My experience with Battlefield 4 was sour at first, but now has become a very satisfying venture.
With forty-six hours into the game, I'm enjoying myself a lot. At first, installation was rough. The game installed, but Punkbuster did not, and without downloading the latest Beta Drivers for my AMD 6870 the game would crash on start-up. This was all easily rectified though, with the help of AMD's website, and the pbsetup utility. Once my random server disconnects were fixed, and the game finally ran I started playing conquest.
Conquest is getting rather old to be honest, and quite frankly they have done very little to make it more interesting. Certainly "levolution" adds a new spice to the otherwise static maps, and the maps themselves are larger and better designed than Battlefield 3, but the average round of conquest lasts too long, and loses peoples interest. A good time-limit for a Battlefield 4 conquest match is around 20 - 30 mins. Any longer and Battlefield 4's maps become tedious. One major thing about "Levolution" is that It would be far more interesting if it was one, of about five random events. The same even over-and-over loses its amazing appeal quite quickly, even if they change the way the game plays. Other maps like Dawnbreaker and Hanoi Resort benefit very little from the "Levolution." How amazing would it have been if in Dawnbreaker an EMP went off that disabled all the vehicles on the map for the rest of the round, as well as all optics and other devices? Or if on Hanoi Resort the weather changed, rose the tide, and more boats spawned in?
I'm not saying its bad, just needs a bit more flushing out. As for the gun-play, I love Battlefield 4's gun-play. While it suffers a marginal amount from the Recon Spam, it is not enough to stop me from playing. Smaller game-modes like Team Deathmatch, and the smaller Conquest, offer the player a way to unlock weapons and equipment before diving head long into the meat and potatoes of the Large Conquest, or Obliteration gamemodes.
Obliteration is perhaps my favorite addition. I was waiting for a mode like this in Battlefield, and I couldn't of asked for more. There are some great firefights that take place during Obliteration, and if DICE can fix the intermittent crashing, the servers that play this gamemode, without a time-limit, will quickly become my favorite. It was so much fun to fight feverishly over the bomb and the flags on Zavod 311 for an amazingly stable ninety-two minutes the other day. It was sheer stalemate, and only after a huge team push did we managed to break the enemy's back and win the match.
There are bugs in the game, but none that I've experienced that make the game unplayable for myself. PC is definitely the best platform for this game. I've played it on Playstation 3 in my roommates room, and the PC version is just far superior in all categories, from stability, to visuals, size of matches, and the controls. Maybe the next-gen consoles will make the experience a bit more enjoyable for those console fans out there, but currently I think PC is the way to go with the game.
Battlefield 4 is good, and almost every major complaint I had about Battlefield 3 has been fixed. I will continue to play it and see what improvements (or problems) they create.
