Sorry, but I have to say I am not impressed much by the game yet and felt the need to share my whine with the rest of the internet community on this forum.

This game has issues, and not all of them are bugs. A lot of them are simply design decisions that are, well quite frankly beyond the realm of understanding for me. I'll start with the most glaring one and that is lighting. This game is too bright, I have dialed down brightness and everything but that hardly helps because every light source in the game likes to beam in your face and most surfaces like to reflect the light in your face as well. I almost feel like Dice is trying to hide something from us with all the brightness blinding me while playing the game. On Grandbazaar I walked up to a lamppost just to admire the sun shining down from it.

Another issue is with a core design choice about squads. Squads are now 4 man, which makes sense in the way they have implemented it currently. Dice obviously didn't want the best option for the squadleader to be hide and let your squad spawn on you. So take out that man and let everyone spawn on everyone in the squad. However this makes fighting over points a bit tedious because now you don't have to root out their squadleader, you have to root out their entire squad and they vice versa. Ideally this would create interesting firefights between both squads as they try to wipe out eachother. In practice this means you still have one guy who tries to stay alive and out of action so the rest can spawn. Great solution Dice! On top of that with the brightness of the game you spend your first few seconds disoriented.

So in bf1942 we had a pretty cool map, this map was usefull and while it oversized certain things on it, you could actually tell what was going on and how the map was laid out. In BF2 the map was pretty cool as well, still some oversized icons, but even that was toned down. In this game however dice has opted for some sort of futuristic LSD trip which hardly tells you anything, has to be manually zoomed out every damned time and in general is pretty useless to consult, unless in a close range fight where you don't get shot instantly so you know where an enemy is.

Chatwindow. OMG DICE WHAT WERE YOU THINKING. With the current lags on the server, a most common response for some people is to open chat and type LAAAAAAAAAG.
Okay, but don't make this appear in the flipping middle of my screen blocking out a big part of my vision. Its like the visual impairment from the sunglare wasn't enough yet.

Maps, well to be honest I find there are only 3 maps worth playing with 64 players. The others turn into a clusterfuck pretty fast. Seine crossing, is just rediculous with 64 players as it features corridors and bridges. Corridors and bridges mean firing lanes. Firing lanes means everyone just sits somewhere as a mortarboy or sniper and shoots at anyone who tries to get to the other side. Then we have Grand Bazaar, this map is slightly better as it actually offers some more routes to the cap points, but it still feels incredibly cramped and the central alleyway just makes me sad. Spam your RPG's, mortars and grenades down that corridor because you are garuanteed kills. Operation Metro, is unbalanced as hell as one side has higher ground and the winning flag is also on that higher ground. I don't think I've ever seen the other team been able to fight their way up the metro to cap that flag. The spam is just insane. Damavand peak looks nice at first, untill you realize that you pretty much have to go through a tunnel, as we have learned from Operation Metro, tunnels are bad because they don't offer much in the way of flanking. Still I rate this map a little bit higher as you still have choppers to fly across the mountainridge bypassing the tunnel. Onto canals we go. This map is okay, but the flight ceiling is pretty low and having to slowboat it to the flags through the water makes it slightly favorable to the other side. Once on the shores the US side still has to fight its way UP again, so again their is a elevation advantage for the russians on this map. Still this map is okay as it doesn't feel incredibly cramped.

So the saving grace maps in my opinion are Caspian border, Operation Firestorm and Kharge Island. These maps don't feel too cramped for 64 players but don't feel very spacious either. They can just about hold that many players without it becoming tedious. They are pretty cool as they offer all vehicular aspects of the game, some open space and interesting map elements. I really hope Dice will release more bigger maps, because even these don't feel really that big for 64 man.

