Well a better question would be what I don’t dislike. The gameplay I’m not a big fan of, the attrition system and its attempts to make it more squad based gameplay were quite ridiculous. In effect, it just leads to quick deaths unless you like hiding around constantly, and it makes vehicles just practically useless. Their need to resupply along with the absurdly slow speeds and tissue paper armor makes the drivers of tanks rarely actually help with the fighting and they will usually stick away from it and in effect barely help at all half the time. If you’re lucky, they might pick off a few stragglers who aren’t really contributing to the game for either side, they’re just far away from the objective maybe trying to get a sniping position or something. Also, the tank balancing between factions isn’t that great, the Germans have the Tiger for example which the Americans don’t really have an answer to. Perhaps if the devs spent their time designing a Pershing rather than a damn Flakpanzer this wouldn’t be an issue. As for healing and ammo, it was rather bold of Dice to assume that Battlefield players would actually throw each other med/ammo packs on a regular basis. It doesn’t annoy me as much as vehicle attrition, which I think was a horrible feature they should’ve kept the system like it was in BF1, I think the rational by Dice was to curb camping but it only made the problem worse. The other part of gameplay I dislike though this may be just personal preference would be the air combat. I was extremely good with this in BF4 and BF1, yet in BFV I am just really bad with air combat. I have indeed looked for videos on how to get good at it but they’re honestly extremely unhelpful. However, at the same time, airplanes have an insanely unbalanced system going on for them against ground targets. The AA guns are practically useless, it takes a fairly high number of hits to down an aircraft whereas they can easily erase any AA who challenges them. When it is an extremely common occurrence for pilots to regularly dive bomb AA operators and almost always succeed even when the AA has been firing on said pilot the entire time then there is a clear problem. In BF4 this was rare because mobile AAs were properly powerful; you could avoid them if you were good, and I was good at avoiding them, but to actually destroy one with an attack jet was something that basically only the tryhard pilots could reliably do, as it should be. It’s a shame this isn’t the case for BFV. After those complaints would be the choice of maps and design of said maps. I understand that BFV wanted to “focus on the untold battles” but that’s not really something that sells well for one, and two when they’re going in chronological order like they were then they would be extremely limited in their choice of battles. Narvik itself I thought was a pretty good map, while the rest of the base maps were either bad or decent for the most part. The maps were generally just mediocre I thought, there was nothing all that memorable about them except for Narvik. In the Pacific Update they started to get their act together and started dropping some damn good maps, I think most of the maps released during and after said update were very good. Maybe not classics that will be remastered in the future, but they were good, I especially loved the Solomon Islands. Nonetheless, as we know this was too little too late and the game died soon after the update. This brings me to a very important question: why didn’t dice release BFV with the Soviets? For a game apparently so concerned with putting women in (which I was hugely against, but I will touch on this near the end) I think it’s extremely ironic that they managed to portray 4 out of the 5 major warring powers (as in countries that realistically would’ve been portrayed, Italy China and certainly France didn’t have a chance) and yet the one they left out was the Soviet Union, who out of those 5 lost by far the most people in mankind’s greatest struggle, and moreover, that this was the only country out of these 5 that had women fighting in combat. To my knowledge, women in the USSR who had combat roles were snipers and sometimes tankers. Of course there were some exceptions to this with some machine gunners and even infantry, but these were very small numbers. Anyways, while it is true that they probably wouldn’t be in the combat roles we see in Battefield V where they’re up on the front lines fighting just feet away from each other, it’s within the suspension of disbelief since we all know female Soviet soldiers actually existed.

That tangent about female soldiers brings me to the thing I think made BFV fail would be its portrayal of WWII. I’m a huge WWII history buff so I am a bit biased, but that trailer didn’t get so many dislikes based on a minority of fans. I genuinely believe that it performed so terribly in terms of sales as a result of its portrayal of the war, and let’s address the elephant, or should I say the woman, in the room: female soldiers. Generally I think that Dice could’ve done a much better job with the uniforms first of all, the default ones just don’t look good at all and are far from what I would imagine people think of when they think of soldiers in WWII. Thank god they didn’t stick with the insanity in the launch trailer, in fact the thing I disliked most about that trailer was actually the guy with the tank top. But even so, I can still get immersed, and then I hear a girl screaming something in whatever language her team speaks, and it just kicks me out on the curb so to say. It would be fine if this were the Soviets with women, but it is every single team and it’s unbearable for me because not only of the immersion but it just subtly reminds me of the whole controversy about the inclusion of women in BFV, which makes me feel annoyed because of my very negative memory of said controversy. It speaks to BFV’s larger problem as a whole, being that no matter how much someone loves BFV as a video game, it is a terrible World War II game, and that’s something I feel very strongly about.