That video:
Very true. The problem is that nobody really uses the squad system, and almost all the voice-com I've heard has been a packet-jibbered mess. And since there's no way to communicate to my whole team, I can't just yell: "We've almost got it, everyone pile on" without laboriously typing it out and then getting shot in the head.
Admittedly the lack of team voice chat is a negative, but let's be entirely honest here: How is that any different from any other team-based multiplayer game ever?
Getting stuck with a bad team, especially when the game is new, happens. TF2 is around 3 years old now, and I still get team stuffed full of retards, and I can whisper, comment, beg, shout or yell over voice chat for people to change class, or defend the flag, or charge the middle... It really doesn't help.
That said, "Get on B/A" takes half a second to type... So Meh.
Ambient/HUD noise
WTF is going on here. Blings, beeps, biddlyboops, and I still don't know which ones actually mean anything and which are purely ambient. It seems they wanted a GUI "Experience" which I don't really care for.
There is no "purely ambient noise". Most of the sounds honestly feel self-evident to me: Lock-on warning, mortar being shot, bullet whizzing by... etc.
If anything the sound in this game is amazing.
Vehicles A lot of people don't seem to understand the power of vehicles or the fact that any uncrewed vehicle can be stolen at any time, and as long as it remains alive a new one won't appear. (That's why the abandonment of the T90 is such a blow.)
In the interests of map balance, IMO enemies shouldn't be able to steal vehicles while those vehicles have never been driven out of their spawn zone.
You do realize that to get in the enemy spawn zone and steal their vehicle is insanely hard if they're at least half competent right?
First you need to actually get all the there without having your face shot off, which is a bit like swimming against the tide. Then you need to wait till a vehicle respawns, then you need them to NOT take it immediately. You need to stay alive and not be spotted till this point in the same place the enemy spawns and runs around in. All the while, you can't be hiding too far from the vehicle spawn, or someone else will take it. Once the vehicle spawns, you need to make a run for it, and pray nobody just happens to spawn closer, or behind you, in time to ventilate the back of your skull.
If you accomplished all of the above, you fucking DESERVE the ride.
Squad respawning:
It's a neat mechanic, but I think they did it a heck of a lot better in BF2142, because at least there's this pod-from-space business.
In BC2, you'll kill an enemy and--whoops--within his last dying second a teammate of his just snapped into existence on the other side of the wall. And that second guy either kills you or continues the cycle. A big reason I suspect I die trying to defuse M-com stations is because I "clear" the area but the last enemy had his back to a wall and his teammate spawned outside and came back in...
It just screws me up because I try to keep track of how many enemies are where so I know what I'm getting into... And now that information will always be stale and subject to whimsical unpredictable change.
Begs the question, where is your squad to cover your ass?
That honestly doesn't happen to me a lot. I do sometimes get the "enemy spawns when friend dies", but usually that only means I spend an extra bullet, 40mm grenade or knife to the face for the extra kill, since they're sitting ducks while respawning. Hell, I once had someone spawn right before I shot their squad mate with a 40mm grenade... Double kill. That was hilarious.
Map design:
Any playable surface that requires you to sprint up a specific section of graphically-similar slope in order to reach another playable zone is bad. There are some areas like this in the demo which I'm not sure are meant to be playable.
Yeah that needs to get fixed. Some zones are obviously not meant to be played, like the right top of the mountain behind the first M-Com set. There are snow zones that aren't even textured properly.