@cpuchess Yeah, being able to play with bots is something that I miss. Even though I didn't use it that often, it was good to be able to practice new weapons and tactics are things that at least move. Battlefield 3 didn't even have a test range.. at least Battlefield 4 has that.

Battlefield 2 was great, but the amount of fun you had was highly dependent on the maturity of the people you played with. This is the same with Battlefield 3 and 4. There is a lot of good gameplay to be had in all of them, but otherwise good games could be ruined by stupid teammates, etc. I think probably the biggest thing, and this could all be in my head, was that the player base of Battlefield 2 was either older/more mature as a result of it being a PC only game. Sure people play BF3 and 4 on the PC, but the player base just seems younger and less mature these days. You have people running around trying their best not to drop ammo or health, people running away while you're trying to repair their vehicle, people taking vehicles and driving them off without any passengers, etc.

Honestly, I don't remember a whole lot about Battlefield 2. I remember that it was great fun, but I can't think of any particularly memorable moments. While I am aware of the teamwork-oriented elements such as:

- Vehicles acting as mobile healing stations or ammo resupply points based on who is driving them.

- Commander mode

etc.

I don't remember too many times where I was in a match where all of these things were used to their full advantage. Maybe these sort of things were best experienced as part of a clan, I don't know. As for commander mode, I remember there being one, but I don't ever remember getting to play as one except for maybe once or twice.

Yes, there are terrible, annoying-as-hell gameplay problems with Battlefield 3 and 4:

Mobile AA being anti-everything

Lock-on spam

Increased use of vehicles as disposable fast transport, abandoning the crew to certain death

Active protection, active radar

Dying behind cover, etc.

Sniper spam, large part in due to high power, relatively low recoil DMRs; bolt-actions not too bad on normal in most cases but bolt-actions and DMRs alike can easily ruin matches in hardcore mode ('which is a half-baked mode where some gadgets no longer even work)

- One thing that I seem to recall is that the majority of the Battlefield 2 maps were designed in such a way that didn't immediately put someone using a specific class at a disadvantage. Either the map had rolling hills, ample vehicles (none of this sitting around waiting for a jeep like BF4), different types of cover such as buildings or foliage, or better balance between the infantry weapon classes. In BF3 and BF4 it seems like if you aren't a sniper or assault on some maps you are basically going to get your ass handed to you unless you spend the whole time in a tank or APC.

However, I think a lot of people are forgetting some of the most infuriating/annoying parts of Battlefield 2:

- Helicopters, especially transport helicopters could carry engineers and repair the thing faster than it could take damage.

- The infantry gunplay was irritating. Hit detection was poor, none of the weapons seemed to have any kick or recoil to them, and they had the most ridiculous weapon spread/inaccuracy problems of any game I can remember. There was no bipod for the support class for example and you couldn't hit something the size of a tank from 25 feet away using an LMG.. the bullets shot out at like 45 degree angles.. something that only happened in BF3 close-range with suppression.

- While the lack of a hardcore mode wasn't necessarily bad, the game had the bad balance of requiring a good amount of bullets to kill someone (low bullet damage) but also terrible rage-inducing uncontrollable random bullet spread. Either the bullet damage from infantry weapons needed to be higher or the spread on the weapons needed to be lower. I guess this all basically comes down to time-to-kill that was too high. Personally, the hardcore modes on BF3 and BF4 were much more tolerable in this regard.

- Air vehicles. There were Stinger emplacements and other vehicles, but my god... good pilots in any of the air vehicles could destroy the mobile AA emplacements or have their locations memorized making it extremely dangerous to try to use one. The result of this is that the air vehicles would completely dominate some matches, way worse than what happened in BF3.

- Grenade/explosive spam was just as prevalent as the modern games.

I can accept him turning it down, but not to even ask him? He has been the voice of Snake forever. It is like Michael Ironside not being Sam Fischer (which also changed didn't it?!), or Kevin Conroy not being Batman or Mark Hamill not being the Joker (looking at you WB Studios for Arkham Origins).

Haha, great comparison. The Last of Us is more accurately a mix between "I Am Legend" (environment),"The Road" (father and child in post-apocalyptic setting) and "Uncharted" (graphical style, girl looks like a girl version of young Nathan Drake, father looks like a grittier adult Drake)

TurambarGS: I feel like some developers get really connected to their game and the decisions that they have made about where to go with it. For example, some of the game mechanics may not be liked by gamers but the development team won't change them because they think what they've done is really better. That, or they will try to rationalize what they did. To give an example: in Halo: Reach a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but I'm not sure) do not like the lack of melee damage bleed through (hitting someone with a shield never does any more damage than taking the shield down, even if there is only a sliver). However, there has been no discussion of changing or even modifying it as far as I know. However, a representative for the company can't say "well yeah we screwed up" within a few months release of a game. Doing that is almost like saying "don't buy this game, we admit it is bad". However, they could say something like "we felt like our decisions with insert_game would be good for the majority of players." A while later, maybe a year or so the company might say that they will undo their wrongdoing in the sequel, but they will not do with within a few months.