counter-knife kill.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • While the weapon balancing has so far prevented a "god gun" from showing up like in Battlefield 3, you'll still see Assault classes running a very limited pool of guns most times. Namely, the AEK-971, the ACE 23, and the M416, due to being a Jack of All Stats, ridiculously deadly in close range, and amazing at range with a fast reload, respectively.
  • With the arrival of Dragon's Teeth, we can add the Bulldog and the Desert eagle to the list. The former due to being one of the highest DPS guns in the game due to having the SCAR-H damage model and a moderate fire rate with the only cons being a small magazine, slow reload, and high recoil. The latter due to out performing the Revolvers of the game by having a faster fire rate, a larger magazine, and a faster reload than the revolvers while retaining the high accuracy and one shot headshot ability.
  • When people are using the recon class, expect about 75% of them to be using the SRR-61 due to its near non existent bullet drop (only the FY-JS has the same drop, but the poor minimum damage keeps it from being a viable choice at long range despite the rest of its stats being better).
  • Among Carbines, the ACE 52 CQB and the MTAR 21 are both extremely popular. The former due to its high damage output (highest among all the carbines) and the later due to its blistering rate of fire.
  • As far as vehicle counter measures go, Active Protection for land vehicles and ECM Jammer for flying vehicles are far and away the most popular. Active Protection will basically give your vehicle invulnerability to explosive weapons for as long as it is active, as opposed to other counter-measures like IR smoke which just hide you and break lock-ons. ECM Jammer for air vehicles disables lock-ons, breaks existing lock-ons, and if any missiles are on their way to you, will cause them to fly around in circles (and generally be harmless) should they reach you.
  • Rebalancing (read: nerfing) suppression and the blinding effects of the laser sights and flashlights resulted in everyone playing snipers in hardcore mode.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Demonic Spiders: Any skilled enemy Attack Helicopter crew on Siege of Shanghai Conquest Large. The map has no mobile AA or jets, the traditional banes of helicopters. On the ground, the buildings impede locking onto or aiming at the helicopter, which will usually not go low unless on an attack run against tanks. On the roofs, one could use Stingers or Iglas, but by the time lock-on is achieved, the heli would have either evaded, popped countermeasures or strafed the roof with rockets and 30mm shells. The few ways of bringing such a team down is to be able to have an equally skilled Attack Helicopter crew, using the Transport Helicopter's miniguns, or a perfectly-aimed SMAW dumbfire rocket. Unfortunately, the latter two methods can be easily countered.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Detractors often call BF4 Battlefield 3.5, due to its reuse of many assets from Battlefield 3. Another new one after the release of the Beta is MoHCoD:BF4 because of how the game has taken on a lot of aspects from EA's Medal of Honor series as well as the Call of Duty series. The retail game gets called "Crashfield 4" due to the game crashing constantly.
  • The "Second Assault" DLC gets called "Back to Metro," since the most popular map in Battlefield 3, Operation Metro, is the star of the DLC.
  • 'Jihad Jeeps' (small transport vehicles laden with explosives) and the 'WALL-Es' (the EOD Bot) make a return from Battlefield 3.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • After a patch, Irish will drive over a civilian in the second mission, but the guy will clip through the van. It's also surprisingly common for the first stop on the elevator in that mission to open into an empty void with nothing but the skybox texture in the distance and several Chinese commandos standing on thin air.
  • The collectible SPAS-12 from the third mission normally has a desert camo pattern, but for some reason when you first pick it up there it will be missing not only that camo pattern, but its sights as well.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The campaign is 7 missions long and can be completed in about 3 hours.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • The common reaction to the 17-minute gameplay trailer. Some fans really wanted Bad Company 3 or Battlefield 2143 over another shooter set in the modern day. Even fans okay with BF4 are underwhelmed at how similar it looks to BF3. There are many things that are direct lifts from BF3: The jeep, the knife animation, the models, it's all depressingly similar. While this could change, it's likely going to be identical to if EA had released another year of DLC and patches for BF3.
  • There's also the inverse: Some fans just want a BF3 without the crap, hoping that DICE learned a few lessons throughout BF3's many, many growing pains.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Rogue Transmission map is based around a radio telescope that is modeled after the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico^note The telescope that the map is likely supposed to represent is the Tianyan radio telescope which has a somewhat different design. The Levolution feature on the map involves destroying support cables to cause the main antenna cradle to collapse onto the dish. In 2020, which also happens to be when Battlefield 4 takes place, the Arecibo telescope collapsed when its support cables snapped due to hurricane and earthquake damage. The destroyed telescope looked very similar to Rogue Transmission's Levolution event.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • DON'T DESTROY THE BUILDING! ^note Some servers (due to a Game-Breaking Bug) explicitly either don't have Siege of Shanghai in the rotation, or if the map is in rotation, explicitly tell players not to demolish the building as under threat of banning. And even in servers where it somehow works, players tend to agree not to blow it up as it makes the map harder to move around afterwards and less enjoyable to play.
