Mr Dave wrote:
For a start, you have the difference between CoD stye near instant death where (lag permitting) the person who first sees the opponent wins to Unreal Tournamentesque actually needing to fight your opponent to win a battle (and to leave yourself in a good state to be in a position to win the next, what with non autorecovering health). Or CoD Style samey realistic weapons to Unreal Tournamentesque broad range of weapons with different uses for different situations that you can swap to when said situations arise. You can chuck in fun things like the various Crysis suit things (I assume they did this in Crysis multiplayer, anyway), or you can make your people shit grendades upon death and cause a certain amount of annoyance. Or maybe helicopters that spew attack dogs.
People don't want that. They want to kill someone who had no idea they were even there, using a wall penetrating auto-aiming rapid firing one hit kill sniper rifle. Gulf of Oman is so popular in BF3 because it features huge tower blocks under construction... with no stairs, so without a helicopter nobody can get up to you to stop you. If they manage to hit you from ground level DON'T WORRY! The sniper class can deploy a mobile spawn point to reappear back up their in their inaccessible lair. They then put on the "noob punisher" dogtag, the most popular one in the game, because the only thing better than killing someone who couldn't defend themselves is killing someone who's inexperienced.
That's what it's all about: empowering fuckheads. Gone is the varied and useful arsenals of Quake and Unreal. Instead you are rewarded for killing with an AI controlled, nearly unstoppable gunship helicopter to help you kill even more. Exciting duels and running battles? Pah! Each fight is over in a split second, often (but not always) the person who fired first winning.
The game itself isn't fun. That's why it's propped up with unlocks and perks and other shit: to give you a reason to keep playing when you're not enjoying yourself. You are convinced that if you can just unlock that ability or weapon that seems to keep killing you, you'll even things up and stop suffering so many cheap annoying deaths. Consider me with the air radar unlock in BF3. I suffered the infuriatingly bad air combat thinking it would make it possible for me to concentrate on my opponent and not the terrible interface.