The classes this time around seem to be a bit better thought out than in battlefield 3, where I was always under the impression medic and spec ops were your best chances of doing well on the map. Picking engineer when you were going to ride around in the deathtraps called tanks (jets OP). The engineer class at the moment might seem a bit of a cookie cutter class to play as it gets something to deal with everything, a decent gun , an rpg or stinger, at mines/repairkit/eod bot. However I find the RPG's to be pretty much pointless as the tanks can kill you before you have found the time to fire about 4-5 rockets in them. Strength in numbers is needed here, which is okay but with 4 man squads its a bit of a toll to ask everyone to play engineer to have an effective counter against a tank. Especially the tanks with an engineer behind them constantly repairing. So I have pretty much resorted to using the stinger instead, because that actually can one shot kill/disable the jets/planes. Still flares are abundant so you have to get a bit lucky, but hey you also have other jets and the mobile killing machine AA on your side to bait out those flares. Killing vehicles reliably comes more down to 3/4th of your squad dieing to a tank and everone respawning as engineer with RPG. Or just other vehicles. Shots in the rear should really just insta disable a tank imho.

So onto flying, its a lot of fun! Once you get your damned unlocks. I don't bother with the jets as I don't find them that interesting but the attack and scout helicopters are quite fun to fly in. The design decision to make everything for the helicopter and jets unlocks is a bit dumb though. No flares when you start out, no stealth no nothing. You unlock them pretty fast and as added benefit to the helicopter you score points for Attack Helicopters if you are just playing the gunner, so you can have a pilot with the unlocks already to get your unlocks. But then where BF2 flyers were pretty overpowered, we come to battlefield 3 where it feels like the Jets just fill the niche of killing helicopters and other jets. I might be wrong in this as I don't play the jets, but it feels like it from my current perspective. The attack helicopter is a lot of fun, but when I go to bed at night I still hear the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP of stuff locking onto me. Oh my god it feels like everything has some form of AA to shoot at my ass now. Jets are still reasonably safe compared to helicopters to the AA as they have speed and hight advantage. The attack helicopter simply works best if you fly low, but this attracts tank machine guns, AA, Stingers, jeep machine guns, well basically every big caliber round. I am pretty good at avoiding most of this by now, but its a bit of a frustrating experience flying the helicopter having constant beeping going on, while you try to shake the locks. Then Dice also decided in all its wisdom that 14 rockets on a tank won't destroy it, but will disable it. Effectively denying you the kill, and only giving you some points for disabling it. You have to turn around and make a new pass to actually destroy the thing. If your gunner was paying good attention you might kill it on the first pass though. Still I feel the rockets on the helicopter are pretty weak, they do a poor job at actually killing the armor. They do a poor job at killing infantry, and they also do a poor job at killing fast moving targets unless you can fly in a straight line behind/front of them. Which presents you as a target to their .50. I think flying needs a few tweaks in the game.

Lags... well obviously they will fix this eventually but it makes every task in the game an exercise in frustration sometimes. You just hate it when you are flying your helicopter skillfully low to the ground over the river in Caspian border and a lag hits you into the trees. You hate it when you are just flying about and the lags hit you. You hate it when you are driving about an the lags hit you. You hate it when you are running and the lags hit you. Rubberbanding is annoying!

Oh well thats it for now. I think I'm going to just wait a week or so and return again to see if they fixed the lag. A lot of frustration comes from the lags. Sunglare of everything being my second most hated aspect of this game. I feel like I need a pair of sunglasses to play this game.

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Da boyz need themselves a Nob they do

Sometimes I think the rising/setting sun with its red color is a guy with laserpointer who is going to shoot me.

I think I saw a server setting to disable spawn on all.
You can zoom it? Need to try that some time to find those sniping rats.

Is there a way to read the chat without writing something yourself? Maybe even the chat history?

Indeed.
3 C4 on a tank makes for a happy Support and a gibbed tank driver. Its also the quickest and most funny way to take care of them, if you can get close ( part of the fun! ).
I also like helis a lot more than jets. Jets probably get interesting again with the missile pod unlock. Getting flares is obviously a must and at least only takes 300 points. I guess jet flares are getting harder and harder to unlock as they are difficult to control and so much antiair around that is trying to kill you. And basically agree to whatever else you say about air.



@ lags: Didnt experience a lot of bad lags yet.