  • The retail game itself gets called "Crashfield 4", since it crashes during map rotation, levolution events, and whenever the game feels like crashing.
  • Please send your feedback and bug reports to a popular YouTuber. ^note Many bugs and issues going as far back as the closed alpha were reported to DICE, only for them to still appear in the retail game. DICE only officially responded to the bugs after some popular YouTubers made videos about the issues, leading some fans to bitterly use this reply.
  • Operation Crashbreaker. ^note The Dawnbreaker map had a glitch very similar to Siege of Shanghai, only instead of with a building, it was with an overpass that happened to be both destructible and have a capture point on it, very similar to the building in Shanghai
  • The PLA quotes have reached memetic levels in China. Due to their overly melodramatic presentation and little errors here and there, they have become a gold mine for sound clips used in Chinese-made MADs (Movie Anime Dōjinshi), with the friendly fire quotes being some of the most (in)famous (compare with the Russian speech in Battlefield 3).
• Obvious Beta:
  • Despite hopes that BF4 would be 'polishing' BF3 and be near perfect, it is not. The game has tons of bugs, some returning from BF3 and the single player apparently haven't been playtested (e.g. choppers fly into the mountainside during scripted events, and it's relatively easy to get stuck because of flags not flipping properly), and in multiplayer the TV-guided missile blowing up your own helicopter still exists.
  • The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game are ripe with graphical glitches, screen tearing, and texture pop-in. It also doesn't help that vehicles are even more overpowered than before, meaning that the majority of players in a 24 player match well spend most of their time cooped up in heavily armored tanks.
  • The PC version of the game constantly crashes server side, which wipes out the round for everyone in the server. One big example being Siege of Shanghai crashing any time someone blows up the big central building.
  • There's also the still unpatched (as of version 1.02) bug reported on multiple platforms which sometimes fails to save/deletes your campaign progress. Cue Cluster F-Bomb when you choose resume campaign and hear Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" start to play...
• That One Achievement:
  • "Perfect Landing" in the "Second Assault" DLC requires, along with 10 hours of gameplay (easy) and landing on top of two very tall towers (slightly less easy but easily retry-able), requires a whopping kill streak of ten. Keeping a kill streak going for that long requires either a huge amount of luck, a really inattentive enemy team, and/or a private server.
  • For newer players, "Safe Raiding". It requires you to get just one kill with the Bomber. Sounds easy? Only five maps have bombers, and not many servers run them. You need to remember where the cabin to call in the bomber is, and getting there first isn't as easy as you think, especially considering that said cabin is usually in the highly contested central point of the map. The bomber takes a while to cool down, and is often camped by people eager to get into the bomber. When you get in, you only have about 2 sets of four bombs to drop on the entire map. For balance reasons, their splash damage against infantry is poor. On two of the China Rising maps, enemy mobile AA can and will shred your bomber if they focus fire on you. The third is infantry-centred, and the topography means getting kills with the bomber can be tricky. The last map, Silk Road, is perfectly suited for the bomber, with no mobile AA and loads of armour... but the central point rarely changes hands in a round. If your team loses the point, it is likely that you're not going to get to use the bomber. Oh, and due to the way the game works, kills are only credited to the bomber if you are still in it when the enemy dies to your bomb, and your second set of bombs tend to hit after your run is complete and you are booted out of the bomber cabin.
• That One Attack:
  • The AA Vehicle's Active Radar missiles, which require no precision aiming or locking on to attack, simply aiming in the direction of a plane/chopper will cause them to automatically chase it down, and not only is the window to use flares/ECM small (at least they work against the missiles), but they produce no Lock-On alarm because they don't lock-on. Apart from this, however, most jet or helo pilots want DICE to nerf all anti-air weapons into oblivion, as anything which prevents a jet pilot from going 100-0 in a game is considered "cheap" unless it's another jet pilot.
  • Of course, from the ground, the Attack Chopper's explosive cannon & the Attack Jet with its JDAM are worse than anything someone in the air has to deal with, as people on the ground can't just fly away from a threat like air vehicles can. Long story short, balancing air to ground & vice versa is really hard.
• That One Level:
  • Metro returns in the "Second Assault" DLC, despite being hated. The only reason people even play it is because it's an easy way to rank up levels.
  • Its Spiritual Successor, Operation Locker, is hated for most the same reason. Essentially, unless you get very lucky, whoever gets the central point first will hold it with a wall of grenades, snipers, automatic weapons, and rocket launchers, and will never let it go, turning the whole three entrances to the area into a meat grinder.
