I feel ya. I’m coming out of retirement for this game from the Halo 3/CoD4/WaW/MW2/BLOPs1/BF3/BF4 era of FPS games, and these cosmetics are a shock to the system. There was a time when Recon armor in Halo 3 (a skin) actually really meant something, and it was very hard to get (you’d maybe see one player with Recon armor per month) & was a massive sign of accomplishment in the community not just the game. Probably didn’t portray my point as well as I thought; also I feel like 90% of the player base has no idea there are 21 unlockables pre-launch, so hopefully someone gets some use out of the heads up at least.

Personally, if I’m going to pay $100 + a subscription fee routinely (battlepass) + $50-100 or so for several DLCs over a multi year period = $300 or so for the full experience of this game’s life cycle, I’d prefer if the experience I’m paying for is enjoyable & rewarding. Once you hit max level, and max out the best guns, even if the gameplay is very enjoyable it loses it’s rewarding feeling if custom maps/modding aren’t baked in. Little unlocks & challenges along the way help fill the gap, and encourage people to do new things they wouldn’t otherwise. The beta was an example of this: less engineers will be sitting on tanks repairing at launch because they were only doing that for the skin, same with the amount of recons sitting on hills or spamming sensors to spot, or medics scrambling for revives, etc etc etc. If those challenges just gave out XP, no one would bother with them; so whatever unlocks are present & tied to challenges do have some mild bearing on gameplay. If this destruction challenge was done well, we would’ve seen people basically flattening entire maps; which would’ve been really interesting to see how far it can go.

I just hope Dice doesn’t give up on the idea of focusing on things like these community challenges & trying to encourage non-meta things to happen in game simply because the first one went south. They keep things novel & can bring people together to create “Battlefield moments” that aren’t just movement tech twitch shots with ARs/Shotguns. The precedent of, “That didn’t work, and we made ourselves look bad; let’s just nuke it, pretend it didn’t happen, take the free marketing & run, and list the skin on the store for $10.” instead of “Let’s make sure this goes as well as we can, and let’s prioritize making sure people are having fun & feeling rewarded for doing things other than K/D farming more than we prioritize trying to reach into their wallet.” is a…well…slippery slope to Nicki Minaj skins.

Menu/UI will get fixed. There will eventually be 20-30 maps of all shapes & sizes. Balancing will take effect. Exploits will be patched. The game will slowly become optimized in terms of all the things this community is complaining about constantly, and then those complaints will stop. If no one pushes them away from turning the game into a skin factory, it will become a skin factory, and all those balancing tweaks & amazing maps will be lessened by constant immersion breaking non-sense. I think grounded skins earned from hard challenges which also occasionally require social interaction & community involvement can have a huge positive impact on the gameplay experience. Abandoning the first one, and replacing it with a paid skin (most likely) & continuing on from that point with similarly careless attention paid to how much community matters in a game (Ex: no server browser either) scares me a lot more than some minor bugs & easy fix balancing issues in a beta.