YMMV / Battlefield

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • For Battlefield 2: No vehicles, infantry only, Strike at Karkand!
    • Strike at Karkand is so popular that it was brought back for Battlefield 2142 and Battlefield 3!
  • For the franchise as a whole: Wake Island. It's in Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 1943, Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield V. That's almost the entire series!
  • Operation Metro for the series post EA's acquisition of DICE. Introduced in Battlefield 3, it was included in a DLC pack for Battlefield 4 and then remastered as "Operation Underground" in Battlefield V. It was also common for servers to have the map as the only one on the rotation, with settings that increased the game length by 10 times the default.
• Cargo Ship: The first-person Idle Animation of the American Support class in BF2 has him petting his M249 SAW.
• Common Knowledge: 2042 being a "Battle Royale until EA changed it" is commonly bought up on every reddit or twitter thread discussing the game. There's no evidence of this and it makes little sense when thought through.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Anyone up for some no vehicles, infantry-only Strike at Karkand? Good, so is everyone else.
  • Metro, 1000x tickets no time limit.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Cult Classic: Battlefield 2142 was one of the lesser-played games in the series, being overshadowed by Battlefield 2 but gained and maintained a dedicated fanbase for the game for a significant period of time, and there are still calls for DICE to add Titan mode to the modern releases.
  • Special Forces is the most liked expansion pack of any Battlefield game, the only one that comes close is the Bad Company 2: Vietnam pack.
• Even Better Sequel:
  • Battlefield 2 was this compared to Battlefield 1942 (and Battlefield Vietnam, which released between the two titles). It is still seen by many as the high point of the series. Every new Battlefield will be compared to BF2 and praised for similarities. Battlefield 2 was so beloved that even after the GameSpy server shutdown that would have normally killed the game, a fans lead community called REVIVE took it into their own hands to keep the game alive for 3 more years until EA killed it with a Cease & Desist order.
  • Bad Company 2 was widely considered to be much better than Bad Company, at least in terms of multiplayer, which was helped by it being available on PC when the original wasn't.
  • Battlefield 1's release was much smoother than 3 and 4. Combined with the refreshing theme change, its critical reception and fanbase reception was much warmer than either of them.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Due to its poor reception, Hardline is largely ignored by the Battlefield fan base. The next entry in the series after 4 is 1. 2042 is getting even worse treatment, not even getting the "under-rated gem" status.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • As the series ages the amount of people who decry the newer games because they aren't "authentic" or "realistic" enough grows. Newer fans of the series tend to forget that the original games included things like ramming battleships and aircraft carriers together, using strategic bombers as close air support, being able to stand on the wings of aircraft, sticking C4 to jet planes and ramming enemy vehicles with them, 'cartillery' where a commander could kill an enemy by dropping a vehicle on top of someone who was camping on a roof, an entire game based upon mecha and anti-gravity airships and where the World War 1 game gives everyone prototype, non-existent automatic weapons that make it play like a run & gun post-2000s War on Terror Call Of Duty.
  • Every Battlefield game after Bad Company 2 had its environmental destruction compared with BC2, with every instalment not "having enough destruction" for the fanbase. Not only was there little destruction in Battlefield 1942 or 2, Bad Company 2 also had a bigger graphical budget because its maximum player size was only 32 players on small maps, while the other games have to deal with maps for 64 players (and then 128 for Battlefield 2042), on extremely large maps.
  • Games after Battlefield 4 get compared with its "Levolution" feature. A feature not in earlier games, and mostly absent from games after BF4 due to the complexity of designing such massive map changing destruction, many of them weren't worth the trouble of including, some actively made the map less fun to play and the feature was a major source of bugs, with Siege of Shanghai and Dawnbreaker both featuring levolution events that would regularly hard crash the server if activated.
• Game-Breaker: Numerous examples throughout the series, including Vietnam's M60 / LAW kit, BF2's dolphin diving C4 and Noobtubes, the post-boost pre-nerf RPD, claymores, and the G36E along with the insta-heal med packs, Bad Company's M60 toting medic class, the one-way portable walls the Sniper carried in 2142, anything involving Japan or China on Wake Island or the US on Strike at Karkand, attack helicopters that can survive a direct hit from the main gun of an M1A1 Abrams, bugged guns like the M26 Dart, jets in all modern Battlefield games, and the Voss / PK rocket combo in 2142.
