Battlefield V

Battlefield V

This is why you shouldn't insult or alienate your audience.

Genre:	First-person shooter
Platforms:	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Xbox One
Release Date:	November 20, 2018
Developer:	EA DICE^AGW
Publisher:	Electronic Arts
Franchise:	Battlefield
Previous Game:	Battlefield 1^AGW

Battlefield V is a First-person shooter game developed by EA DICE^AGW and published by Electronic Arts on November 20, 2018. It is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series.

Plot

Enter mankind's greatest conflict with Battlefield V as the series goes back to its roots with a never-before-seen portrayal of World War II.

Why It Sucks

The game takes place during World War II, but it is extremely inaccurate historical-wise, taking away the feeling of playing a WW2 game and in a way is even being very disrespectful towards those who were involved in World War II. Examples include:
- The most notorious example is a female soldier with a prosthetic arm who was one of the focuses of the game's reveal trailer, more info about that can be found here.
- The story missions are all horrendously rewritten with SJW-pandering in mind: one mission replaces a team of male Norwegian commandos with a woman from Norwegian Resistance and her daughter, one acts like the British SBS would recruit a criminal, and a third adds a bunch of modern-day race politics to black Senegalese soldiers serving in the French military, despite the fact that France at the time was not even THAT racially prejudiced like some other countries were (it is true that Senegalese soldiers did experience some prejudice, unfair treatment and discrimination, but the game does exaggerate certain aspects).
- Some cosmetics for British Army say "For The Queen", even though United Kingdom at that time was ruled by King George VI, not Queen Elizabeth II.
- Swastika is censored even in the campaign. In fact, German soldiers are never even refered to as "nazis".
- Many weapons that were used in WWII are absent, such as the M1 Garand, one of the most iconic guns of the war.
  - Speaking of guns, they also appear at the wrong periods of time, such as the STG44 (which, as the name says, was developed in 1944) appearing in 1942 North Africa.
- None of the well-known battles of WWII appear and there is also a serious lack of factions in the multiplayer.
The campaign mode is very short, repetitive and easy.
After the backlash for the lack of historical accuracy, Patrick Söderlund (EA's vice president at the time) called the critics "uneducated," gave a stupid justification about his daughter and said that if they gamers had two choices, either accept it or don't buy it, apparently many choose the latter.
Bugs and glitches are common.
Cheaters are becoming more and more common on PC.
Character progression is terrible. The player has to spend in-game credits to unlock items, but the amount of credits the player receives is too low, forcing the player to do unnecessary grinding.
Subtitles and other text that appear on the UI can be difficult to read as the text is usually on a white background, which is the same color font as the text.
- This problem is particularly annoying when a character is speaking a foreign language.
It can take a while to get into matches due to the low player-base.
Ridiculously low amount of health, which gives players little to no reaction time when they are being attacked by an enemy player.
The game lacks the chaos and brutality of war that Battlefield 1 had. Examples:
- In Battlefield 1, if a match was going poorly, characters would panic and scream out in distress (crying for their mother, begging the enemy to stop shooting, swearing, etc). Battlefield V does not feature any of this.
- Melee animations seem more toned down in comparison.
- It is not allowed to finish off the wounded players from the enemy teams in the multiplayer, due to "Geneva Convention", which is just a really poor excuse (especially considering how heavily historically inaccurate the game is).
Speaking of Battlefield 1, the game doesn't even have neat extras such as Codex Entries, which gave a lot of interesting information on various events, battles, weapons etc.
Only eight maps are available, which is low when compared to other first-person shooters. Making matters worse is that many maps are set in locations where the British and the Germans NEVER crossed swords, like Rotterdam or Narvik.
Player spawning is broken in most of the maps, especially the map "Hamada", where players in planes can bomb all of the opposing team's vehicles seconds after the match starts.
Squads can only have up to four members instead of six like older Battlefield games.
Parts of the game weren't available at release, most likely due to the game being rushed. This includes:
- Game modes "Tides of War" and "practice range".
- One of the campaign's war stories called "The Last Tiger".
- A bunch of customization options, especially for tanks.
- The Battle Royale mode was delayed until March 2019.
Character classes are unbalanced, as weapon selection is overly-restricted.
- Medics are completely pointless because not only are they under-powered, other classes can also revive players.
The screams that male characters make are hilariously bad, to the point where they sound like a woman screaming.
Lighting tends to be too bright at times, making the graphics look washed out.
The heavily hyped ray-tracing graphics option on the PC version tanks performance to virtually unplayable levels, while only offering very slightly nicer reflections in return. At first this was assumed to be the result of nVidia's then-new GeForce RTX cards just not being powerful enough to do the technology justice, but later games such as Metro: Exodus have used it for vastly improved graphics at similar or better performance compared to this game, making it obvious that DICE just did an extremely poor job of implementing it.
Despite many requests, the game lacks a feature to turn off historically inaccurate character customization for those who want a more authentic WW2 experience. While DICE still claims that this is everyones Battlefield.

Redeeming Qualities

Combat is still good.
The maps "Aerodrome" and "Twisted Steel" are fun to play on.
Aside from the bad lighting, the graphics are great.
Sound design is good.
All DLC is free, and the only microtransactions are for cosmetics.
While easy, campaign missions are now less linear, and there are multiple play-styles to use.
The additional War Story, The Last Tiger, allows you to play as Germans and shows that not all German soldiers were actually nazis and bad people, which is very rare for a WW2 game, even though it's pretty watered down. It is also arguably the best chapter in the campaign.
Many of the worst bugs have been fixed, even though some bugs remain.
Finding games is much easier nowadays.
Animations (apart from a few bugs of course) are exceedingly well done.
Despite the numerous historical inaccuracies and SJW-pandering, some of the war stories cover more obscure aspects of World War II, like the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.
DICE hasn't given up on this game despite the initial turmoil, and they have (for the most part) listened to player feedback. They promised to bring new maps, and a new campaign set in Pacific Theatre later in 2019.

Reception

Despite mostly positive reviews from critics and some fans, it was heavily criticized by fans of older Battlefield games. Many game reviewers also have opinions ranging from mixed to negative. AngryJoe gave it a 5/10 and later listed it as number 5 in his top 10 most disappointing games of 2018 video, Along with Fallout 76. The user scores on Metacritic are 2.8/10 for PC, 2.2/10 for PS4, and 2.7/10 for Xbox One.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Reports have indicated that the game had an even worse debut week than Battlefield: Hardline, which had been generally considered the worst game in the series until this one came along, further reinforced by retailers in the US discounting the game at 50% after just a week after launch. Possible factors for the low sales may include the underwhelming reveal, terrible teaser event with Trevor Noah, EA and DICE's mistake in attacking disgruntled fans, unimpressive beta and YouTube reactionaries slamming the game using strawman arguments. EA lost around $350 million because of Battlefield V's launch.^[4]