  • Dragon Pass is often considered one of the worst maps in Battlefield 4 if not the whole franchise. Players cite its large yet constricted layout, over-abundance of vehicles including the possibility of 4 AA vehicles at once and terrain issues as reasons for disliking the map.
  • Lancang Dam is heavily panned by players for needlessly having almost every vehicle in the game, including a commander-spawned AC-130, on a map the size of Siege of Shanghai, the ability for mobile AA to shoot into the enemy spawn, drab colour palette, lacklustre levolution events, and being skewered in favour of the Russian team.
  • Within the singleplayer campaign, "South China Sea", due to a one-two punch of a nasty Game-Breaking Bug and vague design in places. Early on in the level there's a section where you have to swim through some water, and on some versions of the game it becomes impossible to move unless you pause the game for a few seconds, swim until the glitch comes back, then pause all over again so you can swim again. Later on in the level you get the objective to get back to the aircraft carrier you started on, but simply trying to get to the ship sees the ship infinitely getting ahead of you. What the game doesn't tell you is that you have to kill every enemy boat in the area, many of which can be small and hard to see, and eventually a helicopter comes in that you have to kill, but another Game-Breaking Bug can sometimes prevent the helicopter from spawning. Searching either of these problems reveals stories of dozens of players who Rage Quit the campaign at this level.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Much like its predecessor, the campaign and its narrative were panned to all hell by most professional reviewers and generally advised to be skipped in favor of the multiplayer. Sadly, four weapons and two knives can only be obtained for multiplayer by playing and beating the campaign: the M412 REX by finishing the first mission, while the P90, M249 and QBZ-95-1 by getting one of the three endings (either give the C4 to Hannah or Irish, or neither of them and let the Valkyrie be destroyed).
• Rooting for the Empire: Considering the events of the previous game, quite a few players find the Russians a lot more sympathetic because they're essentially defending themselves in a pointless war after being framed for something they had no fault in. Not that this is ever brought up at all.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Like a lot of large scale games with multiple types of vehicles and mechanics involved, there are a number of these:
  • The new vehicle ammo mechanic. Most vehicles are limited to a couple of reloads of the main weapons before having to wait a couple of minutes for it to regenerate. The tanks, instead of having around 30 or more ready rounds like in reality, now have half a dozen shells ready to fire before being forced to wait. Getting killed by an opposing tank without being able to fire a shot because you had just beaten away an enemy attack is incredibly frustrating. Helicopter combat can turn into a laughable dance with both sides having expended all their ammunition without effect. Their heatseekers take minutes to reload after firing just two.
  • The game itself is much better optimized for the inferior Windows 8 operating system than it is for the much more stable and more widely-used Windows 7 OS.
  • For a long while, Battlelog from BF3, and its attempt at completely replacing the in-game server browser and main menu, was still a requirement. Thankfully, as mentioned in Author's Saving Throw above, the much more sensible and usable in-game menu system from Battlefield 1 was eventually backported to BF4, completely eliminating the need for Battlelog for anything related to actually playing the game (it's still necessary for things like custom emblems that you can enjoy the game just fine without ever touching).
  • Counter-knifing, particularly since the netcode isn't the best. Despite being pitched as a minigame, the victim's QTE window is so long that everyone can counter-knife, resulting in it being literal suicide to melee from the front. Even if that in itself is not seen as a problem, the netcode can result in lag in displaying the exact direction the enemy is facing, creating situations where one gets countered despite knifing from what appears to be the side (which shouldn't be counterable), or having an enemy somehow initiate an uncounterable knife takedown from what appears to be the front (which should be counterable).
• Scrappy Weapon: While the balancing is noticeably better than the last game, there are still certain weapons that no one ever uses except when they're looking for an extreme challenge.
  • In the base game, there's the G36C, a Carbine. To put it bluntly, the gun doesn't do anything good. Its firing rate is slow, its reload is slow, its damage is unchanged from other carbines of significantly higher accuracy (like the AK-5C) or rate of fire (MTAR-21 and the like), and it has a weird issue with recoil. In general, this gun will lose firefights that should not be lost.
  • In the Naval Strike DLC, there's the unlockable Sniper Rifle, the SR338. It holds a unique niche in being the only real semiautomatic sniper rifle (all the others were re-classed as weaker and shorter-ranged but higher-capacity, all-kit Designated Marksman Rifles), but until it was buffed in an October 2014 patch, it had... issues. Firstly, it was incapable of a one-hit kill, even with a point-blank headshot (post-patch, a single headshot is an instant kill out to 15 meters). Second, it has bullet deviation after the first shot if you try and take advantage of the semiautomatic rate of fire, which if you want to kill someone, you must, for the reason stated before (post-patch, the rate at which its bullet deviation increased was drastically cut down to one-sixth of what it used to be). This meant that you couldn't even guarantee that the shots will land, which is the second point of a sniper rifle. And even if you tried using it as a DMR, its ridiculously tiny magazine and slow reload will leave any of the actual DMRs as superior weapons.
