Battlefield V

Battlefield V

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

Genre:	First-Person Shooter
Platforms:	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4^AGW Xbox One^AGW
Release Date:	November 20, 2018
Game Engine:	Frostbite 3
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.

Synopsis

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.

Bad Qualities

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 who exhibits Violet Evergarden levels of strength and endurance (somehow surviving a fall from a bridge 80m tall into a shallow river and overpowering a healthy German soldier while suffering from hypothermia), one acts like the British SBS would recruit a criminal (in reality they consist mainly of volunteers of the Royal Marines), 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 and their armies were not racially segregated (it is true that Senegalese soldiers did experience some prejudice, unfair treatment and discrimination, with the worst and extreme case being Thiaroye massacre, 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.
- Both the Germans and the British use the American built C-47 Skytrain cargo plane, the Junkers Ju-52, which the Germans should be flying, was not included until the introduction of the battle royale game mode.
- Swastika is censored even in the campaign. In fact, German soldiers are never even referred to as "Nazis".
- Many weapons that were used in WWII are absent at launch, 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.
- Multiplayer customization and characters are also heavily ahistorical. In fact, some soldiers look even more like gangbangers.
- The game's final War Story, called "Elites - Steve Fisher", feels nothing like a war story, but rather like a generic action movie that stars Tom Cruise, with cringeworthy dialogue that you'd expect in those types of movies also being included.
The campaign mode is very short, repetitive and easy.
The stealth experience in campaign mode is bad due to terrible mechanics:
- Enemies will spot you from very far away no matter you are in position of crouch, prone, or even behind cover.
- Lure sometimes alerts entire area of enemies, or enemies will go to your position instead of where the lure landed.
- Many campaign challenges require players to go stealth in certain missions, while these missions never provide any weapon or gadgets for stealth gameplay.
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, this game doesn't even have neat extras such as Codex Entries, which gave a lot of interesting information on various events, battles, weapons etc. There are collectable letters however, but they just don't feel as interesting and are there for more drama, though they are still touching and if you collect them all, you will get a unique cosmetic item in the multiplayer (one for each chapter).
On start, only eight maps were available, which is low when compared to other first-person shooters. Making matters worse is that many British vs Germans maps are set in locations where they 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, this feature was actually rushed due to in order to cover up the lack of hardware ray-tracing supported games.
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 "everyone's Battlefield."
Ridiculous TTK (time to kill), with overpowered, unbalanced weapons such as the Type 2A and STG-44, which is not especially help by WIS #9.
Annoyingly long revive animations, which completely kill the incentive and initiative to revive teammates.
Bad voice acting, especially with the female soldiers.
Uninspired atmosphere.

Good 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 microtransactions are only 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.
Before the game's discontinuation, DICE didn't give up on the game despite the initial turmoil, and they (for the most part) listened to player feedback.
Pacific Theatre maps and combat which were added in 2019 are a great experience.

Reception

Despite mostly positive reviews from critics and some fans, it was heavily criticized by most of the players, especially the 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]

It was announced on April 23, 2020 that the game would no longer receive updates after the summer of 2020, along with the game's live service being discontinued during that time.