• Good Bad Bugs: Several. One amusing one was that in 2, the round would end with a stock view of the battlefield. Since none of the players were controlling their (now-invincible) vehicles, this could lead to some amusing sights, like a cartwheeling fighter-bomber.
  • This bug was apparently popular enough to be kept in Battlefield Heroes, which is based on the Battlefield 2 engine.
  • Another one, that could be considered a glitch in 2, is when a person would go prone right next to a wall or a fence. The game would allow the model to go through if the person was right next to the wall, allowing another player to shoot (or knife) the protruding body part. A similar bug in many of the games has been that objects a player might use for cover like rubble, rubbish, boxes and so on, if they're moving (and not something like a recently blown up vehicle), they're client-side only and so they provide no cover at all, as they don't appear on anyone else's screens.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The starting light machinegun for the MEC faction in Battlefield 2 is an RPK-74 with a fictional drum magazine, to bring it closer in line with its American and Chinese counterparts in terms of mag capacity. A drum magazine for 5.45mm AK-type rifles would come to fruition in 2014, with a 95-round drum magazine being introduced with the RPK-16.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The classic BF2 habit of yelling "enemy boat spotted" repeatedly on a map with no water. This goes as far back as BF1942, in which people often spotted submarines on desert maps.
  • The theme of BF3 and 4 are commonly compared to fart sounds due to excessive use of bass electronic notes.
  • And 2042 is just people banging random pieces of metal together while playing it all through a dozen megaphones.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Midnight Sun map in 2 had wolf often howling enough to give chills on top of terrifying war at night.
• Obvious Beta: DICE has a notorious reputation for crash bugs and balance issues out of the box. This is counter-balanced by their generally good support for their products post-launch.
• Seasonal Rot: It's a meme in the community that since the release of Battlefield 3, the community will always view the most recently released Battlefield game as the worst entry ever, while at the same time rehabilitating the previous game (that had been considered the worst Battlefield ever) into an "under-rated gem" that the new game should have been more like.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The introduction in Battlefield 2 of the G 36 E for the Medic in the Special Forces expansion pack saw the Assault class effectively die overnight as the Medic class had a weapon as good as the Assault class at fighting infantry opponents, with the benefit of having a heal kit and a revive tool. Suffice to say, it was heavily disliked by people who didn't have the expansion pack.
  • The Premium pass that had been present in many of the Frostbite-era games is generally hated for splitting up the community and locking maps and weapons behind a paywall. This means that Premium-owners would have to deal with long wait times to get into matches on new maps while anyone who didn't own Premium would be at a disadvantage against Premium-owners who have access to new weapons.
  • The Battlepacks system introduced in the Frostbite-era games is equally hated for being a glorified slot machine that randomly rewards skins and XP-boosts to players based on chance rather than skill.
  • In 2042 they changed classes to hero shooter style "specialists", and changed the monetisation model again to be based around selling skins and "season passes". The specialists created a gigantic backlash while the season passes did little except anger people who bought them up front because the first batch of content intended for them ended up getting delayed by as long as 9 months because of the extremely poor reception & bugs at release and the delay for them resulted in the game losing what little playerbase it had left.
• Sophomore Slump: Battlefield: Vietnam was the lowest-selling Battlefield title to date, and with the arguable exception of Hardline and the free-to-play entries is generally regarded as the worst game in the series. Numerous Competitive Balance problems didn't help, like the aforementioned M60 / LAW kit.
  • Battlefield V is essentially the first real sequel to Battlefield 1942. It suffered from so many problems that it's considered the worst of all the main series of games, at least until Battlefield 2042 came along.
• Vindicated by History: Battlefield 3 and 4 both went through a period of being considered the weakest games in the series before having their problems ironed out and become far more played later on.
  • Inverted by V which launched extremely poorly, but gave hope with the Pacific expansion that it would be reworked and eventually become a good Battlefield game, only for it to be cancelled with no further support.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The powerful Frostbite engine is easily best demonstrated on the Battlefield series, with the explosion, rain, and lighting effects since Battlefield 3 being very nice looking.

---