  • You aren't likely to see many people using the QSZ-92, much less get killed by one. Despite having one of the larger pistol magazine sizes at 20 rounds and having fairly good stability, it does pathetically weak damage. Even up close, with an enemy at full health, it can take twice as many rounds to kill someone than it would with any semi-auto 9mm pistol and at a distance, you can forget about doing any meaningful damage to an opponent - even assuming every shot hits, you're looking at emptying almost half the magazine at someone at its maximum range to actually kill them. There have been spitballs deadlier than whatever this gun is firing. The FN57 isn't well-liked either for the same reasons, with its only upgrade over the QSZ-92 being slightly higher stability.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • Irish seems to exist for no other purpose than to complain, swear, freak out, and be insubordinate. Fortunately for you, sending him to his death in the ending is not only incredibly satisfying, but also nets you one of the best LMGs in the game for use in multiplayer.
  • Agent Kovic returns from the previous title, even if one might not recognize him for a variety of reasons, and he's still a total asshat. The players that actually knew who he was probably don't shed a tear when he gets fatally wounded by helicopter fire and bleeds out.
• Tear Jerker:
  • At the end of the campaign, the explosives fail at the worst possible time. As your team is suspended above the enemy ship, the choice comes to have someone drop back down with a pack of C4 to blow up the scuttling charge on the enemy ship. You have to choose to give the C4 to Hannah or Irish. If you wait too long, the USS Valkyrie explodes, killing Jin Jie, Garrison, Pac and everyone else you fought to save. If you choose Irish or Hannah, they will die, unable to escape the destruction of the ship. There is no other option. The final voice-over from the survivors confirm that it hits them hard no matter what you choose.
  • Most of the situation involving the U.S.S Titan. The crowner would be when Tombstone comes across several sailors trapped under a welded grate. They beg for help getting out, with Irish trying to help them out, only for Kovic to point out that even if they could help, they couldn't be helped in time to save them from drowning. One begs you not to tell his mother he died this way as you walk away.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The AK-12 model was designed after the pre-2013 prototype, including several variations with different barrel lengths and chamberings to mirror the intended modularity of that version. This has the side-effect of dating the game, since by 2020 (the year the game takes place) the real AK-12 had drastically changed in appearance, and most of the variations shown in-game have drastic differences from their in-game versions (the shorter-barreled carbine and machine gun versions) or were cancelled outright (the DMR cancelled in favor of the SVCh, the shotgun cancelled in favor of continuing to use the Saiga-12), to say nothing that there's no option of one in 7.62x39mm to mirror the AK-15.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: A given for a game running on the Frostbite engine.
• Vindicated by History: Battlefield 4 was considered a mess when it came out. After having its problems ironed out, it was one of the more widely played entries in the series. Funny in that 3 also went through a similar process.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • Considering the Broken Base and the lengthy list of faults Battlefield 3 had, DICE seems to be trying to make amends with Battlefield 4. Many Scrappy Mechanics such as suppression and infinite vehicle ammo have been rebalanced and overhauled, and maps look like they're actually designed for 64 players in mind. Unfortunately, some of EA's attempts to fix Scrappy Mechanics ended up as Scrappy Mechanics themselves, such as the aforementioned counter-knifing system.
  • The single-player campaign seems to attempt to reintroduce concepts seen in Battlefield: Bad Company (being able to select any weapon you've ever picked up across the campaign at supply crates, larger/less linear battlefields, visual cursor feedback when you hit an enemy, slightly more durable enemies, hidden collectible weapons, and even a scoring system), which seems to be an attempt to move away from being a straight copy of the gameplay style of Modern Warfare. Amusingly, this hasn't worked out all that well either because the story is still Call of Duty in a blender, with several plot points and locations taken from Modern Warfare and Black Ops, such as an EMP for no real reason (MW2), a mission set on a carrier crippled by that EMP as it's invaded by the enemy (mirroring a portion of Black Ops II), a mission set in a prison where the Russian protagonist of the previous game assists you in escaping and ultimately dies in the attempt (straight from the beginning of Black Ops), etc.
  • DICE LA (now called Ripple Effect Studios) attempted to address complaints about the Rush game mode on vanilla maps with the We <3 Rush CTE initiative. While some complained at first about certain vehicles being removed, many see the new layouts as improvements over the launch Rush maps.